How do you send transcripts to colleges?


















Image Courtesy: Rao Advisors


By Rajkamal Rao  

This post is updated with information for international students.

If you're a high school student, a vexing question is:  When it's time to apply to colleges, how do I send my transcripts to them?

This is an important question because in the digital world we live in, high school performance metrics are routinely zapped to colleges and universities from external organizations based on our request.  The College Board sends SAT and AP scores; the ACT sends ACT scores.  But there's a mystery which surrounds how high schools report the most important part of a student's profile - the official transcript.


Enter Naviance and Parchment

Luckily, high school transcripts are seamlessly transferred thanks to the platforms of two private companies - Naviance and Parchment - which have established a wide network of both origin and destination institutions.

Naviance is an older system that has been in existence for decades.  A 12th grader requests the guidance counselor at a high school to upload transcripts into Naviance using its eDocs format.  After the required checks and balances to verify authenticity, Naviance sends the eDocs file of a student to the Common App, the most common platform used by students to apply to colleges.  At the destination college, the student profile from the Common App is matched with the Naviance eDocs file along with similar files from the College Board and the ACT.  This is how all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are assembled to make the student whole again.

Parchment is a competitor of Naviance and works with thousands of high schools in a similar manner.  A key difference is that with Parchment, the student signs up for a free account.  If the high school is a Parchment partner, the student can request transcripts, recommendation letters and other official documents with a few clicks online and have them sent to the Common App or the Coalition App by choosing these destinations from a search box.  Sometimes colleges don't entertain either application platform.  In such cases, the student selects each college from a search box - in an Amazon-like interface.  When the first school appears on the order form, the student can go back and add more schools to the cart.  When finished, a single click will send the transcripts to all the schools on the order form.

There's no cost to the student to use either service, but schools may charge you a small fee for each school once you have crossed a certain threshold. For example, at Frisco ISD, the first three sends are free, and thereafter, it's $3 a school. 

There's one more difference in the way Parchment works.  Parchment also partners with Naviance to "receive" a copy of the Naviance eDocs from schools that do not partner with Parchment.  So when a destination college cannot find the appropriate eDocs for a student for some reason, the college can query the Parchment database for a copy.  In this manner, colleges are not found struggling to gain access to a high school student's transcript.

Some colleges - mostly institutions abroad - are unable to handle electronic transcripts.  In such cases, both Naviance and Parchment will print out official transcripts and snail-mail them (as in the image above).  This again is done at no cost to the student.

Some schools use School Links. For information on how to send transcripts through the College Application Manager in School Links, click here.

SRAR schools

Some schools, like Texas A&M and Texas Tech, employ the Self-Reported Academic Record (SRAR)  system and have students key in their high school transcript directly into the SRAR. The SRAR replaces the high school transcripts used by the Office of Admissions during the initial admissions process in most cases. All freshman applicants, with a few exceptions, will enter their courses, grades, class rank (if provided on transcript) and graduation plan in the SRAR.

Note: Applications that do not include a SRAR at the deadline will not be considered for admission. The SRAR is a required document similar to the essay.

Process for TAMU applicants. You first get started by creating a SRAR account. You can do this as early as Aug 1 as a rising senior - and even as early as the 9th grade. After you enter all the information asked for (this can take 2-6 hours), submit the SRAR, and hold on to the confirmation email.

Separately, you will work on the TAMU application using the Common App and upload the TAMU Main essay, the supplemental essays, the stealth supplement essays in the scholarship section, and so on. After you submit the TAMU application, you will get a Texas A&M Universal Identification Number (UIN). You need to link your TAMU application to the previously submitted SRAR to complete the process.

Here's an excellent set of tutorials from TAMU.


International Students

International schools (even engineering colleges), and especially those from developing countries generally do not invest in such infrastructure because there's nothing in it for them. But for international schools that do, a common electronic credit transfer platform is eSCRIP-SAFE, a Global Electronic Transcript Delivery Network that supplements traditional paper transcripts by providing high schools, colleges, universities, and third party recipients with a network through which official transcripts are delivered in a secure and trusted environment. Think of eSCRIP-SAFE as the international equivalent of Parchment or Naviance.

If the international school is not a member of the eSCRIP-SAFE network, then students must mail documents in. Your school will print out your "marks cards" - on request. It will place a seal on each copy certifying that it is true and an official will sign it. A clerk will then insert the true copy into a school envelope with school markings (student-provided envelopes are not accepted) and along the edges of the flap, the clerk will again place a seal and initial on top to prevent the envelope from being tampered with (like in the image above). Faxed, scanned, photocopied or emailed copies are not acceptable. Also, the documents must reach the school before the deadline, not postmarked before the deadline. Transit times vary, so allow at least 3-4 weeks for your package to get to its destination.

U.S. colleges and universities don't always accept transcripts from foreign countries and require them to be credentialed by a third-party organization like WES. Students from India who require assistance in procuring transcripts from their institutions can utilize the services of a company like ITCS that specializes in providing such support.

It is always a good idea to ask the official to insert a standard letter describing the school's grading policies. Some schools use codes within their transcripts and these are meaningless to the casual reader. This issue is common even with U.S. high school districts. For example, Frisco ISD uses these codes on its transcripts which, without the accompanying explanations, would make heads spin.

