<P> One report suggested that colleges seek students who will be actively involved on campus and not spend every day studying alone . As a result, they look for high school teacher recommendations that suggest active classroom participation, students who speak up in class, who ask questions . </P> <P> Admissions tries to screen out difficult people . According to Dunbar, many colleges are "afraid of aggression ." He recommends avoiding "harsh humor" or signs of severe emotion, anger, or aggression . Admissions evaluators look for signals that might indicate a difficult person, such as nonconstructive or disrespectful criticisms of others, or evidence of substance abuse . Colleges try to weed out dependent people who either follow their parents too closely, or do only what the "cool kids" do . Dunbar advised that "parental control of any kind, if detected, can be very damaging," and advised that students should not appear to be controlled by parental whims . </P> <P> Michele Hernandez suggested that almost all admissions essays were weak, cliche - ridden, and "not worth reading". The staff gets thousands of essays and have to wade through most of them . When she worked as an admissions director at Dartmouth, she noticed that most essays were only read for three minutes . Some too - common essay types were the "outward bound" essay about how a person discovered their inner grit while hiking tough mountains, or the "community service" essay about how a student discovered, while working among disadvantaged peoples, that "all persons were the same". Admissions officers seek to learn how a person thinks, what kind of person they are, and their level of intellectual promise . Essays are generally important only in borderline cases . </P> <P> One report was that at Ivy League universities, 40% of students were so - called "special cases" including student - athletes, minorities, low - income, legacies, and development cases, and that admissions standards were typically lowered for these groups . </P>

When will a college need to have a student’s score