<p>Before I say anything, I want to remind you that this is not designed to serve as an absolute indicator of your decision in April. It is to define general guidelines that help people that are not on CC assess in a matter of seconds whether a school is a reach, match or safety.</p>
<p>Alright let's see if I can address what everyone has said.</p>
<p>Cevonia -- yes, it does have to be recalculated for every school, but it doesn't take very long (as long as you have a good set of data similar to what northwestern provides).</p>
<p>"you are assuming that the applicant pool to a highly selective school represents an even distribution of the entire range of SAT scores and class rank, while this could not be further from the truth."</p>
<p>It actually does not reflect that at all. If you are familiar with percentage patterns on the SAT, you will realize that it reflects a somewhat exponential curve. Also, if you look at the class rank data, it is clearly shown that there is not an equal of number of applicants at each category. Based on the chart, 50% of the applicants have a class rank of top 6% or higher.</p>
<p>"The problem as I see it is that the objective criteria (sat scores, gpa, rank) get you over the first hurdle. It is usually the subjective factors (res, ecs, essays) that tend to move applicants past being a series of number. Selective private schools are more wholistic and focused on building a class vs being at a large public school which is more purely numbers driven."</p>
<p>If I were to create a systematic admissions calculator (so-to-speak), yes, these many factors would have to be included. But as far as looking at a general interpretation if a school is a reach, match, safety for the avg-nonCCer, my hope is that it is a decent indicator. If we were able to scale EC's in a similar fashion, that would be great -- but it would take much more data than what is available on a college's web site.</p>
<p>"This is pretty accurate for the majority of schools probably - b/c the SAT scale is based on a normal (gaussian) distribution which is describes most applicant pools where the majority of applicants fall in the middle. However for some self selecting pools at schools such as MIT, UChicago, etc, this would not be as accurate"</p>
<p>At a self-selecting school such as MIT or Chicago, the average applicant would have much higher statistics. Therefore, a median applicant's SAT Score at Northwestern would be much lower than the median SAT Score at MIT. </p>
<p>"GPA and rank mean wildly different things at different schools. There are private schools where over 30 percent of each class are admitted to ivies and ivy-like schools and public schools where the top 5% average 1100 on SATs."</p>
<p>Yes, at a top-notch private or public school (such as the school you describe above) this would be flawed. But for most of us that attend schools that do not send 30% to Ivies, my hope is that it is fairly accurate.</p>
<p>"That would not work for my school where 110 out of the 600 graduating seniors had GPA of 4.0 or higher."</p>
<p>This could mean that your school is highly competitve, or it could also indicate grade inflation. Maybe we could take into account the competitiveness of the school when scaling the scores?</p>
<p>"Good work, but I think something like this would only be effective for state schools- most of them."</p>
<p>Do you not think that it still serves as a rough reach, match, safety indicator? Is it completely flawed or just not entirely accurate?</p>