<p>Since the A for Admission book came out 10 years ago, there has been a huge hyp about AI. Now i am still curious as to whether it applies or not. Some aspects of it are questionable. Michele claims that AI 8s and 9s have something like a 92-94% accept rate. That cannot possibly be true because then the Asians will comprise 99.99% of the class at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Stanford, Penn, Cal, Columbia, U of C, Duke, and Dartmouth, and NW. If this is true, everyone should just hit the Sat Prep books instead of EC.</p>
<p>So i guess my question is does the AI still apply as greatly a deal as the book claims or is it slightly outdated?</p>
<p>Don’t expect them to reveal too many secrets.</p>
<p>AI is just one factor- a sum of your academics. EC’s, recs, essays, character all weigh in as well. I suspect AI gets you in the first pile, then the other factors tip you into the second cut, etc.</p>
<p>The CC page says you shouldn’t even assume that it’s the major component of admission. Also, the CC calculator doesn’t include SAT writing for some reason, is that on purpose?</p>
<p>1) The book and calculator were released before the SAT writing component was administered.
2) It is still a score that colleges do not completely know how to evaluate.</p>
<p>We may never know exactly whether or not they use it and to what extent. BUT we DO know that the higher your AI, the better chances you have at the hardest-to-be-admitted colleges.<br>
Of course, there are other things that adcoms consider (athletic ability, race, legacy, or whatever), but surely the AI of an applicant plays a huge part in his admissions decision.</p>
<p>I think you exaggerate it. I know it is just an anecdotal evidence, but at my child’s competitive public high school (a few years ago), Asians did have some “advantages” in their class rank, and SAT Math – just because they tend to work harder in this area. But among the very top SAT scorers (with a score like 2340-2400), there are no lack of students of other ethnic groups.</p>
<p>I may be biased because I only have a single data point (my child’s case a few years ago), but I am of the opinion that high SAT 1/2 scores and the class rank are just the basic requirements. (that is, just a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition.) After you have these numbers, these top schools will start to look at your other credentials like ECs, “personal quality”, etc. If you do not have at least one or two of these (usually an award at the state level), your chance is not great. I happen to know several anecdotal examples where students with great numbers as measured by AI (as well as tons of AP 5’s) but are still rejected by the very top (e.g. HYPSM) colleges. This is plainly because top scorers are still too many; these colleges need to depend on other means to “weed out” some who are just good at these number games (BTW, this is especially true for Asians.)</p>
<p>^^^ i agree thats why im interested if AI is still used widely.</p>
<p>Oh, Asians do have the best scores out of all the races. As the socio-economic enviroment increase, Asian’s average SAT scores grow exponentially, out pacing the increase in the other race.
I cannot find the PDF atm. It was a graph of Average Score vs Family Income. It was a line graph that incorporated all the Races.</p>
<p>As an Asian, I must say that I sincerely believe that our race is no smarter than any other race. The Asian students that are applying to the sort of colleges that we look at on CC are from a very selected group. When my own parents were in their twenties, the only way to leave the country back east was to go overseas for a graduate school education, quite a contrast to some other minority groups in America. Anyways, back on topic, I think its safe to say that the higher your AI is the stronger one aspect of your application is. There are so many factors out there, so many different accomplishments that it really takes a human rather than a number-sorting computer to say.</p>
<p>Near-perfect statistics before the SAT recentering and before all the dumbing-down of the past 15 years, would have implied an extremely high acceptance rate, because 1580+ SATs were very rare. After the recentering, in the late 1990’s, the base acceptance rate of perfect SAT scorers (whatever their grades) was about 40 percent at Harvard and 50-60 percent at Harvard’s competitors. After the further dumbing down of the SAT in the past decade, a 2400 is needed to get that rate of admission. A Princeton spokesman recently disclosed, in response to the Jian Li allegations, that they accept just over half of applicants with perfect SATs. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That is nonsense. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Asians are about 40 percent of the high UC Admissions Index scores in California, as you can see from Berkeley. </p></li>
<li><p>The Espenshade & Chung study of 1997 admissions data at three top-tier schools indicated that if students had been selected in descending order of total SAT score, the white share would have stayed almost the same and the Asian share would have grown to about 40 percent. Other selection methods were less kind to Asians and would not have reached as high as 40 percent. Both figures biased the white numbers downward by giving equal weight to the math and verbal SAT, and by using recentered SAT scores which killed off the upper range of the verbal test where whites had an advantage.</p></li>
<li><p>Caltech has pure academic admission and is currently close to 40 percent Asian-American. That number is inflated by being a tech school, by the location in California, by giving high weight to grades and test scores, and by serving as a refuge for rejected Ivy League/Stanford applicants who have an easier shot at a school with pure academic admission (and no athletic or racial preferences). </p></li>
<li><p>Another measure, one which would hugely overestimate what a pure academic selection might look like at national universities, is the Asian-American share in high school math competitions. Depending on what levels of selection you consider, Asians are between 60 and 30 percent at the upper levels of the US math olympiads, with the Asian numbers declining as the selectivity escalates (the exception is women; there Asians are around 90 percent).</p></li>
</ol>
<p>The more realistic Asian share of admissions assuming pure academic selection at all the schools you listed (i.e., under a policy that forces whites to compete on purely academic terms rather than athletics or other non-academic factors), would be well below 40 percent. More like 20-30 percent, and it is questionable whether it could reach 30 anywhere except at engineering schools or in California.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Percentile for percentile, test scores are more influential than any other factor, and are easier for the applicant to control than GPA, rank, or athletic ability.</p>