Español
The truth of the matter is that the college doesn’t need much information to decide whether or not you are a good candidate for admission to their school. A tremendous amount of the data gathered in the college applications will make its way to various federal and state departments and end up in reports that will be used by government offices, manufacturers, producers and retail businesses to better predict what you want, when you want it and how much you will be able to pay for it.
Ever stop to think about when you started receiving dozens of letters from colleges encouraging you to check out their campus. It was probably a few weeks after you took a college entrance exam, practice or real doesn’t matter. That score identified you as a possible candidate to the colleges who wrote to you. The college application works the same way. As you approach the end of your high school years, the microscopes used by colleges will begin focusing more sharply on your academic performance and they will begin marketing themselves to the best fit candidates.
The colleges will know your testing abilities. What they still need is information about how well you compete with your peers, class rank and GPA. They also want to know what you believe, how hard you work, whether you are lazy or inquisitive… These questions are answered by volunteering efforts, essays, involvement in organizations, leadership activities and letters of recommendation. All that other stuff about your parents, income, address, ethnicity, home, public or private school and the like is used to generate some sort of report and maybe even help complete someone’s graduate research.
In the end it really won’t matter much. Once a question is placed on the application, you pretty much need to respond to it or risk the wait list or outright rejection. Just understand that the question is there for a reason whether that reason has anything to do with what the college needs to make a decision about your application.
