<p>Several AOs told me that admission for 10th grade was not any more competitive than for 9th grade, because while there are a smaller number of spaces for 10th grade than 9th, so is the size of applicant pools. But a couple of top BS AOs have confided in me that 10th grade admission is in reality less competitive than 9th grade. I initially had a doubt but then I was confirmed again by another AO from an independent school. One AO explained to me how it works (using his/her school as an example):</p>
<p>The acceptance rates were 14.5% and 16% for 9th and 10th grade admissions, respectively. So you might not think there was any significant difference between the grades, but real competitions were among "strong" applicants. (How s/he defined "strong' is probably a topic for another day. :)) For those serious and strong applications, the real acceptance rates approximated to 32% for 9th grade applications, and yes, 80% for 10th grade. S/He did mention that there were more year-over-year fluctuation for 10th grade percentage because of the smaller size of applicant pool, but the numbers were not too different.</p>
<p>The context of the disclosure was neutral and their accounts sounded credible, so I wanted to see if anyone else has heard something similar?</p>
<p>Stargirl, you just contradicted yourself in a single post, so I’m not sure if I’d agree or disagree with you. Statistically speaking, the two numbers you derived are not different from each other.</p>
<p>If you had used the figure 200 instead of 210, then the acceptance rates would have been dead even. That’s why I wrote the difference was insignificant… on the paper.</p>
<p>The key is in knowing, among the 10th grade applicants, which were “repeat” 10th graders vs. straight-up 10th graders. I have a sense that the schools like “repeat” 10th graders because they are more mature, bigger for sports, and have more academic traction under them already to deal with the shock of boarding school academics. I would wager lots of the admits in 10th grade are disproportionately repeaters.</p>
<p>@Sharing, being a nerdy numbers cruncher like you (and proud of it!), I already examined the competitiveness of 10th grade admission vs. 9th grade admission to pick a strategic list of schools for S2. My conclusion: it varies greatly from school to school. </p>
<p>Here is my ranking of 10th grade class size
The columns:
Total # students
9th grade # students
10th grade # students
11th grade # students
12th grade # students
10th grade minus 9th grade
10th grade admits adjusted for yield & 5% attrition
School name
Admit rate
10th grade admits normalized for admit rate (column 7 X column 9)</p>
<p>652 117 169 177 189 52 88 Deerfield Academy 13% 11
809 159 207 213 230 48 87 Lawrenceville School 23% 20
591 114 153 156 168 39 75 Hotchkiss School 18% 13
494 84 118 151 141 34 61 Hill School 35% 21
533 109 148 142 134 39 59 St. Paul’s School 18% 11
369 73 111 93 92 38 57 Webb Schools 25% 14
539 118 146 134 141 28 56 Peddie School 20% 11
338 67 87 97 87 20 54 St. Mark’s School 29% 16
374 88 106 90 90 18 44 Middlesex School 22% 10
448 85 103 129 131 18 34 Blair Academy 30% 10
441 104 120 114 103 16 31 Episcopal High 39% 12
277 65 78 70 64 13 24 Cate School 22% 5
347 78 94 91 84 16 24 Groton School 12% 3
304 70 79 77 78 9 17 St. Andrew’s School 26% 4
250 60 62 56 72 1 4 Thacher School 13% 1</p>
<p>NMH, Kent and Loomis expand their 10th grade classes considerably! While at Cate, Groton, SAS & Thacher, the chance of getting in in the 10th grade is totally bleak </p>
<p>caveat: the class size numbers are probably 2 years old, but you can still draw some general insights from the data.</p>
<p>That’s great since I’m applying to Loomis and Kent for 10th. I heard the competition level remains relatively the same. Thanks for the info, GMT.</p>
<p>stargirl, I love your sense of humor (#6). Hopefully AOs can see that too!</p>
<p>GMT, I was expecting you and you don’t disappoint me. This information should be useful for any future applicants to 10th grade. I don’t get the column 10 though. I understand you explained it as a product of the columns 7 and 9, but what does it mean? It’s just (# of applicants) x (admit rate) x (admit rate). What’s the point of admit rate squared? I was trying to decode what you might have intended, but I guess I am not nerdy enough. I thought the column 7 (=adjusted 10th grade admits) was what you meant…</p>
<p>@sharing,
Column 10 is a “risked” estimate of # of new 10th grader admitted. You can think of it in terms of how would u decide which of 2 lottery games is the more “attractive” opportunity:</p>
<p>Game 1: u have a 5% chance of winning $2,000,000
Game 2: u have a 30% chance of earning $20,000.</p>
<p>The “risked” winnings are calculated thus:
Game 1: 0.05 </p>
<p>Some inherent busts in my analysis: I assumed same admit rates and yield rates for all grades. That’s probably not accurate. But hey, there’s only so much u can tease out of incomplete data…</p>
<p>For the students reading this post: PAY ATTENTION IN MATH CLASS</p>
<p>I think one of the breakdowns with column 10 (for me) is that it does not seem you can weight the risk the same way you can two lotteries with different payouts, as the “payout” with boarding school always equals exactly 1. The payout is not the number of winners (admitted students), but whether you yourself win, and you will never win more than one space so this cannot be weighted.</p>
<p>Since the payout is always 1, multiplying by the admit rate just gets you back to the original admit rate.</p>
<p>GMT, thanks for the clarification. I tend to think acceptance rates for 10th grade are largely driven by, well, overall acceptance rates, except those schools with absolute low admit counts like SAS and Thacher. In other words, you’ll still have much better chance, say, with Episcopal High (39% acceptance rate with 31 admits) than with Andover (14% with 109 admits). </p>
<p>Loomis is on the top of your list, which explains your familiarity with local BBQ joint in the area. (I would love to have the name of the place if DC ends up with Loomis.) I believe Beside what these figures suggest, Loomis will be particularly accommodating toward boards for next few years since it will have to fill its new dorm (~50 beds?). </p>
<p>The thing that I really want to understand through this thread was not about quantitative analysis though. I’m getting a sense that, generally speaking, 10th grade admission may be less competitive than 9th grade admission, regardless of school. The explanation was that most of well-qualifying applicants were accepted into 9th grade, which would make 10th grade admission relatively easier for the applicants with similar qualifications. I was just wondering if anyone else had heard something like that.</p>
<p>A majority (I think) of junior boarding schools run through 9th grade, as I understand it. So might some private day schools. What impact this has on the averages, I do not know, but it does add a large number of well prepared first time applicants to the 10 grade admission pool.</p>
<p>@nadk, I have also been wondering about the impact of JBS’s on 10th grade admission. Seems to me that there might be a disproportionate number of strong candidates for 10th grade boys, bcs there are all-boy JBS’s (e.g., Cardigan Mtn & Eaglebrook) that graduate 9th graders. I am not aware of any all-girl JBS’s.</p>
<p>The JBS’s have been traditional feeder schools: Indian Mtn next door to Hotchkiss; Bement & Eaglebrook next door to Deerfield. The JBS kids have already demonstrated they can succeed in a boarding environment, so they will probably hit the ground running in the HS boarding schools.</p>
<p>@GMT Not all girls, but there are a few coed schools (I know of Fay). I’ve been wondering the same thing, but don’t some kids leave JBS after eighth grade? One of my tour guides did, so I bet a few others have taken the same path.</p>
Statistically speaking, the two numbers you derived are not different from each other.</p>
I thought the column 7 (=adjusted 10th grade admits) was what you meant…</p>