With a 16 percent admission rate, the school is one of the most exclusive schools in the greater Dallas area. This exclusivity largely derives from the large number of applications the Admissions Office receives each year. While this large number of applicants come from a wide range of schools, a handful of local schools consistently send a high volume of candidates, creating a perception that attending certain schools augment students’ admission rates.
Korey Mack ’00, Director of Student Recruitment, believes that the idea that schools “feed” into the school is not an observation, but a reality.
“We try to avoid terms like feeder schools, because though we admit a lot of kids from those schools, we also decline more kids from those schools than any other schools because they have more kids applying every year,” Mack said.
Still, the Admissions Office has found a certain familiarity in applicants from certain feeder schools, and while that familiarity does not always equate to admission, it provides the admissions team with more information about an applicant’s background. This context can be a benefit in deciding whether to admit a student.
“The more that we know about the school that he’s coming from, the more we can have confidence that those skills will transfer the competencies that he’s learning and demonstrating at his current school,” Mack said. “We know those tend to transfer if we have other students that have come from that school and then found success here. It’s not a foregone conclusion, but it helps when you know someone else has applied from that school to come (here) and done a really good job.”
At the end of the day, the Admissions Office admits the student, not the school from which they come from. Mack acknowledges that the two are hard to separate.
“We certainly look at the student isolated from the school when you talk about what he would potentially bring to St Mark’s,” Mack said. “I think it’s impossible to divorce the two, because ultimately, a student is a product of his learning environment, so we take that into account.”
When students from a particular institution thrive here, it shows the admissions office that the school’s environment is suitable for creating successful Marksmen. With that, parents will often ask Mack what school to send their child to in order to prepare them for the school. He disagrees with that thought process.
“You’re not sending your child to school just to get into St. Mark’s,” he said. “You’re sending him to learn, to grow and to reach his full potential, wherever that may be. The students who are best prepared for St. Mark’s usually aren’t the ones who planned their entire education around getting here. They’re the ones who focused on learning, asking questions and growing wherever they were.”
The school employs the use of the Independent School Entrance Exam (ISEE) which gives students from unfamiliar schools equal opportunity to assert their value as a student. It is through this test that students from foreign countries or states qualify for admission to the school.
“If a student from a school that doesn’t offer test prep has slightly lower scores, we might interpret that differently,” Mack said. “And on the flip side, if a school does prepare students and someone underperforms compared to peers, that can also tell us something.”
For students transferring from feeder schools, differences in culture between a previous school and the school can often make the transition challenging. The same variations in school structure that the Admissions Office takes into account upon admitting students plays a role in the adjustment process for a new student.
“Switching from co-ed education to single sex education was difficult for me just because I had grown up used to something different,” junior Azim Moosa said. “St. Mark’s is a pretty small school compared to many other schools, and its course rigor is also much harder.”
However, the transition process from feeder schools can often be made easier by the fact that many students join from the same school every year. Moosa, who attended Alcuin, has several friends in various grades that have helped each other adapt to the environment here.
“Even though the St. Mark’s culture is very welcoming, it was nice having people I already knew when I joined the school and was getting used to it at the start of freshman year,” Moosa said. “It made it easier for me to assimilate into St. Mark’s culture.”
As more students transfer here from feeder schools, they often encourage some of their classmates to also apply to the school, continuing the relationship between the two institutions.
“I still talk to my friends at my old school routinely, and sometimes I’ll mention St. Mark’s,” Moosa said. “If one person in the group comes (here), maybe somebody else will. The connection just gets stronger.”
