[81alum]

What criteria are they using to differentiate between students if not a standardized test?

I've long been convinced it is something like this:







With that many applications and so few slots, there is no way admissions staff are spending hours or days looking at any individual application. I've heard stories, but only second or third hand.



The truly fair way would be to set minimum standards, which could be 4.0 GPA, X extras, Y/Z APs the high school offers, and SAT/ACT, bin them by State population, and randomly draw.  But life ain't fair, so they do something else. Or do they? It would be interesting to watch.  (I bet they do it like pledge selection in Animal House.  'We need the tuition, man!').

Stanford (and all the elites) really do read entire applications.  It is large state universities like Cal and UCLA that rely more on the numbers and less on the whole application.  Big publics do not have the staff or the budget to do that kind of in-depth screening.  Stanford does.  Admissions has to hire veritable armies of readers to help.  It has been 35 years since I was a part of that, but I doubt that Stanford has changed its philosophy that much.  I never saw how an entire application was judged, but I know that every essay was read and scored blind by two different readers.  I have since seen presentations by former Stanford admissions personnel who have gone into private coaching and who have (despite NDAs) given out a lot of specifics on the process--more than I knew from my small vantage point.

Reading the whole application before making a cut, by the way, is a big advantage for athletes.  Stanford has been criticized by other elites for putting almost equal weight on extra curriculars as on academics.  It is much easier to put numbers on academics, with high school GPA, the high school's competitiveness, and (formerly) test scores.  The achievements of athletes (and musicians etc.) don't show up as easily as something that can be quantified for use in a first cut, so judging students holistically allows for a greater diversity of talent to be admitted. 

It is also for this reason that Stanford can say, honestly, that they are not "lowering" their standards to admit athletes.  Stanford never said that academics were more than half of an application, and so if a student has lower academic achievements they would need to have higher non-academic achievements.  I still remember that in my entering class 60% of the freshmen had been student body presidents in high school.  As a former Vice President, I felt inferior ;)

[81alum]

What criteria are they using to differentiate between students if not a standardized test?

I've long been convinced it is something like this:







With that many applications and so few slots, there is no way admissions staff are spending hours or days looking at any individual application. I've heard stories, but only second or third hand.



The truly fair way would be to set minimum standards, which could be 4.0 GPA, X extras, Y/Z APs the high school offers, and SAT/ACT, bin them by State population, and randomly draw.  But life ain't fair, so they do something else. Or do they? It would be interesting to watch.  (I bet they do it like pledge selection in Animal House.  'We need the tuition, man!').

Stanford (and all the elites) really do read entire applications.  It is large state universities like Cal and UCLA that rely more on the numbers and less on the whole application.  Big publics do not have the staff or the budget to do that kind of in-depth screening.  Stanford does.  Admissions has to hire veritable armies of readers to help.  It has been 35 years since I was a part of that, but I doubt that Stanford has changed its philosophy that much.  I never saw how an entire application was judged, but I know that every essay was read and scored blind by two different readers.  I have since seen presentations by former Stanford admissions personnel who have gone into private coaching and who have (despite NDAs) given out a lot of specifics on the process--more than I knew from my small vantage point.

Reading the whole application before making a cut, by the way, is a big advantage for athletes.  Stanford has been criticized by other elites for putting almost equal weight on extra curriculars as on academics.  It is much easier to put numbers on academics, with high school GPA, the high school's competitiveness, and (formerly) test scores.  The achievements of athletes (and musicians etc.) don't show up as easily as something that can be quantified for use in a first cut, so judging students holistically allows for a greater diversity of talent to be admitted. 

It is also for this reason that Stanford can say, honestly, that they are not "lowering" their standards to admit athletes.  Stanford never said that academics were more than half of an application, and so if a student has lower academic achievements they would need to have higher non-academic achievements.  I still remember that in my entering class 60% of the freshmen had been student body presidents in high school.  As a former Vice President, I felt inferior ;)