<p>
[quote]
the average MIT or CalTech student will be much smarter than your average Stanford student...
[/quote]
</p>
<p>What are you basing this statement on? You can't make random comments without tangible proof. </p>
<p>Note:I'm choosing Stanford over MIT.</p>
<p>I certainly wouldn't say much stronger, but because Stanford uses strong legacy, athlete, and minority recruitment, what collegealum314 says follows as consequence.</p>
<p>First for the numbers:
SAT/ACT 25%-75%</p>
<pre><code> CalTech 1470-1580
MIT 1430-1570
Stanford 1360-1550
</code></pre>
<p>Freshman in top 10% of their class
CalTech 94%
MIT 97%
Stanford 89%</p>
<p>look, stanford and caltech are both very selective, but they are looking for different things. I remember who stanford took my senior year. (I went to a state magnet school where everyone was the best in their high school before transferring, so there was a high number of acceptances to the top schools compared with a normal high school.) We had 11 national merit scholars (top 2000 people in the country) and 6 USAMO qualifiers. Two out of the 6 USAMO winners (top 100 in math in country) got into stanford and only 2 out of the 11 national merit scholars got into stanford. Stanford admitted like 6 other people with like straight "B"s and SAT scores which were pretty low (like 1300's) with no academic awards. MIT admitted all the people with the best academic records, but none of the other people. Some of the comparisons between MIT/CalTech admits and Stanford admits were pretty striking, like two premeds applied to Stanford, one of them is Captain of the science and math team and has five times the average of the other in biology class (though both get "A"s because almost the whole class is below 25%) and much better scores in all academic subjects (although neither has more than 3 or 4 B's) as well as national awards in basically every subject. The first guy gets into CalTech and MIT, whereas the other gets into Stanford. The academic guy had a fair amount of other stuff (community service/student govt.), but the second person went to Peru over the summer and wrote about that. It's like Stanford takes a few academic stars, then take people who are pretty good academically (above 1300) who had some great story to tell or something or whose life is about community service. MIT/CalTech would never take someone because they had some unusual non-academic talent or activity but were just good students, whereas Stanford will.</p>