When it comes to elite universities like Cambridge and Harvard, students often worry that they are not clever enough to get in. But the truth may not be as simple as that.

According to The Guardian, most applicants to top schools have equally perfect test scores. 【小题1】. Voice of America (VOA) recently interviewed Julie Soper, an admissions officer for American University in Washington. Soper said she and her colleagues place a lot of weight on the way applicants present themselves in their personal statement essays." Personal charm may carry more weight than a straight A academic record.【小题2】 ,” she said.

【小题3】, Elite Reference recently interviewed a former admissions officer from Harvard and found that the school probably won't consider violin skills an advantage since they already have too many violin players. But if an applicant has mastered an instrument that only a few people can play, he or she might be able to gain an upper hand.

When James Keeler, the admissions tutor at Selwyn College, UK, went through a pile of essays for medical school candidates, one of them caught his eyes. “He's been volunteering with St John Ambulance, and also training to be a special policeman.【小题4】. He's clearly doing something worthwhile. He's currently volunteering at a care home. That's a tick for me," Keeler told The Guardian.

"Unfortunately, most essays fail to highlight what's unique about each applicant. Students are often obsessed with maintaining a faultless image of themselves and are afraid to show who they really are. They write an essay, and then it gets passed through the English teacher and the parents and the aunt and uncle and the guidance counselor. 【小题5】,” said Keeler.

Most parents can relate to how difficult it is to send a child to school for the first time. But for Deb on Parental Guidance,sending her daughter off to class when she was just four felt way too soon.

“I looked at her and thought, ‘Do I really have to send you to school?’ Deb, 46, tells TV WEEK. “I started to do some research and found out about home schooling. Before then, I had no idea it existed or that it was even legal.”

And 12 years later, Deb has home-schooled all six of her kids and become a huge advocate (提倡者) forat-home learning. “Home-school parenting allows me to have that strong connection with my children,” she says. “I really believe it prepares them for life in the real world, because we live in the real world every day. They’re not stuck in a classroom with only kids their own age.”

While many parents have had recent experience of trying to bring the classroom into th home during COVID lockdowns, Deb says her approach is very different.

“For me, home schooling is a way of life,” she says.“I’ve worked my whole life around my children’s schooling, rather than making it fit in with my life.”

Despite being confident in her style of parenting, Deb has some unpleasant moments on Parental Guidance this week. The screen-time challenge-where the kids aren’t allowed to use their phones or computers for 24 hours injures her relationship with her eldest daughter Jess.

“Doing the challenge and dealing with those emotions with Jess I felt like a complet failure,” she says, admitting that she struggled to understand Jess’point of view.

But once the teenager explained her experience, Deb understood the effect that having an access to technology had on her

“This is how teenagers connect now,” Deb says. “And with Jess being home-schooled, technology is so important. The screen-time challenge was singly the most challenging, yet most rewarding, moment.”

Have you ever heard the dangers of helicopter parenting? Remaining too involved in a kid’s life, especially throughout college, can lead to depression, lack of self-reliance and some other mental problems.

This wisdom seems sound. But some academics and educators now say they see signs of a troubling resistance. The concern: that too much of warnings and horror stories — the cover of Julie Lythcott-Haims’ bestseller How to Raise an Adult instructs moms and dads to avoid “the overparenting trap” — is discouraging parents from getting involved at all.

“Yes, parents can be intruders (unpopular people),” says Marjorie Savage, a researcher in the University of Minnesota. “At the same time, there are increasing examples of parents refusing to step up when students genuinely need their family.” At Hofstra University, for example, parents now ask embarrassedly about mental-health and campus-safety resources, as if bringing up those topics were forbidden, says Branka Kristic, who heads the family-outreach programs. And Savage recalls talking to a mom who kept quiet about her son’s signs of depression until right before he failed a semester. She did not want to “helicopter in”.

That means colleges, which have spent the past decade learning to cope with parents who get too involved, now have a different problem. In recent years, hundreds of colleges have either launched or increased their parent offices to help parents.

Much of this began, of course, because schools were forced to cope with a generation of students connected with their parents like never before. On average, they communicate 22.1 times per week, according to research from Barbara Hofer, a psychology professor at Middlebury College. That’s more than twice the rate of a decade ago, before almost every student had a smartphone.

With some moms and dads thinking twice of contacting the school in the first place, some programs are being used to encourage a more balanced approach. Hofstra’s Kristic advises parents to “be a guide, while granting that the student owns the journey”. That means asking questions, listening to answers being patient and trusting kids to resolve their own problems. But if issues persist, or if a student is in serious mental or physical danger, it also means hopping in the chopper, at least for a little while.