Chances at Dietrich College at Carnegie Mellon?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Carnegie Mellon University
1

So here are my stats:

Objective:

New SAT: 1410 (700 in EBR&W and 710 in Math)
SAT II: 730 in Math 1 and a 660 in Math 2
Unweighted GPA: 3.88
Weighted GPA: 5.21
Class Rank: 5/525
AP: Calc AB, Calc BC, Stats, Environ, Bio, World, U.S. History, Psychology, English Lang (Have passed all of them or better)
Senior Course Load: Multivariable Calculus, AP U.S. Gov, AP Comp. Gov, AP Micro, AP Macro, AP English Lit, AP Spanish
Awards: AP Merit Scholar

Subjective:

Sports:
JV and Varsity Football (9-12, Captain my senior year, but NOT RECRUITED)
JV Baseball (9-10, was the statistician for the whole program)
Varsity Lacrosse (11-12)

Other ECs:

Spanish Club (9-12, Co-founder of the club, and I am fluent)
UNICEF (9-12, President)
KEY Club (9-12)
Speech (11-12, Captain of Extemporaneous Speaking)
Debate (11-12, Captain of Congressional Debate, also a PF Debater with many awards in both)
Math Club (11-12)
National Honors Society (11-12)
Amnesty International (12, joined because I accidentally walked in on a meeting and got interested lol)
Practicing Martial Arts (I have 2 black belts)
Tutoring my siblings

Job/Work Experience: Worked at a movie theater between my junior and sophomore years

Volunteer Work: I have about 120 hours thanks to my ECs

Summer Activities:
Football workouts (AKA Hell on Earth)
Helping out with Speech and Debate

Essays:
Common App: 9/10. Very in-depth story about the relationship between my autistic brother and me.
CMU: 9/10. Witty, funny, and effective at explaining why CMU is a good fit.

Recommendations:
Teacher Rec. #1: 10/10. My Stats teacher who has caused everyone who has read the essay to cry.
Teacher Rec. #2: 9/10. My Spanish teacher. I’m apparently the best-speaking student he’s ever had.
Counselor Rec.: 8/10. I’ve had a lot of face-time with my counselor to work out schedules and things.
Additional Rec.: 8/10. From my football coach who says that I’m the smartest player he’s ever coached, but it’s not very specialized.

Other:
Ethnicity: White
Gender: Male
State: NC
Income: $80,000
Intended Major: Statistics

2

This sounds a bit nit-picky but both your SAT II subject tests are in Math. For Dietrich, they specify that they want either Math I or Math II and then one additional test (applicant’s choice). Perhaps the subject tests aren’t a big deal, not sure.

http://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/standardized-test-requirements

3

I took that as that one additional test being able to be anything I wanted, so I picked the other math.

4

@morgantmw not sure that’s the way to read it, but then again, it’s also not exactly clear how they use the subject tests in the admission process to begin with.

UW GPA is obviously fine. Your SAT is a bit low when you concord it to the old test. Do you have any thoughts on how the new scores will shake out, distribution-wise? I was wondering that myself. Your EC’s are super so will, hopefully, make up for the low-ish test scores.

Good luck to you!

5

Many thanks! Concerning the new distributions, the concordance tables are highly inaccurate. The proper way to assess the scores should be based on percentiles. A 1410 is in the 95th percentile of test takers which would actually equate to about a 2070 or a 2080 as opposed to what the tables say, which would be around 2000 at most. My SAT is only a little bit below their average in this regard.

6

According to College Board, those concordances ARE equi-percentile based. Probably best not to put too much weight on the User percentiles that CB released because you don’t know whether the adcoms are relying on those unless they specifically tell you that they are. Has CMU provided communication on that recently? According to their website, they seem to be relying on the concordance tables and that hasn’t changed for several months:

“The College Board has also produced a SAT Score Converter that test takers can use to compare results from the old SAT Reasoning Test and the new SAT Test.” https://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/standardized-test-requirements

Of course, at the end of the admissions cycle CMU and other uni’s will have a ton of new scores and can put together a score distribution from that (similar to what they’ve done for the sections of the old test). If there is a bias they’ll see it. However, till that time we can’t assume it’s in one particular direction. It may well be in the other.

7

I looked at the precentiles myself, and the College Board is wrong.

