<p>
This reminds me of another drum I like to beat, which is: don’t have a dream school, have a strategy.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>I doubt that kid has “no hooks”. Something triggered his app from being picked. Some unusual life experience, achievement, or something.</p>
<p>Back to the OP. Test scores aren’t everything, especially at the best publics. Very good schools like UCLA, Cal, Mich, UVA, UIUC and UNC-CH weight GPA more than test scores.</p>
<p>The best privates may “dip” down to the 90th percentile (or lower) to accept a student who helps with ethnic or regional diversity, or has a talent (athletic, music, performance, artistic). A fabulous artist may be so right-brained that his/her test scores are rather lowish, but a top school may still accept.</p>
<p>D has great test scores - good gpa - unusual EC - and off-the-charts essays. I think it was the essays that really showed her personality and thinking that pushed her “over the edge” and got her admitted to many of her top choices. She is a quirky kid (of course, what kid isn’t) and it showed through in her essays as a real positive.</p>
<p>I think the takeaway from this should be that even if you’re a Native American with perfect grades and scores who is also a recruitable football player, a violinist who was on From the Top, and an Intel winner, don’t assume that there aren’t a whole lot of other super-accomplished kids vying for the same spots.</p>
<p>And the second takeaway should be that even if you’re not the person described above, don’t sell youself short–you may not have those traits, but you may have others that top schools will want–you just have to understand what they are looking for, and do a realistic evaluation of what you have to offer.</p>
<p>bovertine - the list is interesting but it would really be better if you could sort it by school.</p>
<p>
I can’t sort it. But the school did. THe second half of the list is sorted by school. Go back to the middle of the list.</p>
<p>Oh, ok. I ran out of steam mid-way through the list. I will try again.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And by applying to more colleges of that type/level (within reason) you increase your chances of acceptance, provided it is a school you could be comfortable with, fit wise and financially.</p>
<p>From the article linked by RobD:
</p>
<p>I can’t <em>explain</em> the Stanford/Yale decisions, but by this point, based on the information on CC over the years, I believe that I have become fairly good at predicting the decisions for that particular pair of colleges, in the cases where one says yes and the other says no. (Or at any rate, my “postdictions” are running close to 100%.)</p>
<p>As others in this thread have said, your numbers are basically correct but they don’t mean what you think they do. There are definitely a handful of top colleges that could fill their freshman class with 2350+/34+ scorers, but it’s just not that important to the admissions decision, so that’s not the case. Great scores open great doors, but the rest of the application is what makes or breaks it.</p>
<p>Harvard and MIT are definitely not going to jump out of their seat to accept a 2400 when they see probably 100+ of them a year. Likewise, they’re not going to pass on a 32 because the next in the pile is a 34. A good score is a good score, but definitely not a ticket to ride.</p>
<p>
If you want data for a specific school, you can also check the class of 2017 decision threads on this website. Many schools show only a weak correlation with SAT score. For example, the first page in the Stanford Class of 2017 RD thread includes the following two students</p>
<p>Student 1: Rejected
SAT I (breakdown): 2400
SAT II:math 2 800, us history 800, chemistry 800
Unweighted GPA (out of 4.0):
Rank (percentile if rank is unavailable):1</p>
<p>Student 2: Accepted
SAT I (breakdown): 700 reading, 670 math, 640 writing
ACT: 33
SAT II: 700 math 2, 680 physics
Unweighted GPA (out of 4.0): 3.81</p>
<p>The perfect SAT/GPA student #1 was rejected, while the lower SAT/GPA student #2 was accepted. Student #1 was accepted to other top schools, such as Yale and Oxford. And student #2 was rejected from the less selective UC Berkeley. An older article at [Palo</a> Alto Online Palo Alto Weekly: Our Town:The man who says no (June 7, 2006)](<a href=“http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/story.php?story_id=1568]Palo”>http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/story.php?story_id=1568) mentions an acceptance rate of under 10% for students “fitting the profile” of perfect SAT/GPA (old SAT format).</p>
<p>Stanford gives significant deference to legacies.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Nope. Self-reported data by those who are interested enough to be on College Confidential in the first place. It’s not representative, it’s not substantial enough in number, and it’s not enough to draw any conclusions from. It’s no more meaningful than the “well, I know in my high school Betty the cheerleader got in and Suzie the editor didn’t so therefore they value cheerleading over editing” that passes for analyses around here most days.</p>
