We’re in the process of shifting gears here. My colleagues and I are coming in off the road, settling back into the office, and preparing to move from focusing on recruitment (our task for the past few months) to focusing on selection (our task for the next few months).

In the spirit of application season, I wanted to share a video with you. We interviewed several of my colleagues a few months ago to discuss what exactly it is we’re doing in our admission process — and what we’re looking for in the applications you seniors are working on right now.

Well hello there, content-starved readers of Richmond’s admission blog! (Note that I’m assuming you’ve missed me.)

I didn’t exactly intend to take such a long hiatus from blogging, but you know how it goes… one thing leads to another…

It has been a crazy couple of months that have kept me from the world of blogging – crazy in a good way, of course. To fill you in on a couple of the highlights (and the things that have been keeping me busy):

1.    We have a new Dean of Admission and Director of Admission here at Richmond! Gil Villanueva, our new dean, and Michael Kabbaz, our new director, both started on July 15, and we’re thrilled to have them. Both are hitting the road this fall, so some of you may have the opportunity to meet them soon.

2.    The University jumped up to #30 among national liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News & World Report rankings.  As I always say, any ranking is in large part what you make of it – and how closely you look at its methodology. One thing I love about Richmond is that our administration cares far more about a host of other things (the student experience, academic quality, access and affordability) than it does the rankings, yet Richmond continues to rise, up from #42 when we moved to the national liberal arts category four years ago.

3.    On August 19, we welcomed a hugely enthusiastic first-year class to campus. This class broke a number of records; it is the largest class in the university’s history (but not so large that we can’t handle it!), made up of students from 40 states and 27 countries. About 7% of the class is composed of international students; 23% are American students from underrepresented ethnic populations; and 21% are members of the first generation of their family to go to college. You can find out more on our student profile, which will be updated and expanded in just a few weeks (so check back).

4.    The Spider football season is off to a great start, with three successive wins over Duke, Delaware, and most recently Hofstra – extending our record winning streak to twelve games. (In the FCS, the only time you get to extend a winning streak over multiple seasons is – you got it – if and only if you take the national championship. Which, if you’re not aware, we did last year.) The school took seven busloads of students down to the opener at Duke (not including those who drove themselves)… Spider spirit has never been stronger or louder!

So that’s the news from the past few months. I’m already into my first week of travel season – in Pittsburgh at the moment, off to Arizona at the end of the week – so I’ll keep you posted. The Richmond Admission Blog is back in business!

By Tom

Ahhhhhhhh.

That’s the collective sigh I can almost hear being released around the admission office this week. With fall travel, application season, spring visit programs, and most recently spring travel behind us, we have done the bulk of our work in bringing together the Class of 2013, and we can finally take a step back and breathe. It’s been a whirlwind of a year – a very exciting year – and it’s great to know that our hard work (and yours!) has paid off.

Enrolled Students

We’re thoroughly excited about the new first-year class. It’s probably the most exciting and dynamic class we’ve ever enrolled here at Richmond, and we look forward to welcoming you in August!

For all enrolled students, newspiders.richmond.edu is your new best friend. I’m sure most of you have created a student account and logged in to fill out some of the forms already (you have to wait for a snail-mail letter that includes your University login information in order to do so). The site gives you a calendar and lots of information about what happens next. Peer Academic Advisers should be in touch with you within the next month or two to help you as you begin to plan your schedule and get ready for life at Richmond. In the meantime, feel free to be in touch with any questions you may have!

Wait-Listed Students

For those of you on the wait list, here’s the news. We are not going to the wait list at this time, but we will be closely monitoring the situation over the next few weeks, as other universities go to their wait lists, to see how it impacts our enrollment. We’ll be in touch within two or three weeks to give you a status update and outlook. We’d just ask you to sit tight for the moment. If you have any questions, let us know.

By Tom

…letters are on their way!

The majority of our decision letters left the office yesterday afternoon via the U.S. Postal Service. All letters will be sent in time to meet our April 1 notification deadline, but we wanted to get the bulk of them out as soon as possible. Pictures are below!

