College Admission Rescission

Over the course of senior year, high school students apply to college, and hopefully, are accepted. As colleges evaluate those students, they are using data from the students’ high school career thus far. The academic portion of this is usually cut off at the end of junior year. However, high school seniors are still going to school and they are still being, you know, teenagers. There’s a lot that can still happen, good or bad, in that senior year and when it comes to the bad, it’s always important to remember that from a technical standpoint, the offer of acceptance to a college or university is provisional.


This brings us to the concept of rescission. That is when a college offers a student acceptance and then comes back later and rescinds that acceptance. Rescission often comes over the summer or sometimes even into the fall semester, but it is not a pleasant experience. Imagine telling everyone at your graduation party that you’ll be headed off to State U. in the fall, you start buying things for your dorm coordinated with your school’s colors, then you get a letter in the mail that says, “on second thought, you’re no longer welcome here.”


Before your panic, I should say that letters of rescission from colleges are relatively rare. If you’ve been a straight A student your whole life and AP Calculus brought you to your knees during your senior year and you made your first B, it is highly unlikely, inconceivable really, that you’re going to see your offer rescinded. Academics are a primary cause of rescission, but only in egregious cases. Let’s say you were an A-B student when you got accepted, then in senior year you failed an elective here or there and only passed the things you needed to graduate with Ds. That looks more like falling off the deep end and is a much more likely scenario to see rescission come into play.


Remember, colleges do require a final transcript upon graduation so they are going to look at your senior year grades. Another academic pitfall relates to colleges that use a self-reported academic record at admissions. This is an increasingly popular practice where colleges ask students to supply their academic history themselves rather than receiving it from the high school. This relies solely on the honor system but colleges will require the final transcript from the high school at the end of the year. If you accidentally said you got an A in your art class your freshman year, when you actually got a B, it’s probably not a huge deal. However, if you forgot about all eight of your Cs and the fact that none of those classes were AP level like you said they were, that’s bad.



Lastly, there’s discipline. This is the other very common impetus of letters of recission. Your first-ever detention for sending a text message in class is a non-issue, but a felony charge for drug possession is a different story. Colleges will discover these significant lapses in judgment and might feel that your presence on campus is more trouble than it’s worth. Whatever the case, make good decisions during your senior year and don’t do anything that makes you even need to read this!!