<p>if you go to a top prep school, you don't need to be top 10% to be accepted to a top college. I think I was in the lower end of the second quintile(40%), and I got into Notre Dame, Emory, and Vanderbilt. I had good test scores, but no hooks. Most people in the top two quintiles got acceptance to ivys/top 25's. Many of the others(3rd quintile and top of 4th) mainly went to pretty good nescac liberal arts schools.</p>
<p>Of course we know the answer. The large majority are athletes, urms , legacies and development candidates. Those candidates make up almost 50% of the student bodies at top schools and are also generally those with below average SAT scores and GPAs.</p>
<p>haha, yea, true. while 50% are students with hooks(athletes, urms, legacies, artists, musicians), the other half is extremeley talented academically. I mean, there was a reason they were accepted to a top prep school in the first place.</p>
<p>But yea, there's a trend that the colleges that have a lot of applicants from prep school generally have a lower percentage of students in the top 10%. I think most of the students outside of the top 10% at top colleges either had hooks or came from selective boarding schools.</p>
<p>The top handfull of boarding schools: Andover, St. Paul's, Deerfield, Exeter, send over 30% to ivies. It's important to notew though that probably 70% would have gone ivy from their local school.</p>
<p>Do you really think so? I'm not so sure, the average sat ranges around 1300-1400 for the prep schools. If anything, I found that boarding school helped me out a lot in college placement and with my friends.</p>
<p>what are hooks 0.o</p>
<p>The average SAT at top boarding schools is very close to 1400 now. Remember, like top colleges, they have recruited athletes, urms and development kids. So the top 60% are stellar students who have 1500 plus SATs and scored in the 95% plus on everything to get in. So I think there are a fair number of white and asian boarding school students who would have done better with colleges going to average high schools where they would have been at the top.</p>
<p>I'm Hispanic, if that makes a difference! :)</p>
<p>I'm just going to have to disagree with you there. There's no possible way to actually prove that our assumptions are correct or incorrect(although i do have experience in prep school college admissions in applying this year, and have friends going through the process too. I'm not sure about your experience with this), so I'll stop my argument here and say that i'll agree to disagree. </p>
<p>One thing though, trust me on this, there are not as many 1500 sat scorers as you think- definitely nowhere near 60%, maybe 10% max at the top b-schools.</p>
<p>Of the non top 10% kids, would you say that they are generally hooked applicants or generally applicants from competitive prep schools?</p>
<p>Suze, you're at Exeter right? I was under the impression that schools like that don't rank. I thought that not ranking made it possible for Ivies to accept kids from your school that weren't first decile without hurting their US News ratings. I remember looking at Penn's statistics and about half of the applicants were ranked and half weren't; I was under the impression those at programs like Exeter aren't even included in the "top 10%" calculation.</p>
<p>If I am right about this, then the top prep schools don't rank and consequently just about all of the non top 10% kids that are ranked are "hooked" applicants.</p>
<p>I know some prep schools give colleges which quintile the student falls into. Most do not rank though.</p>