MP1 = Marking period, denoting a period of six weeks. There are six MPs in a year.
CM1 = Comment 1, field not used by FISD, so always left blank.
CM2 = Comment 2, field not used by FISD, so always left blank.
CIT = Unknown, field not used by FISD, so always left blank.
ABS = Absent days in the Marking Period.
TDY = Tardy days in the MP.
YTDA = Year-to-date absences.
YTDY = Year-to-date tardy days.

Some destination colleges require you to submit the official grading policy of the school you are graduating from. For example, the University of Texas says this when discussing class rank: "Have your high school send us your official transcript(s) documenting all coursework undertaken during your high school career. If your high school does not rank students, include a statement from your school describing its policy, a copy of your school’s profile and a GPA or grade distribution report."

You now know how important it is to have this standard policy document as part of your transcript record.

With both in your sealed envelopes, you will then take them to the post office to mail out. We suggest that you always mail these envelopes certified mail, acknowledgment due.

One more thing. When you request true copies, you will request an additional copy for your records. You will scan this as a .pdf document and upload into Common App, Apply Tex, the Coalition App or whatever online system the destination institution requires you to use.

For the University of Texas in Austin, the process is slightly different. After you submit your ApplyTex application, you will get a confirmation and the so-called "Status Check Page" update in an email, usually within a couple of days. You will be given login information in that email. Using it, you can log into the Status Check Page and upload the "unofficial" .pdf of the marks sheet. For Texas A & M, you would simply upload the .pdf into the university's Howdy system.

The scanned version will serve as an "unofficial" copy until the original document reaches the destination institution. Admissions decisions are generally made with unofficial copies and are subject to be rescinded if the institution detects a variance with the original.

When to request transcript sends

The rule of thumb is to request transcript sends soon after you finalize your list of colleges. This can be as early as the Common App opens or when your 12th grade starts or before your revised class rank run (typical in some North Texas schools). In general, the most relevant transcript is the one issued by your school at the end of your 11th grade, which also includes information about your class rank. This is the transcript that will serve as the foundation of your application. 

Do colleges ask for senior year first semester GPA and class rank too? Generally only for applications that have Jan 1 deadlines and beyond (like Early Decision 2). If you apply to colleges before your first semester ends, you generally don't have to send your first semester transcripts (always check the FAQ of your target college). Exceptions are when you are waitlisted OR you are sending a letter expressing continued interest OR when you are submitting an honors or scholarship application after the initial application (and you have your Fall semester transcript) OR when you are appealing a decision.

Be liberal when sending out transcripts because postponing this step and forgetting to send them during the application season rush could result in your application being turned down only for this reason.

The cost per send is very low. You may send your transcripts to colleges and then decide not to apply. This is fine because colleges will simply toss your transcripts if they don't have an associated application from the Common App, Coalition App, ApplyTex, or another platform. 



Our takeaway

To protect the integrity of the college admissions process, students are not permitted to send transcripts to colleges on their own.  Companies like Naviance and Parchment are critical cogs in a complex wheel to ensure that the correct information of millions of students is sent to colleges, on time, in an unbiased manner.  Naviance alone processed over 6 million transcripts in 2018, so it is difficult to imagine how the world of higher education would work without the heavy lifting that these companies do.



A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.





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Why Advanced Placement (AP) Courses Are So Important






By Rajkamal Rao  




High school students and families have all heard about the AP Program.  Many are already taking AP courses. More than 6000 AP Daily video lessons are available in AP Classroom to help you prepare for AP Exams.

 
 
 
 
But why are AP courses so important? There are four important advantages which a student gets by taking AP courses.




1.  Colleges Love The AP Program

By definition, the U.S. high school curriculum from state to state is different.  Someone taking U.S. History in New Mexico will not be challenged in the same way as someone taking U.S. History in Kansas.  The U.S. K-12 education system is managed and administered at the state level.  Efforts to nationalize the curriculum (Common Core) have repeatedly failed because there are clear advantages to having local control.

But when it is time to apply to colleges, it is only fair that students are evaluated on topics which are not only nationally standardized, but internationally so.  The topics, the format, the questions and post-test evaluation are all standardized and administered by the College Board which conducts 34 different AP exams around the world with remarkable efficiency.  The New Mexico student and the Kansas student will then confront the same exam if they take AP U.S. History on the same day.  For colleges, evaluation and comparison of student performance become a lot easier.
 
According to the College Board, more than 90 percent of the about 2.5 million test takers in 2015 sat for three or fewer of the exams. But the percentage of students who took 10 exams, while very small, more than doubled over the decade between 2005 and 2015, to 0.7 percent, or 16,580 students over a four-year administration range.



2.  Earn That GPA Bonus

High school students earn a significant bonus on their Grade Point Average if they take an AP course in school and pass the AP exam.  Check out our primer on grades to understand how this works. Higher weighted average GPAs translate into a better class rank.  In some states such as Texas and California, getting ranked in the top 10% could win you automatic admission into public universities.

