49:1, @baltimoreguy - that really says it all. Bravo for once again pointing out what’s hidden in plain sight…
Regarding the “Yale RD Results thread” you mention - do you mean “Yale SCEA Results thread” (I’m noting that you said it was 50/50 acceptances/deferrals).
According to the College Board, an 800 on the Math 2 places students at only the 91st percentile, about the equivalent of a 730-740 on the Literature SAT II.
http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/SAT_subject_tests_percentile_ranks.pdf
Those results are from 2008 @renaissancedad -
I can’t post the link for some reason (maybe because it goes straight to a pdf?) but Google “SAT Subject test percentile ranks 2015.” It’s really interesting to see how the scores have changed even since 2008. Now an 800 on the Math 2 is only in the 81st percentile. A 720 on Literature is 80th percentile.
In 2008, Chemistry 800 was 95th percentile, now it’s 91st. Physics was 92nd, now it’s 88th. As @DeepBlue86 mentioned above, for STEM kids, it seems like Subject Test 800s are what it takes to even be in the game - having them is not a positive differentiator but not having them is probably a negative distinction.
When I looked at Yale, it was actually the combined 2019 ED and SCEA Results threads. This year’s SCEA decisions for Yale come out tomorrow.
I’m playing with the same numbers as you, @baltimoreguy , and noticing that there are about 8x as many 800s in Math II as there are 800s in your four “humanities” tests combined. For every 800 in Latin, there are about 200 800s in Math II. Maybe “URM” should stand for “under-represented majors”…
One more interesting comparison trend from 2008 until 2015 is the changing number of people taking the various Subjects tests. It is the rise of STEM!
Math 2 remains the most widely taken, but the number taking Literature has plummeted by more than half in just over a half-decade, from 120,000 to 56,000. US History is down 45%. Math 2 is now taken by more people than Literature and both History tests combined. In 2008, the total number of Lit and History tests taken was almost twice the total of Math 2 tests taken.
Meanwhile, the number taking physics is up 70 percent – more people are now taking the Physics Subject Test than are taking Literature. That really surprises me. And Chemistry is up a quarter, to the point where it’s the second most commonly taken Subject Test, after Math 2.
I’m not a historian or a social psychologist, but I believe three things are going on: (I) the ongoing fallout from the Great Recession, which began in 2008 and undoubtedly caused a lot of students to shift their focus away from the humanities toward areas deemed to offer better employment prospects (i.e., STEM); (ii) the most recent tech boom, which began five-ish years ago and has caused students to view STEM as the ticket to becoming Silicon Valley billionaires; and (iii) the economic rise of Asian countries, particularly China, which sends more and more students to study here, the substantial majority of whom seem to be STEM-focused. Accordingly, STEM-focused Stanford is now the most selective US university, with clear daylight between it and Harvard as of this year’s SCEA round (in which the number of rejections from Stanford exceeded the total number of applications to Harvard).
Yet all these universities have substantial humanities departments, and they need to find students for them. I think from a “chancing” perspective, this is probably a pretty good time to be a humanities-focused applicant if you’ve got the stats.
If you look at the statistics, you’ll see that the acceptance rate for 2400 SATs is the same for those students with 2200 SATs.
Regarding the increase in STEM SAT IIs, it seems that fewer colleges are requiring SAT IIs for all students. Many now require or recommend SAT IIs only for engineering majors, and those programs generally require either Math I or Math II plus a science.
Going back to a tangent this thread took early on, an article that @spayurpets posted recently in a thread discussing EA/ED stats gives some granular detail on who Cornell accepted early: http://cornellsun.com/2016/01/27/cornell-university-receives-record-number-of-early-decision-applications/ . One fact that caught my eye was that Cornell disclosed that each year approximately 80% of their recruited athletes are accepted ED. That being the case, I calculate that athletes accounted for 193 (14.4%) out of a total of 1,338 applicants accepted ED by Cornell, and that there will be 241 athletes recruited over the cycle. I recall seeing disclosure elsewhere that Brown also accepted about 80% of its recruited athletes ED. If we impute a similar percentage and the same numbers as Cornell to Harvard, it looks to me like ~22% of Harvard’s EA acceptances go to recruited athletes.