<p>My math teacher today Cornell, this year or last year, cant remember which, rejected 24000 valedictorians. Can that be true?</p>
<p>Being a valedictorian doesn’t guarantee admission to Cornell. Many other factors are involved.</p>
<p>When you have a top 20 school with an acceptance rate of 18%, there are more applicants with high stats than can be accepted. Cornell and every other college for that matter try to form a class. Issues other than scores are important. Also, the attitude that Cornell is a joke school should exist. It is one of the top 20 institutions in the country and should be treated as such.</p>
<p>The acceptance rates for Cornell’s CAS and Engineering program were hovering around 12% this year, if I remember correctly. That’s a significant decrease from a few years ago. Cornell is not an easy school to get into, even if you’re the valedictorian. It means nothing. In my school district of 5 schools, 2 valedictorians got waitlisted and the one at my school got rejected, but I got in at rank 4/304. Valedictorian status has nothing to do with it.</p>
<p>Brown, for example, admitted just 21% of all Valedictorians who applied. It’s in the last table of the page.</p>
<p>[Brown</a> Admission: Facts & Figures](<a href=“Undergraduate Admission | Brown University”>Undergraduate Admission | Brown University)</p>
<p>I’m sure Cornell rejects valedictorians all the time. I don’t know what their total number of applicants is, but 24,000 seems high for the number of valedictorians rejected by Cornell.</p>
<p>An adcom would give a higher score to the GPA/Rank portion of their “academic rating” to a student at a very competitive high school who graduates 6/200 while taking the most rigorous course load, with 2 B grades throughout high school, than to a Valedictorian of a class of 450 who did not take the most rigorous courses offered at that school but never received a B. Take the sports analogy – would you rather have on your baseball team a hitter with .400 average in AA minors, or .300 in the major leagues? In the same way, and adcom would give a higher academic rating to an applicant with 3.8 from a really tough school, than a 4.0 from an average school.</p>
<p>The 2400 portion of your question is separate. Most adcoms who have posted on this BB have indicated that they do not give an admissions edge to a 2400 vs. a 2300 vs. a 2200, and certainly never vs. a 2350, a priori. The “very high SAT” box is checked with any of them, and they move on. Here is an example: [MIT</a> Admissions | Blog Entry: “What’s the big deal about 40^2?”](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/standardized_test_requirements/whats_the_big_deal_about_402.shtml]MIT”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/standardized_test_requirements/whats_the_big_deal_about_402.shtml) I have also read a couple of books written by adcoms who generally agree with the sentiments of the MIT adcom.</p>
<p>On Valedictorians: There are over 20,000 high schools in the U.S. Assuming 75% of them actually select a Valedictorian, and assuming half of those have multiple valedictorians (let’s say TWO on ave. for the multiples), then that would give us 22,500 Valedictorians from U.S. High Schools. This does not count home schooled applicants or Int’l applicants. The total entering class of the Ivies is about 15,000 places. So you see, doing simple math, there isn’t enough room in the 8 Ivies combined to accept even 70% of the Valedictorians from U.S. High Schools.</p>