<p>Is it harder to get accepted to the college of A&S or engineering?
I applied primarily to A&S and to engineering as an alternative.
I got accepted to Engineering.</p>
<p>I want to transfer internally to the college of A&S and I want to see who I'm dealing against haha. It says on the website that I will be compared to accepted freshmen to the college of arts and sci. </p>
<p>so on a side note, was i accepted to eng. because i said i wouldn't mind that as an alternative or because i really could not make it into A&S?</p>
<p>your major plays an important role in the application process too
some majors are just more competitive and selective
but from what I’ve heard, engineering is considered more difficult to get in than arts and sciences (could be wrong tho)
i think both colleges read your app at the same time, regardless of your decision from the primary college, so engineering shouldn’t have had the mindset you described</p>
<p>Acceptance rates alone do not tell the whole picture because the quality of the applicant pool may be different. At our flagship U, the acceptance rate is higher for engineering than A&S, but the 25th and 75th percentile SAT scores (M+V) are about 50 points higher for engineering. From that perspective, it seems harder to get into engineering. If you knew the stats of students who were accepted from the waiting list, that would tell you more about which is harder to get into.</p>
<p>@chendrix: It is possible that you are correct, but some hard data or a compelling theoretical argument are needed. Here is one possibility: Suppose that Flagship U (or Cornell) only considers applications to A&S with a combined SAT score above 1300 and applications to engineering with a combined score above 1350. Then, they randomly select the admits. Assuming that there are more applications per available seat in A&S than engineering (and assuming the same yield), each A&S applicant has a lower chance of admission than each engineering applicant. So, it is possible that engineering has a higher 25th and 75th percentile SAT score, yet each engineering applicant in the admissible range also has a higher admission probability. Of course, colleges do not randomly select admits, so this is not a compelling theory. (We have also not taken account of GPAs or ECs.) If you can point me to data showing, for example, that the percentage of applicants in the 1400-1500 range or the 1300-1400 range who were admitted to A&S is lower than the corresponding percentage admitted to engineering, that would be more convincing. </p>
<p>Acceptance rates can be misleading just as curves on tests can be misleading. The percentage of students nationwide who get a 5 on the BC Calculus test is several times the number who get a 5 on the World History test. The pools of students taking these two tests are different, just as the pools of students applying to two different colleges are different. That is why people should be careful when using such data.</p>
<p>The basic idea behind it is that engineers are a self selected applicant pool. If a kid has been taking all history and language classes, with little to no science and math involved, they are usually either not going to be interested in engineering, or will realize they have no shot at getting in. Therefore, they would go over to CAS. </p>
<p>The other way around, however, doesn’t work the same way. Even if a kid has taken nothing but math and science, they can still apply to CAS and have a decent shot of getting in, depending on their anticipated major and if they’re spectacular students otherwise.</p>
<p>The result: CAS will get more applicants overall, and engineering will get only those applicants that meet some basic standards, raising the overall strength of the applicant pool. Therefore, CAS has a lower acceptance rate, and engineering has a higher one.</p>
<p>Except considering that in A&S you aren’t accepted based on your prospective major, there will be an approximately equal percent of students interested in every discipline that are denied admission. This means you can generalize the acceptance rate of A&S to every subdiscipline in A&S. </p>
<p>Considering that in Engineering you also aren’t accepted based on your prospective major, there will be an approximately equal percentage of students interested in every discipline that are denied admission. This means you can generalize the acceptance rate of Engineering to every subdiscipline in Engineering.</p>
<p>This means that even in Math&Science in A&S, you will have a larger percentage of students getting rejected than in Engineering.</p>
<p>chendrix, I wasn’t trying to say that M&S majors in CAS had any effect on admissions, I was just trying to make the point that kids with interest in M&S could easily apply to either CAS or CoE, while those who are more into humanities and arts would probably end up shying away from CoE. All this means is more applicants with relevant coursework/experience in CoE. In general, of course. I’m sure there are many exceptions.</p>
<p>According to USNews, University of Chicago had a higher acceptance rate than Boston College, Brandeis, and Lehigh in 2007. Chicagos interquartile range for the combined SAT was 1330-1530. Lehighs was 1240-1390. Suppose, for sake of argument, that an applicant to Chicago with an SAT score in the 1330-1530 range was more likely to be accepted than an applicant to Lehigh with an SAT score in the 1240-1390 range. I suppose one could then say that, for applicants with SAT scores in the respective interquartile ranges, Lehigh is harder to get into than Chicago. But that would be highly misleading. There is also no basis for presuming that a higher acceptance rate overall means a higher acceptance rate for the subsample lying within the interquartile range of matriculants. The conditional probabilities can be all over the map. They can even be non-monotonic, as was documented by Chris Avery et al.</p>
<p>i assume all of your are cornell students; based on your possible experience, could you answer or rather comment on my argument?</p>
<p>i applied to cornell to CAS and put as my intended major, mathematics.
I got a phone call in march asking me if i also wanted to be considered for CoE. i didn’t have to write any extra essays or fill out any additional paperwork, so i figured, well okay sure. the man on the phone seems pretty excited about the engineering school.</p>
<p>now i find myself only accepted to coe.
so, did i do this to myself (not get into cas) by alternatively applying to coe, or would i have not gotten into cornell at all if i did not alternatively apply to coe?</p>
<p>You would have not gotten into Cornell had you not alternatively applied to COE.</p>
<p>From what I’ve heard, they only do this for applicants that will be rejected from their primary college and do not designate a secondary college, which might well be also suitable for their major/studies.</p>