<p>Well that is my personal thought on a safety. I know I would want to get in SOMEWHERE that is a 100 percent sure bet.</p>
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<p>Right–but there’s a very small chance that you should be rejected. The fact that so many on CC were rejected by their safeties means that they probably shouldn’t have considered some of them safeties (or perhaps they did something wrong on the app). Unless, of course, you are asserting that there just happen to be so many students who were rejected at their safeties on CC (which is also highly unlikely).</p>
<p>I think for a small minority of students in California, UCB and UCLA can still be considered safety schools. For example, my public Californian high school routinely has the top ~70 students each year accepted at UCB. This means that if you were among the 10 or so students at the very top, 4.0 GPAs, 2300+ SATs, you’d not only be admitted to UCB, you’d probably also receive the Reagent’s Scholarship. It’s not a false sense of pride, it’s the numbers.</p>
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<p>No. Schools with ~20% acceptance rates should not be considered safeties. They aren’t safe enough.</p>
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<p>Your point? This has been argued countless times, and it still doesn’t make sense. It isn’t because of your school that you’d get in. Berkeley and UCLA accept many students from these schools because high-quality students are in concentration there. Think of it like this: if I took the top students from all the high schools in, say, Orange County, and put them all into one high school, how many students do you think would get into UCLA and Berkeley? There’s a higher per-capita acceptance than the average high school. This is something like self-selectivity.</p>
<p>What you really have to ask is, how many students at these high schools apply? Just as you have many students accepted there, you’ll have many more who applied. From what I’ve seen, even at the schools that accept 80+, there are some 300+ applying. So that means that 200+ are getting rejected. Doesn’t seem very safe, does it?</p>
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<p>You really have no idea how they choose Regents scholars, do you? Why don’t you tell that to all the students with perfect GPAs, 2300+, etc. who didn’t get nominated for Regents? There are quite a few on this site. Many get into schools like Stanford and Harvard, but no Regents. Also, tell that to the students with 2100 who got Regents. Really, selection for Regents is very, very much a crapshoot, and is very far from a numbers game.</p>
<p>Furthermore, Berkeley and to a slightly lesser extent UCLA are considerably less numbers oriented than other schools. At Berkeley, for example, GPA and rigor of course load are “very important,” but scores are just “important”; that’s why students with 2300+ do get rejected–they aren’t impressed by high SAT scores. Essays are also “very important,” and ECs, volunteer work, etc. are “important.”</p>
<p><a href=“http://cds.berkeley.edu/pdfs/PDF%20wBOOKMARKS%2006-07.pdf[/url]”>http://cds.berkeley.edu/pdfs/PDF%20wBOOKMARKS%2006-07.pdf</a></p>
<p>For a student with the stats you listed and with good ECs/awards, I’d say Berkeley and UCLA are matches. Far too often students on this site confuse “match” with “safety”–one is a school where you have a very good shot at, the other is a school where you will most definitely get in (with a very tiny chance that you won’t). I would say that the hypothetical student you described has more than a “very tiny” chance of being rejected, where “very tiny” is <10%.</p>
<p>And just look at CC: students who thought schools like Berkeley and UCLA were safeties were rejected, or else they were rejected at more “selective” schools–for what I can see is only arrogance.</p>
<p>SkyGirl, Gettysburg was your safety? I thought they were fairly selective. I have two friends whose daughters applied there, one was admitted (valedictorian of her class), one was waitlisted there but was accepted at Scripps.</p>
<p>^Jude, yeah I didn’t know about that, I just felt my stats were a good match there and emailed/talked to the regional counselor to get a feel of the campus. Ah well at least it was not my only safety. Check out their forum on CC, it was kinda kooky admissions this year :)</p>
<p>The point I’m trying to make is “Nothing is a sure bet”. Maybe I was too over-confident. Maybe the school had an unusual amount of applications. Maybe my safety application was too late. Maybe it’s a combination of factors. I can’t believe some of the responses I’m getting, like “X is not a safety school” or “pick a school with a 100% acceptance rate”. No one is an expert on safety schools and safety schools are different for each person.Overall, I think I did a very good job of selecting where to send my applications and am happy with the acceptances I got.</p>
<p>Toledo, I don’t agree with pick a school with 100% acceptance rate either. We should pick a “safety” which we like and fit with us, not just do it randomly. Maybe the way I picked schools was not the greatest method either but I did what I could.
I picked them according to SAT/GPA stuff, courses offered, the student body, matching with me. And didn’t someone say no school should be called a safety but there are only matches and reaches in truth?</p>
<p>You shouldn’t necessarily have to pick a school that accepts 100% of its applicants, but it would be a good idea to pick one that accepts 100% of applicants with statistics like yours (at many state universities, this can be pretty well determined).</p>