All school districts allocate grade weights based on the strength of curriculum of courses taken. AP and IB courses always rank as the most difficult of courses and earn the highest GPA bonus. Pre-AP, Honors, GT, Dual Credit courses are the next level down. On-level courses don't earn any GPA bonus.


[Read the following italicized text if your school district inflates Pre-AP courses].
 
[Unfortunately, some school districts (Katy ISD, Cypress Fairbanks ISD, Round Rock ISD) artificially inflate the degree of difficulty of Pre-AP courses by lumping Pre-AP courses together with AP courses awarding both the same GPA weighted bonus. This is a disservice to students and families because apples and oranges are not the same fruit.

Let us examine why Pre-AP courses don't deserve to be in the same category as AP courses.

Rigor. The rigor of AP classes equates to what college students typically experience in the first semester of college. Certain topics like AP Computer Science, AP Physics 2 and AP Calculus BC are even more challenging. AP Calculus BC, with topics such as Advanced Integration Techniques, Advanced Sequences, Series, Convergence and Error Bound, Taylor Series and Polynomials, Parametric Functions and Vectors, and Polar Coordinates and Polar Graphs, equates to a second-semester college-level Calculus course.

Why some school districts provide a teenager the false hope that taking Pre-AP Precalculus is no different from someone taking AP Calculus BC is head-scratching. The argument just does not compute. An apple is not an orange.

Evaluation. Student performance on an AP course is not only evaluated by a high school teacher during all 36 weeks in school, but is also anonymously and independently evaluated by the College Board on a separate exam (anonymously, because the evaluating teacher does not know the student and there can be no favoritism in grading). The multi-level evaluation of a student provides colleges an extra layer of assurance that the student's performance has been fairly measured. It is this assurance that allows institutions to offer college credit (see section 4 below) for strong performance on AP exams.

College Credits. No college credit can be earned by taking Pre-AP courses.

Yet, many students in these school districts gladly take an Honors-level course in place of a tougher AP course, effectively gaming the system to earn a better class rank with much lower effort. Families need to be aware that colleges can and do tell the difference when admission teams review student transcripts. Top universities want to see that students take the "toughest" courses offered by their high school. If a student could take AP Human Geography but has instead settled for the easier Pre-AP World Geography, this fact is plainly visible to college admissions officers. After all, "Strength of Curriculum" as a factor has consistently been the #4 rated factor in college admissions, after grades and SAT/ACT scores].

3.  Enhance Your Brag Sheet

The College Board recognizes students for their achievements in AP.  These academic distinctions can make your brag sheet look better because they are "good things to include on résumé and college applications." And some awards will appear on your AP score report which you send to colleges.  Check out the various AP Scholar awards and see if you have already earned a level.  The College Board does not always inform you if you have won an award.  You need to log in to your account to print out a certificate.

Source: The College Board


4.  Lower College Costs

Many colleges award you with college credit for completing AP exams if you earn a certain minimum score.  AP exams are graded on a 1 - 5 scale with the 5 being the most accomplished.  As the College Board says, "each college and university makes its own decisions about awarding credit and placement." Check out this College Board website to see what it takes to earn college credit at your favorite institution.  Once you get an idea, visit the actual college website because there could be information that may not have been updated on the College Board website.



During the college applications process, you don't have to send your scores. All platforms and colleges accept self-reporting of scores for the purpose of college admissions.

But you MUST send all of your scores to the one college that you will ultimately attend. The deadline date for this is the middle of June of your Senior year, around the time you graduate from high school. The College Board allows you to send all of your AP scores for free to one college. Colleges require the official scores from the College Board in order to grant you course credit or permit you to skip a course. Every year you take AP Exams, you can send one score report for free to the college, university, or scholarship organization of your choice. Score reports include this year's and prior years’ AP Exam scores. Most students don't take advantage of the free score send all years, but only at the end of the Senior year after they know their future college.

Just because a college rewards you with course credit, it does not always mean that you should exempt out of a particular course.  If you're studying to become a medical doctor, you might think that you could accelerate your path by exempting out of a freshman year Biology 101 based on the strength of your AP Biology performance in high school.  But it may make sense to take the Bio 101 class in college after all because learning in a college environment is far different from doing so in high school.  You would have matured more and your ability to grasp things would be higher in college.

The way to request that certain AP credits not be applied toward your degree will depend on the college and will involve an in-person meeting with the counselor or an official letter. Explain to them that you desire a stronger foundation in a subject and don't want to skip a prerequisite although you have AP credits for that course. In effect, while you can't choose which scores are sent when you request the free score send, you can often choose how they’re used.

Also, just because the AP Credit Policy Search shows that you can earn college credits does not mean that every AP course that you complete, even if you meet performance requirements, will result in an automatic granting of college credits. All students pursuing an undergraduate degree must complete the so-called core curriculum of standard courses. 

If your school does not offer AP exams or you want to earn college credit when in high school, you can also pass CLEP exams. Modern States, a charitable organization, allows you to take CLEP exams for free and apply those credits to colleges. 
 
