College Confidential seeds student anxiety

Anum Khan, a student at Whitney High School in Cerritos, writes:

If anything can be called a double-edged sword, it’s this: College Confidential.

It’s esentially the be-all and end-all for high school students to everything college. Discussions are organized into forums ranging from specific colleges, to testing, to transfer students, to dorm living, etc.

And though all this information can be helpful, it undoubtedly causes a lot of stress to high school students reading the site as well. I recently stumbled across one of the all too commonplace "chance" threads, where students ranging from seniors to seventh-graders list all of their accomplishments/statistics (we’re talking down to each class they took and what percent they got), every ballet award since preschool, and their exact GPA and SAT scores), asking if they have a chance at XYZ college.

One poster recently listed an SAT score of 2300 (out of 2400), and had the guts to ask if they should re-take it.

HELLO?!

It is people like this that make me -- and other “average” students -- feel less than competent.

Another person listed 12 languages that she was fluent in, asking if that would help her get into her dream school, Columbia University. As for the replies she got, almost all were skeptical about how she could truly be fluent in so many languages.

And this type of posting leads one to think: Will admissions officers be completely taken by this person’s linguistic expertise, or rather, will they take it all with a healthy pinch of salt (and worse, possibly question the rest of the application)?

And don’t even get me started on when admissions time comes around. Thousands of posters who applied to various colleges list the coveted ACCEPTED, or dreary REJECTED or possibly worse WAITLISTED in their posts, along with all of their statistics. One wonders, why did a student with a 1700 [SAT score] get into Stanford, while one with a 2310 got rejected?

And there’s always the looming question: Is any of this even real? Are people making all of their statistics up?

I’ll be the first to admit -- I spend an exorbitant amount of time on this website. Sometimes, it’s just to read the answers college students give to people’s burning questions about a particular college.

But other times, especially after reading those posts from people with 4.7 GPAs and 2390 SATs, it’s to read about that student who got into UCLA with a less than stellar GPA and SAT. You know, just one of us "average" people.

But even those slight glimmers of hope can’t make me feel better after reading the statistics of over-acheivers. And after nearly a year at the site, I’ve come to the conclusion that though College Confidential can be useful, in the end, this double-edged sword may be sharper than it needs to be.

Comments

[Christopher DiManna]

Most of what you read on College Confidential is biased opinion instead of objective third party facts about colleges. It is a terrible resource to use for evaluating colleges since the information is not vetted in any way shape or form and is often incorrect. Pick up Barron's Profiles, the Princeton Review and don't use College Confidential if you want to make the best decision.