Counselling activity: admissions officer for a day

I developed this activity for grade 11 (year 12), and it is a fun way for me to see them in action and learn which elements of an application they consider the most important. 

This is one of the first tasks I complete when I meet new junior groups. In essence, it is a role swap, letting the students work for an hour or two in the role of admissions officers for a US-style application.

Here’s how I run this in class.

Step 1: starter

I do a lightning-quick run-through of how applications are assessed in the US, with as much student input as possible. Then I share an excellent video, College Admissions: Inside the Decision Room, which goes behind the scenes of the admissions process at Amherst College. 

We then have some quick class reactions. My students are often surprised by how cut-throat and fast-paced the decision process is, and by how the video gives the impression that decisions can often be based on single factors, such as a candidate’s challenging background.

Step 2: inside our decision room

Next, I put students into groups of four or five and ask them to take on the role of admissions officers for their own college. They have six (mini) applications to assess.

Here are the instructions:

1. Start by individually reading each application. Note three strengths and three potential areas of development for each candidate.

2. Come together as a group and discuss each application in turn.

3. You have two available places and one wait-list place.

4. Once you have all agreed on your decision, you must write a quick email to each student applicant, either congratulating them on their acceptance and saying which elements of their application you liked, or empathetically telling them the bad news and explaining how they could try to improve their application before sending it to other colleges (if only real colleges had time to do this).

This activity usually sparks valuable discussions and lots of “Aha!” moments. Often students ask questions such as, “Are we a school that specialises in art?” or “Do we need students to have studied X course?” I give them complete freedom on this and refer back to these questions when we later explicitly discuss good fit.

Students hopefully begin to realise that grades aren’t everything, and often differentiating factors are other skills and activities.

Step 3: the class decisions

After students have made their decisions and written their emails (more detailed feedback to the applicants can be encouraged for early finishers), we come together as a class and each group shares their final decision with their reasoning. I have never had 100 per cent agreement between groups. In fact, they are usually shocked at others’ decisions, thus highlighting the subjectivity of the process.

We end by using the e-clicker resource Mentimeter to have a class vote to decide the final two applicants we will accept. The third student is wait-listed.

This activity helps build students’ resilience as they learn about the admissions process. They begin to understand that decisions are not personal validations, but rather made in the context of fit – and sometimes in the face of extreme competition. 

I also encourage students to take these resources home and share them with their parents, to begin discussions about which type of schools their existing activities and academic profiles might fit best.

Resources

The two resources I give to students are a template for the emails (each student only needs to write one email; groups don’t need to write four or five emails for each applicant) and six mini-applications.

Don’t write the mini-applications yourself. Get your favourite AI tool to do it for you – this is exactly the type of activity that LLMs such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini are great at. This saves many hours of work and eliminates any problems with data confidentiality. Here’s a sample prompt:

Make a fictional mini college application as an example for a high-school class. It should include the following elements: 

• Name and nationality
• Subjects and semester grades for an IB diploma student (in table format)
• Two-paragraph personal statement (referencing extracurricular activities)
• One-paragraph counsellor letter of recommendation
• One-paragraph teacher letter of recommendation

This works best if you format it with your school’s branding and use your school’s curriculum. Proofread the applications for suitability and to ensure they make sense (for example, number of subjects and combinations).

Have fun experimenting with variations for the other five students – one could be an art specialist, one could have lower grades but fantastic extracurricular activities, one could be a great application apart from a red flag of your choosing. Just add any extra information to the end of the prompt.

It took me no more than five minutes to create all six of my applications, and another five to format them.