[Maritime Q-Scout]

Originally Posted by blankall

Professional and post-graduate schools really care about all this stuff, as well as undergraduate schools in the USA. Once again, the issue is that marks don't have the same meaning as they used to. Almost nobody fails anymore and way more students get As.

Without marks the admissions people then turn to the extra-curriculars. Many people on admission boards are academics, who themselves don't have much life experience, and aren't in a great position to judge the character of students. Many have their own biases they want to confirm, so will use the extra-curriculars as an excuse to let in certain students and exclude others.

The idea of judging a 17 year old on their character is pretty absurd to begin with. They likely have little experience in the real world, and, realistically, what have 99.9% of people under the age of 25 actually accomplished? Yet, they need to display how good of a person or how hard working they are.

So having a bunch of resume padding awards is the go to. The parents, in order to ensure, their children have the padded resume, need to fork out all sorts of cash and time to give their kids the edge.

Oh I'm not disagreeing. Like I said maybe it did make a difference for me? I just thought of it as a way to have fun, travel and drink