In Texas, the 42-hour statewide Core Curriculum applies. Examine this link to see a detailed list of all core courses for your destination Texas institution. There are three fields on this page:
  1. Select Fall Semester of Calendar Year
  2. Choose an Institution
  3. Choose Component Area - we suggest that you keep this as ALL.
Core courses may be chosen from a large menu of classes offered under broad topic areas such as English Composition, Humanities, History, Government, Social Sciences, Math, Natural Sciences, and the Arts. In the image below for UT Dallas, only one Math course of three credits is required for graduation from UTD. Students can choose from at least a dozen Math courses to fulfill the Math core curriculum requirement. Students can generally proceed to take classes in their major only after completing core curriculum requirements - and will generally start taking a majority of their courses in their discipline only after three semesters, assuming 15 core credits are completed a semester.
 

UTD Core Curriculum requirements (partial). Source: Texas GECC WebCenter

Your AP courses will often exceed core curriculum requirements. Suppose you completed AP Physics, AP Chemistry, and AP Biology with a score of a 4. All these will technically get you college credits. But if your destination college requires only two Natural Science courses to be completed as part of its core curriculum, only two of the three AP courses that you worked so hard for will qualify for credit. This is one reason that students who have 15 AP courses are often able to transfer only 8-9 AP courses for credit.

The College Board allows you to cancel your AP score if you are not happy with your performance in an exam. Score cancellations are permanently deleted from your record. You will need to fax or snail-mail the form to the College Board with your signature. The form will ask you for the exam code. Find it on page 4 here:

Nearly all universities disallow changes to a student record once an AP credit is claimed. Contact us if you have questions about which courses to transfer for your desired major. 

Summary

Gaining admission to colleges and obtaining college credit using your AP scores are entirely different things and handled by two separate organizations within each college.

The first is handled by the undergraduate student admissions office which looks at your grades in school, accompanied by any self-reporting of AP scores that you have done in your Common App as a way to evaluate your merit. This is a subjective exercise as your record is compared against the record of other students.

AP scores for credit transfer are handled by the counselor's office within each department of your target college. This process is resolved a month or two before you start at a college, generally after orientation. The university will have strict rules about granting college credit for AP classes - and a counselor has no authority to override the process.

The College Board allows you to report one set of full AP scores for free to one destination college, the college in which you enroll and to which you pay a deposit. You can do this in early June, two months before starting in the Fall.



A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.






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#MeToo Tips For College Bound Families



Stanford University. Image: Rao Advisors


By Rajkamal Rao  



Anything that is disruptive and destructive is bound to lose steam after a while - whether it be a hurricane or a human-inspired movement.  We have had numerous campaigns come and go including Black Lives Matter, protests to support refugees in Europe and a movement against income inequality (remember Wall Street’s Top 1% riots?).  Each of these stayed on in the public sphere for some time and slowly, fluttered out.

But #MeToo has been a remarkable exception and will likely stay on as a powerful movement for gender equity for years to come. This is because, at its core, it indirectly impacts every one of us, not just for our actions today, but as it played out in the confirmation battle of now Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for alleged actions 35 years ago as a high school student.

#MeToo has empowered women to come forward knowing that there will be consequences for the men involved. While doing so will not erase unfortunate instances in the past, it has the advantage of acting as a deterrent against future abusive action by men. For anyone who believes in equity and justice, #MeToo as a force has no parallel because it can help prevent gender abuse whereas the best laws to date address grievances after the fact.


Why #MeToo Is Different

#MeToo shines a spotlight on the way powerful male colleagues, often in roles of authority, have abused their power to advance the careers of those women who submitted to the men’s sexual fantasies and limit the careers of those who refused.  It illustrates sexual harassment of the highest degree, exemplified by a powerful line in Michael Crichton’s 1990’s movie Disclosure:  “Sexual harassment is not about sex. It is about power.” Although, in this movie, the perpetrator was female and the victim was male.

#MeToo is different from all other movements to date because once uncovered, action occurs at lightning speed.  The consequences are usually terminal because decades-long careers, mostly of men, are lost overnight for transgressions which occurred decades ago under social environments which permitted, even encouraged, gender bias.

Risks


But there are risks of such a shoot-from-the-hip approach. For one thing, there is no due process.  Judgment is passed in the court of public opinion at breakneck speed as tweets and posts go viral.  There are no courts of law where the accused is given a chance to defend himself.  In fact, the accused is often never heard from again.  The circumstances and evidence are also not always fully understood.

While most stories of the women are credible, there is always the suspicion that some stories may not be true and some women may, yes may, be deliberately misstating what occurred (as in Disclosure) or may have a different view of what happened a long time ago.

#MeToo in college


Traditional college sexual assault cases cannot be technically classified as #MeToo because, by definition, they don't involve workplace sexual harassment.  And long before #MeToo, there has been due attention given to what happens in college, especially in elite schools.

A few years ago, an explosive story in Rolling Stone magazine described how a woman was gang-raped by men at a fraternity house at the University of Virginia.  Later investigations showed that the woman had made up the whole story.   Rolling Stone had to pay damages because it lost a defamation suit when a professor at UVA sued the magazine.

