<p>Check out this website, i am not sure of its credibility but this is the first metric that i have seen to show the new SATs of admitted students. If this is true, then that would mean that the vast majority of ppl worried about SAT scores are in error as the threshold does not seem that high.</p>
<p>Ivy</a> League College Admissions Facts and Statistics</p>
<p>Princeton Review has the 25th percentile at 700 CR, 700 M, 690 W = 2090, so that should be right. Bear in mind that recruited athletes claim a significant number of those spots, so it's unlikely that 25% of non-athletes come in under 2100.</p>
<p>There are also almost certainly allowances made for low-income underrepresented minorities. Keep in mind also, that some applicants may have just one low score in an otherwise strong application.</p>
<p>Only some "helmet" sport athletes fit into your presumption of recruited athletes in the bottom 25%, or very few "superstars" on other teams. If you review the majority of athlete profiles on the team rosters at gocrimson.com, you will see they are Presidential Scholars, NMFs, etc., just like the general H population. And please note that one 2011 football recruit, a great athlete who is also a URM, made a 36 on his ACT.</p>
<p>These athletes have maintained great stats while sacrificing 20-30 hours a week on practices, meets, games, and increase their hourly commitments at the college level. </p>
<p>The bottom 25% you disparage may well be made of legacies, musicians, or other groups as well.</p>
<p>I don't know if this is the way they do it at H, but one of the admissions officers at the University of Chicago (blasphemy, I know) explained it to me the following way:</p>
<p>First, they look at test scores to see if the applicant fits in the general range that is acceptable to UChicago. If not, he/she is immediately rejected. If he/she fits, then the scores are not even looked at again, so they really don't influence the rest of the admissions process. </p>
<p>Of course, there is probably a correlation between the average ACT/SAT score and high school GPA, for instance, so kids with higher test scores might have slightly higher acceptance rates, but this is not influenced by the test scores themselves, but rather by other factors that are related to the test score.</p>
<p>This is based on a statistical fallacy. What is reported for test scores is section-by-section interquartile ranges. Although I'm sure Harvard also knows interquartile ranges for three-section composite scores of its enrolled class, those are not reported as part of Common Data Set reporting and cannot accurately be inferred from the section-by-section interquartile ranges reported in several sources, for example, </p>
<p>College</a> Search - Harvard College - SAT®, AP®, CLEP® </p>
<p>Anyway, Harvard has a rather definitive statement about what it looks for besides test scores in its NCAA self-study, which is posted on the Web. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.college.harvard.edu/deans_office/NCAASelfStudy.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.college.harvard.edu/deans_office/NCAASelfStudy.pdf</a> </p>
<p>(I thank CC participant PapaChicken for first finding that link and posting it in this forum.) </p>
<p>Moreover, really high SAT composite scores are sufficiently rare that any college looking for other desirable student characteristics besides high test scores will always admit some student without peak scores. </p>
<p>That Harvard surely admits a few (but probably not 25 percent of its admitted students) students with three-section composite scores of 2080 or lower is not particularly surprising, given that Harvard admission officers imply as much in public information sessions, and given that everyone familiar with American college admission knows that test scores are not the only factor that make students desirable.</p>
<p>From the Harvard study: Recruited Student-Athletes have less than 100 point average score difference from regular students. Interesting that on pages 46-48 the charts that are supposed to show standardized scores are all blank.</p>
<p>It's true that the separate 25% levels adding up to 2090 doesn't mean that 25% have 2080 or lower. It's unlikely that the same students are in the bottom 25th %ile on all three scores. Some will be, but a lot less than 25%.</p>
<p>It's also worth noting that, even if 2090 were the 25th %ile level overall, that could mean that 26% of the class had 2090, and no one had anything lower. That's unlikely, too. But I suspect there are very few composite scores at Harvard much below that. I'll bet the slope of the bell curve is pretty steep in that region.</p>
<p>Also, 25% of a Harvard class is over 400 students. Does anyone think that there are 400 recruited athletes at Harvard in each class? Not a chance! A couple hundred I would believe, but not more. So whatever the bottom 25% is, it is comprised of a lot more than athletes (many of whom, as noted, are not in that quartile).</p>
<p>Finally, noting that there are some people at Harvard with excellent, but comparatively low SAT scores, doesn't mean that applicants aren't right to worry about their SAT scores. Let's say there are 400 students in each class at Harvard with SATs of 2080 or less. That's out of how many applicants with SATs of 2080 or less? And how many applicants with SATs of 2080 or less had a choice between Harvard and an equivalent college? In other words, those 400 students could be 3% of the applicant pool with those numbers, and could be close to the only people in that pool who were offered admission. At the top of the charts, the students enrolled probably represent a much higher percentage of applicants with equivalent scores, and a lower percentage of people in that pool offered admission.</p>
<p>Yeah low score aren't great, but i think the fact that ppl get in with lower SATs, bolsters ppl to apply and not shy away bc of a certain SAT score.</p>
<p>No, 400 are not recruited.. but if you count underprivileged URMs, people who are geniuses in a certain field and poor in others, outstanding musicians/artists/community leaders, it's not hard to imagine how that number of harvard students are under a 2080. a high score on the sat has to involve well roundedness.. and harvard likes to take well-lopsided people, not well-rounded people.</p>
<p>That same logic would mean that 25% had over a 2380... which is equally unlikely.</p>