How top schools actually score your extracurriculars and soft factors

Your application to most highly selective colleges and universities will boil down to a few scores that the admissions office assigns to you based on their perception of your achievement in and out of the classroom.  Typically, these scores revolve around academic performance, personal achievements, and fit for the school or major.

You can’t know your audience unless you know their criteria for passing judgment on your application, so here’s what you should know.

Let’s talk about the “personal” score, the mysterious fulcrum of holistic admissions.

(By the way, this isn’t new or secret information.  Harvard’s methods for documenting personal scores are well-known, especially since the lawsuit. You can read their internal papers on how these scores are assigned. Also, I was looking for an article to reference it and the first Google result was this article about it… from 1969!)

What is a personal score?

For decades, selective colleges and universities have looked for students who have both excellent academics AND a high propensity for success in areas beyond the classroom.  Excellent grades and scores are necessary, but not sufficient, for admission to these schools.

Enter the personal score.

The personal score isn’t about personality, gregariousness, or extraversion.  It’s a measure of context, impact, and duration in pursuits beyond – or well beyond – the four walls of a classroom.

It also is usually grounded in the context a student comes from – their hometown, family, and high school environment. That is, personal scores are not tabulated on the national or international scale, where every student in the universe of applicants is used to grade personal scores on a curve. Instead, schools look at local contexts to evaluate and assign these scores.

Note that schools might vary in criteria or use a different internal name for this score, but assigning a personal score is part of the process at most highly selective schools.

What elements of an application contribute to a personal score?

Here’s what Harvard says about their personal score :

The personal rating reflects a wide range of valuable information in the application, such as an applicant’s personal essays, responses to short answer questions, recommendations from teachers and guidance counselors, alumni interview reports, staff interviews, and any additional letters or information provided by the applicant. Harvard uses this information to understand the applicant’s full life story… and what impact they might have both here at Harvard and after they graduate, as citizens and citizen-leaders of our society.

So if the academic score is quantitative and comes from grades, test scores, rigor, class rank, APs, etc., the personal score is much more qualitative. It’s assigned based on the all-important qualitative aspects of your application – essays, the extracurricular section, letters of recommendation, and any other additional information you supply. The personal score is a major part of holistic admissions.

In my view, personal score and fit for major/school are the two elements of the application that students have the most control over in their application.

It’s not just “what extracurriculars did you do?” It’s how you talk about these experiences that matters—because an AO will read what you tell them and score you accordingly. In other words, the way you articulate your experiences can influence a literal quantitative score assigned to your application. To be deliberately redundant: It matters how you talk about these things!

We’ll come back to this in a moment. But first, what goes into a personal score?

What are schools looking for when assigning a personal score?

Different offices will have different priorities for what they want to see.  Drawing from the language of a few admissions offices and in my experience, I would boil down a student’s personal qualities to context, recognition, magnitude, and duration.

Context: Context matters—especially for students who have faced some disadvantages. If you took care of your 3 siblings throughout high school, they’re going to evaluate your “average” ECs in a very different light. If you’re a first-generation student coming from an under-resourced high school, they’re going to factor that in. If you attend a top-10 university prep private school—or are a well-resourced student in a competitive public school—they’ll still want to see stand-out achievements within that context. Local context—the context of your school—really matters for assessing personal scores.

Recognition: Have you been recognized for your efforts?  This might be an honor or award in athletics, an academic competition, or a major scholarship.  Perhaps you have achieved success off the beaten path by designing video games, starting a popular podcast, or selling original artwork.  (See my piece on distinctive ECs here).  It’s helpful to spell out the level of achievement by using numbers when possible.  How much money did you raise?  How many people are on the team you lead?  How selective was the program you joined?

Magnitude: Have your efforts outside of the classroom had a large positive effect on others?  Have you positively impacted your household, school, neighborhood, city, state, or country?  As an admissions officer, I would often describe standout students with high impact as “change agents” or “natural leaders.”  The magnitude of one’s actions, and their impact on others, stand out.

Duration:  This one is pretty self-explanatory – how long have you been engaged in these activities?  Look, I get it.  If you’re 17 when you apply to college you haven’t done anything for 20 years.  But it’s a nice bonus to demonstrate a trend of commitment or interest in a topic over time.  Still, don’t worry if you only recently discovered your current number one passion.  Heck, that will continue to evolve throughout the course of your life.  But know that AOs want to know what you’ve been up to for all four years of high school and it’s always nice to see longer-term commitment.

Now, I want to provide some bad news and some somewhat good news.

Bad news first. At many of the most highly selective schools in the country, the reality is that many students who are admitted have national or international levels of achievement in their ECs. These students have BIG impact and, often, demonstrate dedication over time.