And there's confusion about what constitutes assault.  The hook-up culture in today's colleges - as described by Lisa Wade in her book - is shocking, pervasive and extensive.  Wade says that alcohol acts as a catalyst and hundreds of students reported being completely inebriated before casual sexual encounters.  Most people did not even remember what occurred because parties were loud and the lighting was dark.  In such a situation, the line between consensual action and assault becomes rather thin. The most dramatic case was one at Yale, where a male student was acquitted of wrongdoing by a criminal court of law in March 2018, but the public outcry was so intense that Yale expelled the student anyway in Jan 2019.

These things happen in part because of the relative immaturity and young age of college students. They could be in what they think are consensual relationships, and when these relationships turn sour, the girl could claim later that she was assaulted during the weeks leading to the breakup.  This is the most controversial situation because liberties taken by partners when things are going well are immediately held to a different, higher standard by one partner, often without adequate warning.

This is what happened at Columbia University a few years ago when a female student, Emma Sulkowicz, claimed that her ex-boyfriend assaulted her.  She became famous for dragging a mattress all over campus for years, including to her graduation ceremony.  For her, the mattress represented the painful burden rape victims carry throughout daily life.  But Columbia later settled with the male student after he had charged Columbia of enabling a harassment campaign by a fellow student who had accused him of rape.  Prior internal investigations by Columbia had cleared him of wrongdoing. Under the #MeToo lens of public scrutiny, Columbia may not have settled with the male student.


Tips For College Bound Families

Both boys and girls should be aware of their rights and duties when they first arrive on the college campus.  They are away from home for the first time and exploring new friends in an unsupervised setting is the essence of the college experience.  But this freedom also comes with enormous responsibility because a single act, however innocent or misconstrued at the time, can spell disaster.

Boy or girl, we advise you to avoid parties which involve alcohol.  Not only is possessing or drinking alcohol illegal in most states until you're 21 years old, but alcohol has also proven itself to be the cause in most things bad - traffic accidents, negative health effects from binge drinking and of course, assault.  

The best tip we could provide all boys is to treat all girls the same way they would treat their sisters or mothers at home. And of course, to avoid any encounter which could become intimate and wait to have a serious relationship until after graduation when they are no longer in a campus setting.

For sure, these are moral questions and each person has to decide the course of action here.  But be aware that the issue is also legal because the definition of what constitutes consent is murky.  There are now smartphone apps such as We-Consent and Legal Fling which can record consent that could protect you later.

Under the Obama administration, the burden of proof for reporting campus sexual assaults was dramatically lowered.  As the New York Times reported, these policies led the government to investigate many universities and colleges over their handling of sexual assault cases under the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination by any school that receives federal funding.

The Trump administration has slowly begun to raise the burden of proof making it harder for victims to press assault cases.  Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, is reported to have said that “there are lives that have been ruined and lives that are lost in the process,” referring to students accused of assault.

Update from the Wall Street Journal, 05/06/2020:

The Department of Education has revised its rule for due process for sexual-assault accusations on campus. The new rule says college tribunals must give the accuser and accused the chance to present and challenge evidence and to cross-examine witnesses. Both will receive the same written notice about allegations, and both will enjoy the same right to appeal. The department issued the new rules after considering more than 124,000 public comments.

One of the hallmarks of the Biden administration has been to undo everything the Trump administration did and reverse policies, at a minimum, to the standards that existed during the Obama years, or, make the policies even more progressive. As expected, the Education Department announced next steps in overhauling Title IX campus sexual assault rules. But the overhaul will likely take time and is subject to court challenges from organizations that lobbied for the changes implemented during the Trump administration. For now, the Trump administration rules will stand.

Our takeaway

This is a topic which parents must confront and discuss with their college-bound teenagers. The problem is compounded because teenagers tend to over-estimate their abilities and parents are already anxious about sending their wards so far away from home. Worse, there are no easy answers and it is often embarrassing to have such conversations.

But the price of avoiding difficult conversations can be devastating to young minds and hearts. It is our hope that this blog post can function as a conversation-starter. If you don't like what's in the post, please go ahead and blame us - we don't mind playing the role of a bad cop!


A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.

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How To Write a Winning Personal Statement or SOP







By Rajkamal Rao  


If you're a student about to embark on writing your first college essay, personal statement, or Statement of Purpose (SOP), this image probably describes you well.

For international students, especially, this feeling is for a good reason.  Students from India, China and other parts of Asia are rarely asked to write creative essays through their high school and early college years.  Engineering students are at a special disadvantage here.  Semester exams never test creative writing and reports written at the end of projects, internships or for conferences are far too technical.

The SOP is the most important subjective element of a student's application package.  It brings together the entire student into a single 2-page essay, essentially, a human story.  The SOP is NOT a resume but a good SOP includes highlights of your abilities.

We like to define the SOP as the essay version of a Google roadmap.  Describe who you are today (origin), describe where you want to go and why (destination), and articulate how you want to get there (the route map).

Writing an SOP is not easy

As a professional writer and essay reviewer, and someone who served as an international op-ed columnist based in the United States for the Hindu group of publications (including as a weekly columnist for the "World View" column for the group's MBA student publication (BusinessLine on Campus) for over 11 years, I take my essays seriously.  Every column I have written is edited by a team of professional sub-editors.  To date, more than 650 columns of mine have been published (including editorials for Tipp Insights).

