This is the story of Mr. Worthington Wordsworth, imaginary Dean of Admissions at the Best University in America.
August 1st, 2013
Mr. Wordsworth meets with several of his highest ranking admissions officers. These are the people who create the parameters for admissions for every school year. Today's meeting was to establish the guidelines for this year's early admissions process. Mr. Wordsworth was tired of the rather high acceptance rate of 20%.
"We can no longer be the easy chick everyone has a shot with at the party! We must be more selective!" Mr. Wordsworth emphatically preached to his admissions officers. They then decided to set up new numerical cut-offs for the upcoming school year. One admissions officer realized that the school preached that they didn't have numerical cut-offs and voiced his opinion to Mr. Wordsworth.
The admissions council didn't respond, but all silently gawked at the officer's blatant heresy. Mr. Wordsworth responded, but with a golf club to the ear instead of words. With the one traitor eliminated the admissions process could proceed. The council decided on SAT scores of at least 2110, to be achieved any way the student wanted. They also needed an unweighted 3.85 GPA...and then decided to make it 3.86. They also required at least 6 A.P. classes and a minimum score of 4 on each A.P. test.
"Excellent!" Mr. Wordsworth declared, "What is next on our agenda?" Mr. Wordsworth's right hand (wo)man, Ms. Largemouth piped up and squeaked, "Well I made sure we weren't on the stupid Common Application, that would make applying much too easy. I also think we have to discuss our racial quotas for the next year."
"Correct, racial quotas are very important," Mr. Wordsworth emphatically replied. "What are our statistics for the current school year?"
Mr. Hardick (pronounced Haar-Deek, not whatever you perverts are thinking) was the master of statistics of the school and eagerly pulled out his notes and spoke with a very heavy Indian accent saying, "Ve have 67% percent Vites, 2% Hispanic, 23% Chinese, 5% Negros, and 3% Other."
"Interesting...so I am going to propose a plan and you all are free to comment. We must reduce the amount of the chinese! They work too hard and they all have 4.0s, we should care more about different colors of people in our school rather than just their academic accomplishments. Additionally, we need more blacks. The blacks should have lower requirements for admissions because we need more of them. I suggest a 3.0 GPA, 1600 SAT and 1 A.P. class as their requirements. And if they play sports then all they need is a high school diploma. Fair enough?"
Everyone nodded their heads in agreement but one, rather slurred, voice spoke up hesitatingly, saying "but...thats not...fair. Equal...opportunity...everyone," and then passed out again. It was the traitor from before, apparently a 9 iron wasn't enough to shut him up so Mr. Wordsworth got out his carbon fiber driver out of his caddy bag and whacked him again, and taped his mouth shut for good measure.
"I'm sorry about that, please ignore Mr. Logiclyspeaking. He probably had too much to drink last night. So...no objections to the block Asians and admit Blacks plan?"
"No sir!" The council replied in unison.
"Excellent! Now for the essay topic...what do you all propose?"
The responses overwhelmed Mr. Wordsworth so he asked for them one at a time. The responses were interesting. The top five in consideration were: "Why are you a leader and does leadership help you in life?", "Pick a color: black or white?", "Where IS Waldo?", "What can you contribute to the Best University in America besides tuition fees?" and finally, "Write an essay explaining the environmental benefits of marijuana."
The council was stuck for the first time that day, and pondered long and hard before Mr. Wordsworth decided to give everyone a 15 minute break. After they returned from using the bathroom and not washing their hands, the admissions council feasted on the donuts and small sandwiches Mr. Wordsworth had brought in for them and56 they settled on the first one. The rationale being a leader somehow contributes to how well you do in college level courses.
With the requirements and application details complete, Mr. Wordsworth assigned three of the council members to create an application online and to work in a couple of short answers that they would never read in order to make it as tedious as possible. And with that, the admissions council departed, to return on November 1st, the deadline for all applications.
November 1st, 2013
Mr. Wordsworth walked into the war room, as he liked to call it, to begin the reviewing of applications.
"How many did we receive this year?" He asked.
"Exactly 41095 applications sir!" Mr. Hardick replied.
"And how much in application fees is that?"
"Approximately 32876 double zero dollars."
"So that's 3,287,600 correct?"
"Yes sir!"
"And how many have we disposed of due to numerical cut-offs?"
"10 triple zero sir!"
"Good! Now how many Chinese applications did we dispose of?"
"95% of them! so now only 1000 applications are from the Chinese"
"So that leaves only 21095 applications right?"
"Correct!"
"And how many of the blacks met their numerical cutoffs?"
"Three triple zero sir!"
"Good, send them their acceptance letters and we shall start reviewing the remaining applications. Good work Mr. Hardick"
"Thank you sir!" And Mr. Hardick sat down.
