Chances at Emory?

Hey guys,

These are my stats:
GPA: UW-3.75
W-idk prob like a 4.0

SAT:1510
ACT:34

AP- Bio(5), French (5), Stats (5)

SAT 2- Math L2-750
-Chem 720

EC’s
-over 200 hours volunteering at a special needs center
-violinist at youth symphony for 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grades
-Publicity/Activities Coordinator of special needs club in school
-Summer stuff- internships, work, volunteering etc
More EC’s, but too lazy to list

My common app essay is good and pretty genuine i think

I’m also applying to BU, NYU, Purdue, UIUC

IDK if its worth applying to Tufts and UMich

Thanks!

You have a fairly good shot but your GPA could potentially fall short with the amount of well-minded people who are applying that have similar applications as you do.

Your chances are at a 65%

Good luck!

@nataliebaker1654
I would say its a High Match for you as Emory will really like the fact that your AP test scores are all 5’s. Again RD is very difficult.

The RD round is very tough with no guarantees. @nataliebaker1654 you should apply to all of the schools that you are interested in and then, hopefully, have some good choices. I don’t like people on these boards chancing peopole and don’t trust any of them. Emory looks at rigor of courses taken vs what’s available, among other things. People with your stats get in and don’t get in. Great luck.

@frozencustard : I agree, I try to avoid. I don’t see how I could know. I am not an admissions officer nor could I predict what they want from year to year. Emory certainly doesn’t make it easy. There isn’t as much correlation with scores as some other places, and they change how much they admit each year (like right now after ED, they are claiming they are aiming for only 1350 this year).

@bernie12

What did Emory shoot for last year?

Where has Emory talked about targeting 1350 this year?

Didn’t Emory over-admit last year?

The 25th to 75th Percentile last year was 1360-1490.

I can’t speak for @bernie12, but the point is that those 1360s CAN get in if they are strong somewhere else. It could be outstanding grades combined with strong APs from a favored school or even incredible strength in one area.

@BiffBrown I believe the standards get tougher in the RD round and the 25th percentile scores might get more traction in the ED1 round, but the numbers go up in the RD round.

I am also not comfortable with anyone chancing people in the ED2 or RD rounds. Admissions is admitting and denying so many in that 25th to 75th percentiles and they are viewing each application on its own and not as a number. There are too many subjective aspects of an application that nobody chancing on CC can know.

@ljberkow I think bernie12 meant enrollment of 1350 not stats, stats seem as if they will rise again. And those 1360’s stats wise are probably URM’s, athletes, or some other large hook applicants.

@VANDEMORY1342 , you are right about Bernie’s post. However, Emory is not as focused on scores as some other schools. If the 1360 is 25th percentile, that means that a full 1/4 of admits have a hook. That’s a bit high. I just don’t see how you can chance for an RD round without just playing a numbers game and Emory is not doing that. Do you think they particularly care if someone is a 1420 or a 1480? My guess is that they are agnostic as to those two scores and go deeper into the applications and interviews.

When you chance others, it’s as if you’re playing poker and two cards are hidden from you. If Emory really wanted, they could fill a class with kids with 1500 SATs. I also think you shouldn’t draw too much from the kids who post their stats on CC. It may not be an adequate sample for many reasons.

@ljberkow
well URM’s make up 20-25% of a campus then you have ORM athletes. That alone should make a sizable 25% or more of the student population. I would wager that the bottom 1-5 percent is 1200-1250 fairly respectable. So if someone says that applicant with an 1170 is a High reach, then that is fair and warranted. I or others never say an applicant wont or will get in.
Yes theoretically Emory could do that, but the other factors they control for would suffer, and probably yield and freshman retention would suffer as well.
Chancing is a cathartic exercise, and only gives a applicant a general sense of things. its obviously not to be taken as more than an opinion. Other sites like prep scholar do the same.

@ljberkow and @BiffBrown : Oops, sorry for the confusion. They claimed their target enrollment is 1350 students which is lower than the 1400+ they wanted for some reason the 2021 cycle. Emory’s scores are already maybe in the low 14s or very high 13s on the new SAT, so they will probably at least aim for that (for 2020, where a mixture of old and new was included, the mean was 1390 I think, which is a substantial increase from previous years. I would expect it be similar for 2021). Actually they probably do not aim for that, they probably just select people and usually they have that range. You can tell that Emory’s admissions office is not deliberately aiming to achieve a certain score range because the mean scores have fluctuated in the past. Schools that focus upon scores or aim for a certain IQR seem as if they usually do not allow that. They will cherry pick based upon scores until they can successfully say that the scores are higher (even if like 5-10 points) than the previous year’s already high scores. There is something so obviously deliberate about it and it doesn’t seem to be the case at Emory. They seem to just pick out who they want and then those are the admitted stats, so sometimes they will fluctuate. Many of the top 10s appear to have this scheme too. Their admit rates may decrease because of increasing applications, but not all of them will choose a higher score range as a result. With some schools, you pretty much know that if their application numbers increasing even modestly, their scores are going up. Even if their mean score was a 1600/1600 on the new, they will go out of their way to ensure that the new ones have a 1605/1600 lol. Such a scheme is quite hilarious, but it works on idiot current students and alumni who sit around and say “wow they are so much smarter than us”. The reality is kind of like: “It is 10 points on a multiple choice test, only in really easy classes that use them, will it effect mean performance”

@VANDEMORY1342 : What is an ORM athlete? Most of Emory’s athletes seem white (there may be some Asians and a few URMs) to me and they are generally on par or a little better than the overall student body it seems. They typically have above average Emory GPAs and seem to produce a lot of academic super stars. Athletes at a D-3 should not be discussed as if it is D-1 school. It isn’t remotely the same. Most of the “recruits” are at least on par with the other students.