Over the years, my columns are published largely as originally written, with minor edits to style or format.  But on three occasions in the last 12 months, I have had to completely re-write my column because it did not meet editorial muster for one or more of eight elements of my submission.  As described by the English Department at Brown University, an Ivy League school, these are Idea, Motive, Structure, Evidence, Explanation, Coherence, Implication, and Presence.

In my experience as a reviewer of student essays, I find several patterns.  Most students overestimate their ability to write and are unwilling to accept genuine criticism of their writing.  International students, in particular, consider the SOP as a necessary evil to complete the application and are willing to use boilerplate SOPs written by someone else.  Indeed, cloud versions of SOPs for every branch of study are already available - all you have to do is modify the statement just a bit for your use.  International students would also much rather engage in peer reviews of their essays which are free, although the peer has no professional writing experience.

Lacy Crawford, author of the book, "Early Decision: Based on a True Frenzy," said it best in an article in the Wall Street Journal on Aug 24, 2013:   "In my years handling applications to elite schools, from Harvard to Haverford, Davidson to Dickinson and everything in between, I was often surprised by where students did gain acceptance. But in every case, it was a student who wrote a fabulously independent essay. Not necessarily hyper-sophisticated. But true."

She also adds,  "Find someone who did not raise you from infancy to proofread your essay."

Breaking Down a World-Class SOP

To help students, we have constructed a simple framework to attack this most important part of a college application.  It focuses on the international student applying to graduate schools but a U.S. high school student applying to college can easily adapt the framework to excellent use.

A good SOP has the following structure, 1,000 - 1,200 words long, each point below representing a paragraph:

Paragraph 1.  Write something about you, a personal story about what drew you to your current field.  If you're an electronics engineer, perhaps your father had a garage at home that got you interested in electronics.  Make it personal.  This should be a pre-12th grade experience.  Limit: 100 words.

Paragraph 2:  What really interests you?  What is your passion?  Preferably this should be a class of problems that you want to solve - nothing as generic as solving world hunger but nothing as specific as a particular problem at a particular enterprise.  It should be something in between and be bite-size.  If you are an applied physicist interested in the dynamics of fluids, you could say you want to develop solutions for a class of aerodynamics problems in moving objects that encounter drag - cars, boats, planes, etc.  Limit: 250 words.

Paragraph 3:  What is the current state in this field?  Which companies or organizations (such as IEEE, ASME) are doing outstanding work that inspires you?  Why?  Look for information about the departments you’re interested in at your target institution, including professors and their research.  Are there academics whose research interests parallel yours?  Check the specific program; it is recommended that you name a professor or professors under whom you might want to train.  This is where you need to convince the faculty of your target school that you understand the scope of research in their discipline, and are engaged with those research themes.  Limit: 250 words.

Paragraph 4:  This is about why you are particularly qualified to dream this big.  Give the reader what your accomplishments were in college (academics); practical work outside a pure class setting (project) and outside college (internship) - all should point to what you learned and how this prepares you for doing what you want to do.  These paragraphs should not be long recitations of your resume but highlights which can help the reader connect the dots to paragraph 2.   They should also highlight your other skills - Communication, Teamwork, Planning and Organization - and how these have helped make you who you are.  You could break this all into multiple subparagraphs.  Limit: 300 words.

Closing arguments - ask for admission assuring the committee that you will do well, contribute to the student body and learn from it.  Limit: 100 words.

While our recipe above works well for most students, you could also review the guidelines of what an SOP should contain from Cornell University. 


How we can help

Our SOP review process is very structured.  Please review all links in our essay primer.




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How Many Extracurricular Activities Are Good For a High School Student?




By Rajkamal Rao  


In a piece recently, we discussed how important extracurricular activities are for high school students.
In this companion post, we will discuss how many extracurricular activities are good for a high school student.

As we have said before, extracurricular activities have come to define what college admissions officials say they look for in a high school student when they conduct a "Holistic Profile" evaluation.  Holistic in this sense refers to both academic performances and to activities that begin when the last class of the school day ends.



How Many Extracurricular Activities?

There's obviously no right or wrong answer here but any number greater than four becomes automatically suspicious.

A meaningful extracurricular activity for the purpose of college admissions is a pursuit where the student is so passionate about the activity that it draws the student to it, much like a magnet draws a piece of wrought iron.  It's something that the student thoroughly enjoys, loses all sense of time in doing and does not mind any associated heavy lifting if such effort is required.  It's what the student is most comfortable talking about, the most comfortable reading and knowing more about.  It's what defines the student.

Jeff Brenzel, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions at Yale says it best:   "My usual advice in this area is simply do things that you truly enjoy in high school, rather than trying to outguess an admissions committee. Why? Because what you truly enjoy, you're probably going to be good at, and you're probably going to get better at—whether it's one activity, two activities, three activities—don't obsess on whether it's an activity that everyone else in the world is doing, and therefore, one that's not going to distinguish you; or an activity that no one's doing and colleges are going to think is bizarre." 