In answer to the many questions that I’m sure are flooding lots of minds right now: No, we do not notify in any other fashion – you have to wait until you receive that hard-copy letter. We do not give notifications online or over the phone. If we get to April 2 and you haven’t received anything, please contact us at that point in time to check in. No, we can’t predict when you’ll get your letter – once they leave our office, they’re in the hands of the USPS. They tend to hit closer locations sooner (some Virginians might see their letters today, Pennsylvanians tomorrow, and so forth).

We had another highly competitive year in applications, and our decisions as always were very difficult to reach. We always have many more qualified applicants than we have space for in our first-year class. For those who are offered a spot on the wait list, I’ll be posting some more information within the next few days, so check back.

Congratulations to all admitted students!!

Operations Team members Gay and Debbie preparing letters and admission packets

Bins of admission packets are lined up alphabetically in preparation for mailing

More bins

One of the mailmen, Dante, loading bins into the mail van

By Sabena Moretz (Associate Director of Admission) and Tom

Our average GPA is a 22.96.

Seriously.

We’re asked that question so frequently – “What’s your average GPA?” – that we thought we’d actually go ahead and calculate it. So we took all of the enrolled students in our current first-year class and averaged together all of the GPAs that their high schools reported to us last year. And the golden number came out to be 22.96.

We’ll come back to that crazy (and accurate) number in just a minute. We find that, for many students in the college search and application process, GPA tends to get a whole lot of attention, often being used as the measuring stick for likelihood of admission. But when an admission office looks at your transcript, there is much more that directs us toward a particular decision than just a GPA. Admission offices all over use very different practices in this regard, so there is not a singular approach, but we think it’s important for you to have a deeper understanding of this statistic and its use in admission decisions from the point of view of UR.

The most important academic factor in our process is rigor of curriculum. Not just the number of honors or AP or IB or Dual Enrollment or whatever your school calls their best classes, but how deeply you’ve continued your studies into each of the five academic core disciplines of English, mathematics, lab science, history, and foreign language. The student who stops taking math after Algebra II/Trig is differently prepared for college than the student who goes on with higher level math, especially if they’ve gone on to calculus. Two students with the same GPA can have made enormously different choices in regard to curriculum, so when students start asking about average GPA, a smart admission person would be very cautious about commenting.

Grades are weighted in a myriad of ways, so we never really know what kind of performance a student has until we actually look at their transcript. We’ve seen straight-B students with 4.0 GPAs. (And the families really are convinced that their students are “4.0s”!) Highly selective colleges would be looking for students with grades of A in weighted courses, not grades of B that are inflated in the GPA calculations. (Though most of us would much rather admit a student with an A/B mix in a weighted curriculum than one with straight As in a basic college prep curriculum.) We find this to be a source of great frustration to parents and students. Not all GPAs mean the same thing.

This is not even to mention the many different grading scales out there. We do look at what the scale is, and we expect a little higher GPA in more generous grading scales to try to offset that difference. Most students I (Sabena) have met in my years in this business think that their school’s scale is the toughest in the world and puts them at a disadvantage. Trust us – most colleges and universities are smart enough to put measures into place to try to minimize the influence of different scales, although no system is flawless in this regard.

A strong GPA can mask some serious individual grades that demonstrate weakness in a particular curricular area. If it’s a curricular area that is required for graduation at UR, we can be reasonably concerned about a student’s likelihood of success in required courses. Senior semester or trimester grades can also change a decision if they show dramatic decline from the previous performance.

So when a college publishes an “average GPA” for its enrolling students, the smart prospective student would ask the source of that number. Is it a straight average of all the GPAs as calculated by the high schools? Or is it a recalculated GPA based on the way that college might recalculate? We regularly see high schools using 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 40, and 100-point scales – some weighted, some unweighted. (That’s where our average GPA of 22.96 comes from!) Some high schools don’t even calculate a GPA. At a school on a 6.0 scale, a “4.0” student is usually a straight-C student.

We hope you’re beginning to see how GPA is much more complicated than it might appear, and why the individual grades on your transcript are much more important to us than that one number. We also hope this is making clearer why, when you ask about GPA, we say that the typical student admitted to Richmond has average grades of A- in highly rigorous courses, not that our average GPA is 22.96.