<p>It depends how you use the data. For example, if you are comparing the acceptance rate of CC members to the general population, of course the acceptance rate is going to be very different because CC members who choose to post in the thread differ the general population. However, if you are looking at what general overviews of accepted/rejected, it is more meaningful. For example, looking at the decision thread one might conclude that a 2400 SAT, perfect GPA, and good ECs does not guarantee acceptance; or that a 2000 SAT with a mediocre GPA does not exclude acceptance, but significantly hurts your chances. Looking at the posts of low scoring persons who are accepted, it’s often obvious what other factors influenced the decision, allowing one to draw further conclusions about things the college finds important that may override a mediocre SAT/GPA.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You can’t evaluate chances based on the data from CC. Again, even leaving aside that it’s self-reported, it’s very incomplete (we don’t know the essays or LOR’s), and it’s not representative of the applicant pool. You’re only seeing a self-selected handful of applicants. Trying to conclude ANYTHING is foolish.</p>
<p>I know of two Harvard admits this year whose test scores do NOT put them in the upper 2%. So, there are also any number of students applying to the most desired schools that will be contenders due to other factors than test scores. From what I have seen, there are schools that don’t even look at the test scores themselves when making the admissions decisions. Certain thresholds get a certain score and whether you have perfect scores or are right on the line of the threshold, you get the same consideration on the test score category. Also, a lot of the ivies, I know, as well as a number of other highly selective schools, don’t use just the 3 numbers of the SAT1 ore the ACT composite, but use 5 numbers of the SAT and some formula mixing ACT and SAT2s. That can change the picture for a number of applicants.</p>
<p>When there are so many students applying for so few spaces with such schools making it their objective to turn down more kids rather than take them, it’s really one bad gauntlet for those kids and families going through this. It’s really a matter of looking for ways to eliminate rather than accept. </p>
<p>Yet, given the situation, I have no suggestions on how to change the process to make it fairer. How the heck does one make a situation where most of those applying are going to get denied fairer?</p>
<p>A lot of this is parents trying to make some sense out of a senseless process. It is a very subjective process and we want to look at objective data to try and understand what’s happening behind closed doors. The truth is probably pretty close to what another poster suggested. The great stats simply get your foot in the door. After that its a total crap shoot.</p>
<p>I think the results threads are useful, especially if you look at them for several years. They do give you a general impression of the kind of kids who get accepted, waitlisted, and denied. While there are always some surprises, tendencies are readily observable.</p>
<p>Another thing–and I know this is picky–random and unpredictable are not the same thing. So while the admissions decisions may look like a crap shoot, they aren’t actually a crap shoot. What’s mostly happening is that both objective and subjective criteria are being applied that aren’t visible to us. If Harvard takes a kid because he’s the best applicant from Idaho this year, that isn’t really random. If he’s the best candidate from Idaho who is also a URM, or a legacy, that isn’t random either. But the confluence of all these mushy criteria makes it hard for people on the outside to predict results.</p>
<p>
This is getting silly. The portion of the my post you quoted listed 2 conclusions. I’ll go through each one.</p>
<ol>
<li>“a 2400 SAT, perfect GPA, and good ECs does not guarantee acceptance”</li>
</ol>
<p>If the conclusion was not accurate, it would mean the only candidates in the application pool of tens of thousands with perfect SAT/GPA who were rejected happen to be posting in that thread, so if you are not one of those few posting on CC, then a perfect SAT/GPA means guaranteed acceptance. </p>
<ol>
<li> “a 2000 SAT with a mediocre GPA does not exclude acceptance, but significantly hurts your chances”</li>
</ol>
<p>Similarly if there are a couple persons on CC who got in with a ~2000 SAT + mediocre GPA, it’s a safe bet that they are the only ones in the tens of of thousands of the application pool who meet this criteria. </p>
<p>I’m not saying, you can conclude you that you have a 63% chance of getting in based on the thread. I’m saying that you can draw some general conclusions that some applicants will find useful. For example, “maybe I shouldn’t put all my eggs in one basket because my top scores + GPA doesn’t guarantee admission” or “maybe I should still apply even though I don’t have top SAT/GPA since some get in with similar stats, ECs, feelings about their LORs/essyas.”</p>
<p>Whew! I am back to disagreeing with Pizzagirl. I do think that you can draw some conclusions based on posts on CC. They are mostly in the category of existence proofs (i.e., there exists student X such that X has a 2400 on the SAT I + a 4.0 UW GPA + add other qualifications here, and X was rejected from College G). In order to discredit the existence proof, you would have to claim that every post by someone claiming to be such a student was a fabrication. Of course, one might claim that–but I don’t think it’s true.</p>
<p>Data 10 has made essentially the same point in post #59, with an extension to consider students on the lower-scoring side who were admitted.</p>