By this standard, it is hard to envision children with more than a few passionate pursuits.   This is why the Coalition for Access & Affordability app – a platform used by over 80 elite colleges for college admissions and a new competitor to the Common App - includes slots for only two extracurricular activities. MIT which uses its own application platform called myMIT has reduced the number of slots for extracurricular to four, down from ten a few years ago.  It specifically advises applicants not to list activities from the ninth grade, which MIT says should be “a time for exploration."

Richard Weissbourd, a renowned Harvard psychologist, takes issue with the amount of emphasis on organized clubs, sports, far-flung charity trips, and other costly endeavors, the so-called "community-service Olympics with.  He says, “Many high-schoolers do volunteer, but it seems the public service doesn’t always come with pure intentions.   It doesn't advantage you to go to Belize – it’s just as good to work in a local soup kitchen.” His report on college admissions has been endorsed by more than 120 colleges and universities.




Our takeaway

Do just a few things but do them well.  How well you do is not as important as how committed you are to the cause, and how the experience helped you become who you are.  It is this that you will describe in your supplemental essay. And it is this which will bring out the human in you.



A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

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Should High School Students Audit a Class?



By Rajkamal Rao  



We are used to college students telling us that they audited a particular class in a semester.  Auditing a course allows a student to take a class without having to appear for exams or earn a grade or credit.  College students do this to explore a topic area or for self-enrichment without having to do the heavy lifting of taking a course for credit.

But, can a high school student audit a class?


Absolutely.  It is done all the time and for reasons different from those for a college student.






How High School Audits Work

An audited class is an extracurricular or elective class not needed for high school graduation.  For most students, this is an additional course in band, choir and athletics.  We say additional because most states require only one credit during the four years of high school in one of these topics to graduate.

Suppose a student has been in band through middle school and loves it.  In the 9th grade, she takes her first high school band class for credit and continues loving it.  At the end of her 9th grade, she has already satisfied the high school graduation requirements for band, so what should she do in her 10th - 12th grades?

She is faced with a Hobson's choice - if she were to sign up for band in her 10th grade, which is usually an on-level 4.0 GPA course, she risks lowering her overall high school GPA.  Check out our post to know more about weighted and unweighted grades.

But not taking band would make her unhappy because she is being prevented from pursuing her interests.

So high schools allow her to take band for her 10th grade but audit it.  In effect, it won't be material to her high school GPA.




Audit Conditions

To prevent abuse, school districts impose many conditions before a student can audit a course.

The most common is that the student should be enrolled in a certain minimum number of courses during a semester before he can audit a course, generally five.  Students can generally not audit a class that carries weighted credit, such as an Honors or AP course.   They can also not audit a CTE (Career and Technology Education) course - they do not want auditing students to distract other students who are genuinely enrolled to learn a skill.  Finally, many districts require students to have earned a decent enough GPA already before they can begin auditing classes.

All of these conditions make sense.  Students should recognize that auditing a high school class is a privilege and not an automatic right.








Our takeaway

Auditing a course is a great way for a high school student to pursue an interest without having it impact the graduating GPA.  The audited course will appear on the transcript but just won't carry any grade or credit. 


A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
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A Primer on College Essays






By Rajkamal Rao  

Essays are crucial to college admissions. Image Credit: Rao Advisors LLC

Primer on College Essays

High school students already know that the most crucial subjective part of their college application is, without a doubt, the college essay.  

Why do colleges even need essays?  They already know a lot about you through your grades, honors courses, AP exams, and admission tests.

As you probably guessed, grades and admission test scores tend to bring you down to a number.  Students are human and bring with them compelling life stories that are not captured by these numbers.  

The college essay provides you, as a student, an opportunity to present a human side to college admissions officers. Members of your audience who will review your essays are experts in the field. Admissions officers with just 5 - 8 years of experience may have read over 10,000 student essays in their careers!

Composing essays takes practice. You should pay attention to the style of writing - it can't be informal, like an email you would write to your friend. Neither does it have to be formal, such as an academic research paper. It has to be somewhere in between, where you can and should liberally use the word "I."

For most essays, you should adopt the role of a storyteller.  The reader does not know you and wants to understand who you are. So oblige the reader. For some essays - such as "Why is an odd number odd?" - the storytelling approach may not work quite as well, but you can still try to inject your personality into the essay.

Depending upon the essay, the tone should express confidence, joy, or optimism. In some cases - such as a student describing a story in which he/she overcame trauma - such a tone would be inappropriate.




 

Please contact us for more information.




A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical, and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions. 

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors.  Please contact us for more information.





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The Cancer of Fake Resumes in American IT Staffing





By Rajkamal Rao  




Many of us in the technology industry are as opinionated as everyone else - so dissent among our ilk is just as common as within members of the larger public.

But if there's one thing that just about all of us agree on, it is that the cancer of fake resumes - especially in the IT staffing industry - is growing rapidly.  To say that the situation is now terminal is not an exaggeration.

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Yet, not much has been written about it.  Nor has there been much reporting in the media.  Most of us know it exists, so we have agreed to move on, helpless that we can't fix it.




The Basics:  What Do We Know About The Problem?