The good news: Many students don’t have the resources or opportunities to have a national-level impact, and that is okay.  AOs understand this and often value outsized local impact similarly to national achievement.  Also, schools have gotten way better in the past decade at understanding and awarding value to family responsibilities.

However, the students who might be in a tight spot are those in the middle—those who come from well-resourced communities, have typical backgrounds and life experiences, but who lack high-magnitude or high-recognition ECs and achievements.

These students are likely to be passed over in the extremely nitpicky holistic process at many selective schools. u/mcneiladmissions was talking to someone at a super selective private university in California (👀) who told him that, even ten years ago, national or international-level achievements were the par for admitted students. In that admissions office, because there were so many over-the-top qualified students, the true job of the AO was to look for reasons to rule someone out—not reasons to accept. Things are crazy at the top.

This is something that most schools won’t say out loud. But it’s really important to know.

(We’re going to tell you what to do with this information at the bottom. But spoiler alert: build a more balanced list of less-selective target and safety schools.)

What is the weight of the personal score in the overall evaluation process?

As we’ve written elsewhere, and as Joel R. Kramer wrote in the Harvard Crimson in 1969, academics drive your application’s trajectory in admissions.  If you have a 3.5 GPA and a 1350 SAT and apply to Harvard, your application might not even progress far enough to receive a personal score.  But, if your academics are deemed competitive enough, the admission office will dig further into the qualitative side of your application.

(Smaller schools like LACs may assign personal scores—or some analog to them—to every student, regardless of their academics. Plug for LACs—especially for students who have less competitive academics but relatively stronger ECs and stories.

But assuming your application does pass the academic thresholds, the real weight of personal scores becomes clear. We know that personal factors – again, stemming from essays, ECs, and recommendations – play a major role in your chances of admission.  Just look at these articles from students who reviewed their admissions file at Stanford and Yale.  Notice all the mentions of those personal qualities and other qualitative factors I wrote about. AOs notice these factors and how you write about them.

Ultimately, successful applicants to the most competitive schools demonstrate excellent academics in addition to standout extracurriculars and essays. Academics = necessary. Academics + personal score = sufficient.

Takeaways

The information above is most relevant at only a relatively small handful of colleges and universities in the US. While it is true that academics drive the admissions process at nearly every college, the vast majority of college students at the vast majority of institutions have much more average/ normal/ good-but-not-off-the-charts grades and ECs.

So what do you do with this information?

For one, I hope you have a clearer understanding of how and when qualitative holistic review enters into the picture. The personal score is important to understand because it makes up one element of the trinity of admissions evaluation: academic competitiveness, personal factors, and institutional/school/major alignment. We’ll be talking about institutional alignment in our next post to complete the circle.

For two, I want you to understand that the essays, ECs, LORs, and other soft factors aren’t just important—they’re decisive. Meeting academic standards is necessary. Beyond that, the main thing determining your admissibility is the content of these other application elements and how you weave them into one coherent narrative.

Finally, we want you to get a better sense of where to apply. Highly selective admissions isn’t competitive simply because of academic cutoffs—it’s also tough because so many students have such outrageous levels of EC achievement.

Our eternal—and hard-to-hear—message is that most applicants should build a list that places its eggs in non-T20 schools. The T20 represents only .04% of schools in the US. Many, many of the other 99.96% of schools have great ROI outcomes and are much more attainable to attend.

Whew, that was a monolith of a post. Hope you understand personal score now! As always, feel free to ask questions in the comments.

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P.S., If you're interested in any of this "inside" information about admissions, there are so many books that you can take a look at, some of which served as a basis for these posts. Here are a few:

• Who Gets In and Why, by Jeff Selingo. "One of the most insightful books ever about “getting in” and what higher education has become, Who Gets In and Why not only provides an usually intimate look at how admissions decisions get made, but guides prospective students on how to honestly assess their strengths and match with the schools that will best serve their interests."

• Valedictorians At the Gate, by Becky Munsterer Sabky. "Witty and warm, informative and inspiring, Valedictorians at the Gate is the needed tonic for overstressed, overworked, and overwhelmed students on their way to the perfect college for them."

• A is for Admissions, by Michelle Hernandez. "A former admissions officer at Dartmouth College reveals how the world's most highly selective schools really make their decisions."

• Creating a Class, by Mitchell Stevens. "With novelistic flair, sensitivity to history, and a keen eye for telling detail, Stevens explains how elite colleges and universities have assumed their central role in the production of the nation's most privileged classes. Creating a Class makes clear that, for better or worse, these schools now define the standards of youthful accomplishment in American culture more generally."