Answers I liked

[Violet]

That's still scholarship matrix material. I'd suspect endorsement issue or a terrible seminary recommendation. Or a highly weighted GPA? BYU doesn't weight GPAs so that could be something.

[Whistler]

I thought they did at least take AP/honors classes into account somehow

[Marduk]

How on earth do you get rejected from BYU with a 3.89/34...? Must have been some weird confounding variable like ecclesiastical endorsement or something but still....

Yeah, there's some kind of shenanigans going on here...

[Portia]

I got in with a 3.4/31 and I didn't apply for any other schools.

You are an inspiration to me in non-neurotic living.

[Genuine Article]

I got in with a 3.4/31 and I didn't apply for any other schools.

This makes me want to play BYU Admissions limbo. (How low can you go!) My GPA was pretty close to a 3.0 (I can't remember, it's been so long), but definitely no higher than a 3.2 and my ACT equivalent was a 31. I also did not apply to any other schools. I'm guessing I got some good recommendation letters, and coming from a small youth program meant I had a lot of leadership-type stuff. Isn't hard to be the class president when there are two of you!

[Katya]

I'd guess some kind of performing art.

Me too. It would explain why she is so proud of her major, while still having a hard time getting a job in her field.

[Shrinky Dink]

I got in with a 3.4/31 and I didn't apply for any other schools.

This makes me want to play BYU Admissions limbo. (How low can you go!) My GPA was pretty close to a 3.0 (I can't remember, it's been so long), but definitely no higher than a 3.2 and my ACT equivalent was a 31.

I think my GPA was around 3.4 and my ACT was a 27, but I didn't get in.

[Portia]

I'm going to be playing admissions roulette for graduate school by only applying to one institution. I'm unwilling to relocate, and there is only one university which offers what I want to study. My undergraduate GPA is on target, and my GRE is way above what they require, so assuming I can track down recommenders, I feel solid about my prospects.

My brother and I are trying to convince my sister to go to college in Hawaii. Insanely, she seems set on BYU-Provo although we live firmly in red territory. And frankly, she's not a strong test-taker, so I'm skeptical at best about her prospects. My fiancé's younger brother (and actually, now that I think about it, my former fiancé's younger brother) is going to BYU-Hawaii. To quote a friend of mine, "your university has a campus in Hawaii ... and you didn't go?"

She'll probably end up in Logan or something. Although my livelihood depends upon testing anxiety and youths grasping to get into BYU, I've become much more laissez-faire in my views as I get older: the idea of the dream school is probably as much an illusion as a soulmate. I do think it's harder to get into BYU now, though, compared to 10 years ago. But the denominator of applications is way up almost everywhere. (I have no idea how the mission thing changed the game and if it's normalized. What happens to the kids who are too lazy to have their lives planned before?)

[Digit]

admissions roulette

Reminds me of an interesting story. I once went through the UK's UCAS system because I thought it would be interesting to do my undergraduate education there, and I remember the paperwork saying that with this one application you could try for seven institutions, but when it came to Cambridge and Oxford, you could not try for both. Of course that wasn't relative to me, as both were beyond my qualifications.

[Portia]

Took me a while to parse that as United Kingdom and not University of Kansas. I was like, "what?!"

[the anglophile]

Concorde's Harry Potter answer was 12,457 words. That's 31.3 pages if it's written in times new roman 12 pt single space font. I don't think I've ever written that much about one subject in my life.

[yayfulness]

It beats Zed's previous record by 1,299 words. I honestly thought that record would stand more or less forever.

[Zedability]

Now I have to find another question I'm passionate about and reclaim my title

[Emiliana]

Holy Harry Potter answer, Batman! Now I see why almost no questions posted yesterday--someone was too tied up proofreading that! Thoroughly enjoyable, too (even though I disagree with a few points).

Zed, yours might have been shorter but I think it was every bit as much a tour de force since it covered so many different types of technical knowledge.

[Squirrel]

Squirrel. You know who I am. You once watched me sleep for, like, 90 minutes. Make me this, now.

"a nut pizza-- whole wheat, whole grain hazelnut crust with hazelnut, almond, and pecan butter spread, walnuts and pecans on top, drizzled in nutella, pure maple syrup, and powdered sugar."

I promise, people, I'm not a creeper. I had just found out Portia's identity when she happened to fall asleep across from me in the library.....

[Dead Cat]

Confession: I asked the Harry Potter question. I was a bit irked that Concorde spent so long about things I didn't actually ask about (and I disagree with the idea that Harry was immortal since he still got injured frequently and a huge chunk of rubble is going to squash any baby's head if it makes contact--maybe the crib supported the fallen ceiling enough to protect him in canon?), but I was highly satisfied once the character studies got rolling, even if I did continue to disagree on some of the details.

[Concorde]

Okay. I wrote the answer and I don't have any actual opinions on what I wrote. It's literally just conjecture. Do I think Harry is immortal? I don't actually care. I just walked through it and realized that with some assumptions (whether correct or not) you could assume Harry was immortal. You could just as easily assume that Harry was mortal. Makes no difference to me.

And irked? Really? For your free answer that I took a chunk of my life to write (and still ended up being on time!)? That was clearly marked so you could easily skip the conjecture and find where the character part started? Heaven forbid! Did you ask me to write so much? No. Do you realize how much that sucks? When I spent so long writing it? Only to get complaints and disagreements?

I'll tell you: it sucks. It really sucks. I really enjoyed writing that answer and I got really into it. I gave up a significant part of my day to write it, only to hear that the questioner was irked. What on earth makes that something that I would want to hear?! Even if you were irked, why would you share that publicly, given the obvious amount of effort I put into that question? It's not like you paid for the answer, and like I said, it was still on time and you could have easily skipped all of the conjecture part. Good grief, that stings. I was excited for the answer and the questioner was irked by my free service, hard work and effort. heaven forbid...

And this is how I know it's time for me to permanently retire from the Board... Go ahead and take your record back, Zed. I couldn't care less anymore.

[Zedability]

I was really just kidding about the record, I loved your answer. I am way too much of a Harry Potter fan girl. The idea of the longest board answer being about Harry potter is highly satisfying.

[Concorde]

I don't really care about the record. Yeah, it was fun that I beat it, but when I started writing the answer that wasn't really my intention. I just got really into it and I discovered that there was more conjecture than I thought. I'd always assumed that Harry was a horcrux, but I learned that it's really quite controversial. I had no real opinions and frankly, I didn't care either way. I had more fun seeing all sorts of different possibilities than I did with agreeing or disagreeing with any given point, so it's a little off to me that people are disagreeing. Like, who cares? I made assumptions and went with those assumptions, knowing full well that some could be wrong. It was just for simplicity's sake. If I had explored every possible angle (and believe me, I explored a lot, as you can see) then it would have been twice the length.

Also now I'm more than a bit jaded about it, because the private e-mail feedback I got, in conjunction with the boardboard feedback was largely not positive, which is really NOT fun.

[the anglophile]

I thought it was awesome. I'm in the middle of re-reading the series and your answer gave me so many feelings haha... It was a really interesting take on the Harry Potter series.