Also, I don’t ever have enough data to determine whether certain scores will get in. They would have to present the application or the ECs for me to even discuss what a bottom 25% percent person can improve other than the score itself. The fact is, there will always be a bottom 25% by rule of stats. We know where the bottom quartile starts, but we cannot be so sure what all is in it and the spread of scores below it.

I really don’t bother unless I see that coupled with “meh” ECs or if I see a low GPA and then no class rank for evidence of rigor (or if they didn’t take rigorous courses).

@ljberkow : The comment on 1500s is very true. I feel as if any school can do it by just taking advantage of how competitive admissions at peers have become. It is effectively what WUSTL and VU do. You bank on the students with those scores to get denied, wait-listed or poor financial aid packages from elsewhere in droves (and it happens), and then you pick them up (can direct admit or wait-list) to heavily skew the bottom 25% of enrolled towards something pretty high like 14something (you deny most in the 13s and low 14s if qualified or talented and let them go to “lesser” schools like Duke and Stanford lol. Stanford and Duke then go on to produce several Rhodes Scholars and Goldwater winners on a consistent basis haha). In fact they SELECT at around 1500 for bottom quartile in RD. Of course many who do get in to a higher ranked place and get good fin. aid will not yield, but overall using that method yields higher scores than if you don’t select with the score range in mind. You end up with a student body that looks like HYPM on paper, but were not necessarily selected with the same things in mind (again those schools not only select very good MC test takers, they tend to select a higher threshold of pointed people or well-rounded people super talented in at least like 1 or 2 areas among the things they do. Many other places settle for “high scores, great GPA, well-rounded/leader of clubs, no academics or artistic spike needed”). Nobody has to know that though.

I think the yield at the very top tier of elites is so high (70+%) that most do not have to select at 1500 for bottom quartile. Most of them probably select the exact same range they yield. Considering that HYPSM with the old SAT had a bottom quartile of enrolled students ranges from 1380 (old scale Stanford, class before last) and 1460 (MIT), (among non-STEM, I think H is the highest at 1430), they seem to be CHOOSING to exclude many with 1600 and in the 1500s. There super low admit rates and medium size cohort sizes suggest that most people with these high ranges are just denied (we know that tons of the people in those ranges throw themselves at those schools). They have to go somewhere. You can choose to most of them up or just select very carefully among them.

@bernie12 I need a phrase to describe whit and Asian students. Some news publication did an expose on the Emory women’s swim team. and it said the avg SAT score for the team was a 1350 and this was last year, so its safe to say other Emory athletes have similar stats (I.E below the median.) I was just trying to get across to @ljberkow that there’s enough major hooked students to be at least 25% of the class.

@VANDEMORY1342 : I don’t actually know what the median is, and then it also depends on which class was profile. There was like a 4 year period, where the SAT mean ranged from 1359 to 1371 I think (and no it was not an increasing trend, it was a fluctuation).

Also, they I would say are on the median, because males tend to score higher than females on standardized tests like that, but females tend to have higher GPAs. When you balance that out and probably account for all the teams, they will be exactly the same as the student body give or take some. Also, 1350, puts them well above the 25% of enrolled students especially if we talk 2020 (where the 25% was 1290 for enrolled) which would have a theoretical median of 1395. I don’t consider that very different. That number would reveal that it the athletic teams may not contribute much to the bottom 25%. Maybe for admitted students, but not enrolled (and then I suspect a decent amount come from early rounds, so may even be a normal admit among those) At the end of the day, it is about who they yield. It just says that the women’s swim team does not make for the best admits in terms of stats (but most are competitive), but once the smoke clears, they are decent matriculates.

The bottom 1-5% being that high. I seriously have my doubts whether you are talking admits or matriculates. Maybe the bottom decile (or eighth) would start at 1200 for one of the two categories. It also doesn’t really matter what they put in that category. Collegeboard for enrollees suggest bottom 5% is those who likely fall between 1000 and 1200 and that is a generous estimate because there is a math bias at most elite schools where math scores are higher than verbal (so for 2020, they had 5% in the 500-600 range for math and 11% for verbal). I guess from that you could reasonably estimate that the bottom 5% of admits would be higher by about a bracket or so, so yes the 5% mark for admits may start at roughly 1200 or so. I also speculate that a bigger range of students occupy the bottom quartile than we think. A decent chunk will be taken up by those with no hook at all which may not happen at other schools. Some of these results in the past on CC seem to indicate that this is so.

The 1350 average isn’t a big deal one way or the other. I don’t know the story, but it tells me that 50% of the swimmers were above the 1360 and 50% were below. There is probably a good amount in the the 1380-1440 range as well as the 25% below 1360. I agree that there is a bump from applying ED1 and ED2 and RD might have to reach a higher standard. You just never know and it’s tough to chance that group.