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We’re an east coast school and substantially fewer kids apply to Stanford than HYP and MIT. Unfortunately the scattergrams no longer seem to be up at our school’s website or I no longer have access to them, I think there were around 12 applications to Stanford vs. 40 to Harvard. In four years two kids have been accepted at Stanford, both with SAT scores around 1250, weighted GPAs around 95. There were a few kids with worse scores/grades, many with better. In the Harvard case, all the acceptances came from the top quarter of the scattergram. Of the Stanford acceptances, I later found out one was an underrepresented minority and related to a NYC politico, the other was an athlete and a legacy. I was pretty sure looking at the Naviance scattergram that something like that was going on, but only found out for sure after the fact. It’s possible that Stanford is so busy accepting kids from the wealthy suburbs in our county that they don’t realize that the top kids at our school are great candidates too, or it may just be a statistical blip. Still it made it clear to me that Harvard was probably a match not a reach for my son and that Stanford was highly unlikely.</p>
<p>I was under the impression that the Academic Index is used mostly for determining how academically unaccomplished the sports teams are allowed to be at the Ivies. Am I wrong?</p>