Why perfect-grade students get rejected from Stanford

SStanford's admissions office turns away far more valedictorians than it admits, and a call one reader took the morning after early decisions went out shows why. The caller was a father who could not understand what had happened. His daughter was valedictorian with perfect scores. She belonged to the honor society, volunteered widely, had danced ballet since she was six, and had written a thoughtful essay about wanting to study biochemistry. By any ordinary measure she had done everything right.

She had, and that was the trouble. There are tens of thousands of high schools in the country, each graduating a top student every spring, and the most selective colleges enroll a couple of thousand freshmen. Excellence measured against your own school is the entry ticket, and the committee is looking for something else.

What distinguished the applicant in the reader's account

In the office we learned from, almost every admitted student prompted the same question at the committee table: what is this student's point of excellence. The phrase means a single skill or interest developed so far that the applicant looks different from nearly everyone else in the pile. It is the opposite of well-rounded. Well-rounded describes a student who did what the school offered, at the level the school offered it. That student exists at every high school in the country.

The ballerina's biochemistry essay was sincere, and nothing else in the file backed it up. A reader saw an interest stated once and never acted on.

Well-rounded describes a student who did what the school offered, at the level the school offered it. That student exists at every high school in the country.

Three ways to be unusual

The rarest kind is the outright achievement: national-level results, professional work as a musician or actor, a recruited athlete, published research. Families who have one know it. The second is leadership across several fields at once, the student who rose to the top of the dance company, ran the honor society and founded a program teaching science to younger girls. Both are hard to manufacture late.

The one you can build

The third kind is academic, and a student can build it on purpose. Choose a field you actually want to study, then assemble activities that prove the interest is real: a college course, research with a professor or graduate student, a paper submitted to an undergraduate journal, a talk you organized. Write about the field with enough specificity that a skeptic believes you. Two academic strengths that speak to each other, philosophy and art history, say, or biology and statistics, are better still.