A CareerBuilder survey in 2014 said that nearly 58% of resumes overall were suspected to be fraudulent, with 63% of resumes in Tech earning this dubious distinction.   Three years later, in 2017, CareerBuilder said that this problem was on a rise, with nearly 75% of all resumes being somewhat fake. But it did not include a breakout for IT workers.

On a more anecdotal level, there was a superb piece of video journalism by the NBC local affiliate in the Bay Area.  In Sep 2015, it ran an investigative story about a company called Beta Soft which was alleged to have charged job-seekers $1,000 to train them in a technology field and then create fully fake resumes to place them in contract IT jobs.

There is one other reference:  John Sule of Horizon Technology Partners, one of the oldest and largest IT staffing providers in Chicago, said in a March 2017 blog:  “Resume fraud happens in every industry, but it is rampant in IT.”  

So what exactly is resume fraud?  In the traditional sense, this happens when candidates exaggerate their contributions to a company,  elevate a skill set or claim credit for what was the effort of a team, betting that hiring managers will not verify the claims.





Fake Resumes in American IT Staffing

The fake resume in American IT staffing takes fraud to a whole new level.  It starts with candidates adding several years of experience on their resumes just to make their profile look stronger.  Job titles, work performed, dates of employment, skills used and honed, achievements - everything is fake.  In such resumes, the name of the company worked for and the location are both accurate.  But the candidate probably has never even seen the place, far less worked there.

The trick works because large companies, such as Bank of America and Cigna, which  regularly use staffing companies to fill IT roles, have not taken the problem seriously.  Across America, Indian-owned companies specialize in recruiting and placing IT contract resources.  These "body shops" rarely contract directly with the big American corporation but are tiered two or three levels below, sub-contracting to the prime staffing vendor.

The growth of these boutique body shops can be traced to market forces as corporate America demands inexpensive, short-term IT labor to coincide with an increasing supply of Indian-origin tech workers.  While the number of H-1B visas continues to be capped at 65,000 each year, most of which are grabbed by the big IT majors from India, what fuels the staffing company labor pool are Indian and Chinese graduate students who are designated 20,000 additional H-1B visas not included in the 65,000 annual cap.

Then, there are thousands of students with graduate degrees on the so-called OPT-STEM training visas.  In 2008, there were 29,000 students on this visa, but in 2017, there were 149,000 students on it, with multiple chances to convert to H-1Bs.  The OPT-STEM visas are granted for a 1-year term with generous renewal terms for up to three full years, so, collectively, there are nearly 450,000 students eager to find and keep employment.

Finally, since 2016, President Obama’s H4-EAD visa benefit released hundreds of thousands of H-1B spouses in to the workforce, all anxious to work even under substandard conditions.  Employment under H4-EAD is largely unregulated.  Beneficiaries can work in any industry and for any wage, even if below market.

Taken together, all of these groups amount to a pool of nearly 1 million candidates, each eager to out-shine the next to appear the most employable.





So, How Does It Work?

On fake tech resumes, the "Marketing Team" of the staffing company - say ABC staffing - carefully creates a resume which is completely false.  The resume makes explicit mention of a big name client (say, Bank of America) where the candidate is supposed to have worked but buries the actual employer name - ABC staffing company - somewhere deep in the resume.  A JP Morgan Chase hiring manager evaluating the resume is encouraged to call ABC staffing for verification, not the Bank of America supervisor.  When the call is made, ABC staffing not only validates the candidate’s claims but also provides positive feedback on the candidate's performance.

ABC staffing provides another valuable service to the candidate - it prepares him with a series of canned technical responses to the Chase interview drawn from a question bank.  Both the question bank and responses are maintained by more experienced ABC consultants who have worked at Chase and are familiar with its managers, systems and processes.

Thus hired, the candidate shows up at work, ever nervous that his lack of integrity and competence could be exposed at the most innocent of moments, such as at the water cooler.  The real risk is during the conduct of actual duties.  A candidate who has faked four years of experience into the resume is expected to possess a certain set of competencies which the new employee just does not have.  Eyebrows are raised when the employee makes elemental mistakes, or worse, acknowledges through actions that he is inept at performing the task, risking dismissal.



The Bottom Line

Faking resumes is not illegal in America.  But in life, the legal bar is often lower than the ethical bar.  In an intensively competitive Darwinian job market where the person with the most attractive resume survives - however fake - it is sad that it makes it impossible for genuine candidates to shine through and become recognized.

Much like real cancer, there are no easy cures for the fake resume problem as well.  Much like real cancer, there is hope if there's a concerted effort among all the players to limit its spread.  But for this to happen, someone has the bell the cat.

The Trump administration has taken some steps unknowingly which can indirectly help.  It announced recently that students on the STEM-OPT visa effectively cannot seek employment where they are trained by a third-party client of the staffing company.  In other words, JP Morgan Chase cannot train the candidate because the training responsibility falls squarely on ABC Staffing which maintains an employer-employee relationship with the candidate.  This rule unfortunately makes thousands of candidates with real resumes ineligible to work in the IT staffing industry, altogether, but it certainly eliminates the problem of fake resumes among these students.






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