[Michael Blake]

Originally Posted by Alexa Stott

That means Dean's List winners could potentially be students with low SAT/ACT scores, few other extracurricular activities, bad college admission essays, etc. Even the cumulative GPA is not incredibly informative if given on a 4.0 scale; it provides no indication of the strength of a student's schedule and whether or not that have taken challenging courses that would warrant entrance into a prestigious school.

Alexa... you may be right about a lot or even the majority of FIRST Dean's list Finalists and their academic (objective measurements) and their extracurriculars / recommendations / essays (subjective measurements) NOT being good enough for M.I.T. and Yale despite having Dean's List Finalist in their quiver.

But, in my son's case, he applied with a 99.6 GPA, 13 AP-level and 13 PreAP-level courses, HIGH SAT score (5th highest in his class of 604 seniors), FOUR _killer_ recommendations/assessments (including ONE on FIRST letterhead)... and AP Scholar... and an award-winning poet and writer in his district of ELEVEN high schools and in Texas... and FOUR years of _competitive_ marching band and concert band playing TWO different instruments; the clarinet and the bassoon. The rest of his life was pretty-much dominated by FIRST and competition robotics, hence the D/L Award.

AFTER he received his 2012 Dean's List Finalist award, the following summer he took a _non-paid_ internship at the FIRST Central Region/Texas (Alamo) where he worked projects, built a 3D printer from the open-source RepRap model, built a holonomic drive FRC demo-robot for the district, and took that robot and FTC/FLL robots on the road around San Antonio to PROMOTE FIRST ROBOTICS where he presented to/spoke with about ONE THOUSAND middle-school students (SEVEN events total) who were attending summer PREP (pre-engineering) programs at area colleges.

STILL, it wasn't enough for those, at M.I.T. and Yale, who are represented to "love" and "want" Dean's List Finalist applicants...

--Michael