<p>Also–DH used to teach at a state-funded boarding school for gifted teens. I worked in PR at same school.</p>
<p>One kid had near-perfect stats and great ECs yet got rejected by MIT. He was Asian-American. The scuttlebut: MIT gets too many stellar Asian male applicants, so they have a de facto quota. Don’t know whether that’s true but it sounds accurate.</p>
<p>Another student (Asian girl) got accepted at MIT (same year) – and she had lower grades and MUCH lower SATs than the rejected guy. I guess MIT wanted Asian girls that year!</p>
<p>Similar situation, same year: Less-than-stellat kid got accepted at Harvard, while more qualified applicants didn’t. Possible reason? The more qualified applicants were from New Orleans / Metairie area, which sends a lot of kids from the Ivies. Accepted kid was from eensy little Ville Platte in Cajun country. I bet Harvard does not get too many applicants from Ville Platte. Yep, it’s the diversity thing (geographic and ethnic).</p>
<p>Our older son, a Nat’l Merit Semifinalist, has excellent but not super-star SATs (2100). Yet he’s being recruited by several Ivies, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia & Cornell. Maybe it’s partly because we live way out in the backwoods. Who knows? In any event, he’s not interested. He’s looking at small Southern liberal arts colleges – both Catholic and public. Right now, we’re leaning toward UNC Asheville. My DH is an alumnus of Harvard’s Graduate Scohol of Arts and Sciences (PhD), and I attended the Div School for a year way back when. Based on our personal experience, we’re not convinced Harvard (or any Ivy) is worth the extra money (or extra angst).</p>
<p>Another anecdote from DH’s teaching days at the state-funded boarding schools for gifted teens:</p>
<p>DH has his doctorate in history, and he went to this school (in its charter year) to teach history. But pretty early on, the school discovered that they had a ton of students who wanted to take Latin and even a few who wanted to take Greek. They’d hired a Latinist part-time, but they quickly had to make her full-time to accommodate the level of interest. Even then, there was more demand than she could handle – so, long story short, my DH was impressed into service as a Latin and Greek teacher (in addition to his history classes).</p>
<p>Well, he had a lot of brilliant kids in his various classes. (Some not-so-brilliant, too, of course.) Some of his kids had off-the-chart SATs. But my DH swears that his very best Latin student of all time was this incredibly hard-working girl from a Cajun family out in the country. She was smart as a whip but did not test well. (Some very smart kids just don’t have the test-taking knack…it’s as much a game as anything else.) So, her SATs weren’t that impressive. However, she nailed Latin grammar, trasnlation, etc., better than anyone else, including the superstars. DH wrote a GREAT recommendation for her, and some top schools were savvy enough to recruit her. However, she chose LSU because it was close to home, and she was very family-oriented.</p>
<p>Don’t know what ever became of her. She was a sweetheart as well as a dream student. Will have to google or try facebook to catch up…</p>
<p>My DH swears he’d rather have one student like this girl than a whole class-full of SAT superstars who put in less time and effort because everything comes easily to them…</p>
<ol>
<li><p>It confirms what we already knew - the top schools are giving a serious look to a substantial group of students with less than perfect scores.</p></li>
<li><p>Since there are likely (on a proportional basis) to be a significant number of Californians in the 2400 Club, some of whom will apply only to the top UC campuses, the actual number applying to HYP, etc. is probably even lower.</p></li>
<li><p>Unless at least half of the people in the 2400 Club are posting on College Confidential, it seems that there may be some score inflation in the reports on the site. :-)</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Of the Ivies I’m most familiar with, Brown is the most forthcoming with statistics, though its website doesn’t tell you how many 2400 SAT scores were in the app pile. It does tell you the # of 36 ACT scores and the # accepted and…LoremIpusm may not sleep any better: </p>
<p>It’s not all about grades… while a 2400/4.0 shows that your intelligent, schools know that there are probably rapists, conartists and terrorists that are that smart, or else they wouldnt be so good at their secretive (and rather disturbing) acts…</p>
<p>What im eluding to is that when your extracurriculars, and what you can say about yourself and what you do with your time shows that you are the best, THAT is when you are an academic superstar for these schools. I saw a kid who patented a major solar breakthrough, worked with big companies on scientific breakthroughs, and did volunteership, went out and started there own things, and were simply the “OPRAH”, if you will, of their community. These types of qualities complement the great scores to show that these people are smart because they are clinically insane, (saddam huesein wasnt a stupid man), they show that someone is smart because they care for the benefit of the world and themselves, and that they are more than numbers…</p>
<p>Lady, I wonder if your definition of “more qualified” might be a little different than that of HYPMS? One of the items affecting the USNWR rankings has to do with the percentage of kids who graduate within 4 years. I doubt that HYPMS spend much time accepting kids they feel are not “qualified”. Otherwise, their ranking could be adversely affected.</p>
<p>Well, I don’t think schools consider a 2400 some kind of magical threshold that is different than 2390. Hopefully, they don’t make decisions on the basis of one or two mistakes on a relatively basic test. I’m pretty sure they don’t, although there may be some unconscious appeal of the <em>perfect</em> score.</p>
<p>In general, I think within 20-30 points of perfect on each subsection is considered the same as an actual perfect score. 20-30 points can be the result of a single error.</p>
<p>Too many times people focus on being “best student”. Honestly, there isn’t much of a difference between the valedictorian and the top 10 (not 10 percent). At that point it’s really who is better at schoolwork. Of course you have to work hard to get into a good college. However, if I were an admission officers and I saw a 2400, 4.0 gpa, but no passion in his transcript, passion for learning etc. and a 2300, 3.8 gpa, and a passion for…science, I’d choose the latter.</p>
<p>Story, those tables only show the statistical results of single-sitting tests. I’m sure there must be a 10- to 20-fold increase in perfect results after superscoring multiple tests.</p>
<p>Stanford has 2-3x class size # of applicants with > 4.0 GPA, first in class and 35 ACT or 2400 SAT with all APs/honors in junior year. They often get rejected for the 3.8 GPA who did something besides study</p>