The admissions committee looked at several applications every 10 minutes, throwing away essays at the first sign of a grammatical error. They instantly rejected applicants who hadn't been a president of some organization, because they clearly lack the proper leadership skills of a student at B.U.A.
And with some amazing show of resiliency, the traitor stirred to life, chiming in for what were probably his last words: "why...do you care about leadership...these kids are here to LEARN not LEAD! That's what our professors are for..." and his voice trailed off with a sound THUMP, indicating his head had fallen back down.
"We'll just ignore that, yes?" Mr. Wordsworth asked his team, "Obviously, a popularity contest is more important to success at B.U.A. than their petty school work."
"Of course Mr. Wordsworth, leadership is ever important! You don't need to tell us twice." Ms. Largemouth replied.
As they continued to review the applications over the next few days, another group of admissions staff worked diligently in the background. See, the admissions team didn't believe in disposing of all the paper from the rejected applications. They also didn't want to print rejection letters or invest in a huge server to handle online application checking. The admissions council was stumped for about two days after the University first opened in 1776.
Somewhere between 1045 and 1058 A.D. Bi Sheng of China invented movable type, a monumental step forward in the making of books. The admissions council took his invention a step further, and made a fixed movable type prototype that inked itself and would print in red ink. They called it a rubber stamp. The word on the stamp: a nice, thick, capitalized REJECTED, all in a nice juicy red.
Instead of printing a rejection letter and wasting more paper they would simply stamp the front page of the application with the stamp pictured on the right and then send that right back to them. No explanation, no nothing. Saving paper and helping the United States Postal Service, simply a double win for the admissions officers at B.U.A.
The people responsible for this were not the direct admissions staff. There was an army of workers right under the floor where the counselors made their admissions decisions. The trash bins upstairs funneled all the rejected applications downstairs so they could be stamped and sent back to their owners.
This process would continue for several weeks until the amount of applications was narrowed down to 4 times the size of the actual incoming freshman class.
This is around the first week of December and Mr. Wordsworth was really excited, "Bring out the dart board!" Two people rolled out a rather large custom dart board, divided into four separate quadrants. This was the best part, the infamous dart board contest. The remaining stack of potentially accepted students was to be divided equally among all the senior admissions officers and they would each cut down their stacks to one fourth of the original amount. After making sure all therace diversity quotas were filled they would take their applications, four at at time, pin them to the dartboard, give it a spin and throw one dart. The person whose application was hit would be accepted while the others would be sent down to the next floor.
Eventually, after many days at the dart board, the admissions council decided to release the decisions of the lucky few who got admitted, finally bringing happiness to some applicants as opposed to all the misery they sent out in the previous weeks. And so ends the admissions process for this year, Mr. Wordsworth accomplished what he wanted.
Next would come the story of Ms. Moneybags, the head of financial aid services at B.U.A. but that story is for another time. Thanks for reading!
"We can no longer be the easy chick everyone has a shot with at the party! We must be more selective!" Mr. Wordsworth emphatically preached to his admissions officers. They then decided to set up new numerical cut-offs for the upcoming school year. One admissions officer realized that the school preached that they didn't have numerical cut-offs and voiced his opinion to Mr. Wordsworth.
The admissions council didn't respond, but all silently gawked at the officer's blatant heresy. Mr. Wordsworth responded, but with a golf club to the ear instead of words. With the one traitor eliminated the admissions process could proceed. The council decided on SAT scores of at least 2110, to be achieved any way the student wanted. They also needed an unweighted 3.85 GPA...and then decided to make it 3.86. They also required at least 6 A.P. classes and a minimum score of 4 on each A.P. test.
"Excellent!" Mr. Wordsworth declared, "What is next on our agenda?" Mr. Wordsworth's right hand (wo)man, Ms. Largemouth piped up and squeaked, "Well I made sure we weren't on the stupid Common Application, that would make applying much too easy. I also think we have to discuss our racial quotas for the next year."
"Correct, racial quotas are very important," Mr. Wordsworth emphatically replied. "What are our statistics for the current school year?"
Mr. Hardick (pronounced Haar-Deek, not whatever you perverts are thinking) was the master of statistics of the school and eagerly pulled out his notes and spoke with a very heavy Indian accent saying, "Ve have 67% percent Vites, 2% Hispanic, 23% Chinese, 5% Negros, and 3% Other."
"Interesting...so I am going to propose a plan and you all are free to comment. We must reduce the amount of the chinese! They work too hard and they all have 4.0s, we should care more about different colors of people in our school rather than just their academic accomplishments. Additionally, we need more blacks. The blacks should have lower requirements for admissions because we need more of them. I suggest a 3.0 GPA, 1600 SAT and 1 A.P. class as their requirements. And if they play sports then all they need is a high school diploma. Fair enough?"