8

@morgantmw - so you came up with different percentiles? How were you able to do that? Very interested because I want my kid’s SAT to be a higher percentile as well :wink: Do you have access to data?

9

Just google the percentiles at which people were scoring on the Old SAT and New SAT. For example, the minimum 99th percentile on the Old SAT was 2220, and the minimum 99th percentile on the New SAT is 1510. Therefore, a 1510 on the New SAT is equivalent to a 2220 on the Old SAT. Does that make sense? The concordance tables that the College Board provides don’t align with this in the slightest.

10

Huh. When I use the following tables (see links, using 1600 scale rather than 2400 for the old SAT) I get pretty consistent results between the concordance and the new percentile tables:

https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/sat/sat-percentile-ranks-composite-crit-reading-math-2015.pdf

https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/understanding-sat-scores-2016.pdf Page 6

Let’s try some examples:

50th percentile (old) = 1000 - 1010 which concords to about 1080-1090 (new) which is around 50th-52nd percentile
60th percentile (old) = 1060 which concords to about 1130 (new) which is 60th percentile.
70th percentile (old) = 1120-1130 which concords to about 1190-1200 (new) which is around 71st-72nd percentile
75th percentile (old) = 1160 which concords to 1230 (new) which is around 77th percentile
80th percentile (old) = 1200 which concords to 1270 (new) which is 82nd percentile
85th percentile (old) = 1250 which concords to 1310 (new) which is 87th percentile
90th percentile (old) = 1300 which concords to 1360 (new) which is 91st percentile
95th percentile (old) = 1380-1390 which concords to about 1430-1440 (new) which is about 96th percentile
97th percentile (old) = 1430 - 1450 which concords to 1480-1490 (new) which is about 98th percentile
98th percentile (old) = 1460-1490 which concords to 1500 - 1520 (new) which is about 98th - 99th percentile
99th percentile (old) = 1500-1550 which concords to 1530 - 1560 (new) which is about 99th - 99+ percentile

Overall I think the relationships are consistent between the User Data and the Concordance, though there are slight variations at certain scores.

Going backwards and plugging in your approximate score: 95th percentile (new) = 1410-1420 (new) which concords to 1350-1370 (old) which is about 93rd-94th percentile. Put more simply, your 1410 is about the 95th percentile (new) and the 93rd (old) when you concord. That’s one of the larger variations but given that the overall relationship seems to hold pretty well, it’s not too bad (though you probably wish it were a bit more consistent!).

I think the numbers just work better using the 1600 scale than the 2400 scale. That writing section doesn’t translate to the new test very well and you see that in the 80 point variation that you mentioned earlier.

One piece of advice, however. I wouldn’t look at total score for assessing chances at Carnegie Mellon. They are probably going to look separately at math and verbal subscores. They certainly present their admission statistics this way. So it makes sense to understand how your Math subscore concords, what that percentile is, and how that compares to what is reported. Wouldn’t hurt to examine the relationships near and around jthat score value as well, just to see if they hold consistently. It gives you an idea of what Carnegie might be doing in assessing the new vs. the old scores.

Good luck to you!

11

I definitely agree that the New SAT scales much better, and I think your analysis on the CR + M scores on the Old SAT are very true! As far as the separate section scores, I have checked, and while I am a bit below average for Carnegie Mellon in terms of Math Scores, I am pretty adequate in terms of EBR & W.

12

^ I’m perplexed, if you already think you’re “pretty adequate” then why did you make the original post? Seems rather unnecessary. You seem to be arguing with anyone who challenges your chances. What was the point of your question? Or was it not a question?

13

One of the commentors had a question about my thoughts on the New SAT Score distributions, and I gave my thoughts on it.

14

As long as it doesn’t hijack the thread, I’m happy to discuss new vs. old SAT. It’s very important to understand how these new scores will be interpreted. As I mentioned earlier, colleges may be doing their own research to see how the new score distribution stacks up to the old for accepted students, and whether this distribution is consistent with what a concorded distribution would look like. I know at least one school that maintains they are doing that type of analysis. But they are also relying on the concordance tables, because that’s really all they have. We can see that the new score percentiles come in on the high side by 1-2 points for total score; for the subcores the gap might be even larger. Perhaps one can look at the percentiles, then look at the concorded percentiles, and figure their score falls somewhere in between :slight_smile: