<p>You should have applied to Brown. It's far better than Duke :P</p>
<p>you have a good shot</p>
<p>not so much, but thanks for the comments</p>
<p>as for science team, our coach sort of forgot to sign us up, so we went to some uva thing, got into the round of 16, and got our butts handed to us by some NJ team. it wasnt so good. but if yal are bored, check out <a href="http://www.battleofthebrains.net%5B/url%5D">www.battleofthebrains.net</a>, and look up saint annes belfield</p>
<p>
[quote]
You should have applied to Brown. It's far better than Duke :P
[/quote]
i wouldn't go to brown if they paid me haha</p>
<p>GPA is a problem. Yr school senior class in 2003 has sats of 622 verbal, 637 math. By the standards of top prep schools, that's not impressive. So yr GPA can't be massaged by stressing high academic ability of peer group.
On other hand, awesome SATs suggest bright underachiever on way up.
I think you have a chance at H RD. Did you not apply to schools rated between Harvard and Duke, eg Dartmouth, Columbia, Penn, Stanford, Williams?</p>
<p>I second that, ay_caramba, lol. And what, mensa, do you mean by rated "between Harvard and Duke"? As far as I have seen, most of those schools you listed are rated below Duke by many different measures...</p>
<p>Radon:
i think you have a pretty good chance... dont worry about your GPA too much, people tend to overexaggerate it's importance on this board...</p>
<p>overexaggerate GPA? I dont know, if anything it seems to me that ppl UNDERESTIMATE gpa, especially b/c CC is filled with boatloads of info about ECs and the like (as opposed to GPA).</p>
<p>...
[quote]
And what, mensa, do you mean by rated "between Harvard and Duke"? As far as I have seen, most of those schools you listed are rated below Duke by many different measures
[/quote]
</p>
<p>By the measure of what schools people choose over Duke if they get into Duke and other schools, Duke fares much worse than in UsNews rankings, which puts it fifth, I believe. It's 19th in the NBER revealed preference ranking. To put it another way, NBER shows that for those who get into Duke and for example Dartmouth, a very significant majority choose Dartmouth over Duke. Does that mean Dartmouth is better? Maybe not, but it's not as absurd as putting Duke 5th, which even you (presumably a Duke student or matriculant) couldn't possibly believe. Or do you? I have to say, that I would rather go to any of those schools over Duke; but then again, I'm not sports oriented, which is Duke's strength.</p>
<p>NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES
A REVEALED PREFERENCE RANKING OF
U.S. COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES
Christopher Avery
Mark Glickman
Caroline Hoxby
Andrew Metrick
Working Paper 10803
<a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w10803%5B/url%5D">http://www.nber.org/papers/w10803</a></p>
<p>on the brown thing, yah my mother went there, and i toured it. not happening, although they do have free cable in dorms</p>
<p>secondly, that was last years senior class (idiots). this year, we had kids get in early to yale, dartmouth, colombia, duke, WM, UVA, Stanford, Williams, JHU, etc. a bunch. and gpa for my first semester was 3.85, which is actually pretty damn good, probably top 10 in class. </p>
<p>thanks for posting that nber thing by the way
i applied to duke, harvard, stanford, amherst, penn, dartmouth, William and Mary, and UVA.</p>
<p>First of all, I don't believe in ANY rankings, and that includes those rankings which are as preposterous as the ones that you posted. What you have there is a PRESTIGE ranking, not a QUALITY one. It doesn't take a scientific study to determine that most people that get accepted to Harvard are going to go. That ranking has no more credibility than USNews' Peer Assessment Score.
I'm not saying that USNews is any different, which is why I don't believe that one either. But just because I don't think USNews has a particularly good formula doesn't mean that I don't think that Duke is one of the 10-15 best universities in the country.</p>
<p>
[quote]
doesn't mean that I don't think that Duke is one of the 10-15 best universities in the country.
[/quote]
I'd have to agree with that. 19th in NBER is pretty hard to get around, even for me, hardly a Duke booster.</p>
<p>Just to add, NBER is not really a prestige ranking. It basically says that where people decide to go incorporates the collective "wisdom of crowds", like any market does, reflecting how individuals basically decide to spend their time an money. It rests on the assumption of rational choice, like all economic theory.</p>
<p>I have seen that "ranking" and in light of the cross-admit data I have seen for Duke it seems very off. In cross-admit contests Duke is beaten by only by HYPS by a ratio greater than 1:3. The only other school to beat duke in these contests is Brown, which wins 45%/55%. Other than that, Duke goes head-to-head with Dartmouth and Columbia and beats Penn and Cornell by a lot (~40%/60%). Duke also beats Georgetown 80%/20% as well as Northwestern by a very large ratio. Just by talking to kids here you can clearly see that the majority of kids here turned down one or more Ivies for Duke and so I simply don't invest anything in that survey. Likewise, I think that US News is pretty ridiculous as well and I dislike rankings of all kinds. But for you to say that "for those who get into Duke and for example Dartmouth, a very significant majority choose Dartmouth over Duke" when reality that is not true at all is ignorant.</p>
<p>
[quote]
But for you to say that "for those who get into Duke and for example Dartmouth, a very significant majority choose Dartmouth over Duke" when reality that is not true at all is ignorant.
[/quote]
I cited my source; what's yours.</p>
<p>It is a written report published in 2000 (which means Duke has probably improved the cross-admit yield data I gave) which gives the cross-admit data for Duke and all the Ivies, Stanford, Georgetown, and Northwestern (along with UNC-Chapel Hill)--the institutions with which Duke's applicant pool most overlaps--for the 5 years before 2000 as well as an average of the yield rates. I got the report from the admissions office, but I'll try to find it online.</p>
<p>Also, though it doesn't include the numerical data I have, here is a quote from the alumni magazine that confirms what I said:</p>
<p>"Among Duke's admitted students, the application overlapping is greatest with Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford...Duke still loses most of its admitted students who are also admitted to one or more of those schools; the same is true in the competition with Brown, another school with which Duke shares a large number of overlaps. But Duke pretty much splits the difference or wins out for students against other Ivies--Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and Columbia.</p>
<p>Also, mensa, did you even apply to Duke? I sincerely hope you did not if you really consider Duke's main strength to be sports and think so little of it. I didn't play sports in high school but rather focused and accomplished a great deal with music, which I have been able to continue here with an amazing teacher and outstanding resources (I got to hold Joshua Bell's $5 million Strad violin this past weekend and talk to him one-on-one). Though I was never interested in sports in high school, I have learned to love Duke basketball though I know of students who do not. I think the fact that Duke is muched more balanced of a school in terms of athletics and academics (like Stanford) is only a good thing--you will find that this combination fosters a sense of community and attracts kids who have lives inside and outside the classroom. It is ignorant to label Duke as a sports school without knowing very much about it or its students.</p>
<p>do you guys happen to have access to the nber list? thanks</p>
<p>well mensa posted the link above, click on either PDF or via email down toward the bottom to get the report, as misleading as it is.</p>
<p>According to the NBER report, the (non-random) survey data was collected in 2000, even though the report was published in 2004. In my opinion, a lot can happen in five years. In that sense, there are "rankings" that are more current than this. I wonder why it took four years to publish this report? - A report that supposedly that did not manipulate the non-random data that was collected.</p>
<p>what do you mean by non-random survey?
It might be the data set for the early admissions game, pub in 2003.
That was sent to people who were applying to ea/ed schools.</p>