Everyone nodded their heads in agreement but one, rather slurred, voice spoke up hesitatingly, saying "but...thats not...fair. Equal...opportunity...everyone," and then passed out again. It was the traitor from before, apparently a 9 iron wasn't enough to shut him up so Mr. Wordsworth got out his carbon fiber driver out of his caddy bag and whacked him again, and taped his mouth shut for good measure.
"I'm sorry about that, please ignore Mr. Logiclyspeaking. He probably had too much to drink last night. So...no objections to the block Asians and admit Blacks plan?"
"No sir!" The council replied in unison.
"Excellent! Now for the essay topic...what do you all propose?"
The responses overwhelmed Mr. Wordsworth so he asked for them one at a time. The responses were interesting. The top five in consideration were: "Why are you a leader and does leadership help you in life?", "Pick a color: black or white?", "Where IS Waldo?", "What can you contribute to the Best University in America besides tuition fees?" and finally, "Write an essay explaining the environmental benefits of marijuana."
The council was stuck for the first time that day, and pondered long and hard before Mr. Wordsworth decided to give everyone a 15 minute break. After they returned from using the bathroom and not washing their hands, the admissions council feasted on the donuts and small sandwiches Mr. Wordsworth had brought in for them and56 they settled on the first one. The rationale being a leader somehow contributes to how well you do in college level courses.
With the requirements and application details complete, Mr. Wordsworth assigned three of the council members to create an application online and to work in a couple of short answers that they would never read in order to make it as tedious as possible. And with that, the admissions council departed, to return on November 1st, the deadline for all applications.
November 1st, 2013
Mr. Wordsworth walked into the war room, as he liked to call it, to begin the reviewing of applications.
"How many did we receive this year?" He asked.
"Exactly 41095 applications sir!" Mr. Hardick replied.
"And how much in application fees is that?"
"Approximately 32876 double zero dollars."
"So that's 3,287,600 correct?"
"Yes sir!"
"And how many have we disposed of due to numerical cut-offs?"
"10 triple zero sir!"
"Good! Now how many Chinese applications did we dispose of?"
"95% of them! so now only 1000 applications are from the Chinese"
"So that leaves only 21095 applications right?"
"Correct!"
"And how many of the blacks met their numerical cutoffs?"
"Three triple zero sir!"
"Good, send them their acceptance letters and we shall start reviewing the remaining applications. Good work Mr. Hardick"
"Thank you sir!" And Mr. Hardick sat down.
The admissions committee looked at several applications every 10 minutes, throwing away essays at the first sign of a grammatical error. They instantly rejected applicants who hadn't been a president of some organization, because they clearly lack the proper leadership skills of a student at B.U.A.
And with some amazing show of resiliency, the traitor stirred to life, chiming in for what were probably his last words: "why...do you care about leadership...these kids are here to LEARN not LEAD! That's what our professors are for..." and his voice trailed off with a sound THUMP, indicating his head had fallen back down.
"We'll just ignore that, yes?" Mr. Wordsworth asked his team, "Obviously, a popularity contest is more important to success at B.U.A. than their petty school work."
"Of course Mr. Wordsworth, leadership is ever important! You don't need to tell us twice." Ms. Largemouth replied.
As they continued to review the applications over the next few days, another group of admissions staff worked diligently in the background. See, the admissions team didn't believe in disposing of all the paper from the rejected applications. They also didn't want to print rejection letters or invest in a huge server to handle online application checking. The admissions council was stumped for about two days after the University first opened in 1776.
Instead of printing a rejection letter and wasting more paper they would simply stamp the front page of the application with the stamp pictured on the right and then send that right back to them. No explanation, no nothing. Saving paper and helping the United States Postal Service, simply a double win for the admissions officers at B.U.A.
The people responsible for this were not the direct admissions staff. There was an army of workers right under the floor where the counselors made their admissions decisions. The trash bins upstairs funneled all the rejected applications downstairs so they could be stamped and sent back to their owners.
This process would continue for several weeks until the amount of applications was narrowed down to 4 times the size of the actual incoming freshman class.
This is around the first week of December and Mr. Wordsworth was really excited, "Bring out the dart board!" Two people rolled out a rather large custom dart board, divided into four separate quadrants. This was the best part, the infamous dart board contest. The remaining stack of potentially accepted students was to be divided equally among all the senior admissions officers and they would each cut down their stacks to one fourth of the original amount. After making sure all the
Eventually, after many days at the dart board, the admissions council decided to release the decisions of the lucky few who got admitted, finally bringing happiness to some applicants as opposed to all the misery they sent out in the previous weeks. And so ends the admissions process for this year, Mr. Wordsworth accomplished what he wanted.
Next would come the story of Ms. Moneybags, the head of financial aid services at B.U.A. but that story is for another time. Thanks for reading!
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