<p>Obviously, the admit rate went down, like it does for many top schools year after year, but after I looked at the 2016 Results thread and 2017 Results thread, I felt the applicants who got in 2017 were 10 times more competitive than the 2016 applicants. Meaning they did a lot more of the Olympiad competitions and did amazing stuff. Not saying that 2016 didn't do amazing stuff, its just that to me the 2017 people did a lot more competitions while 2016 had more regular, but still brilliant high school kids. It makes me tempted to do those type of competitions, but I don't want to spend my life studying all the time. Not really a question, but what are your thoughts on this?</p>
<p>I doubt they got ten times more competitive. When I was younger and had more free time I used to plot the stats from the results threads of different years and life circumstances to see how things changed and where I stood. If you’re as insane as I am you could try that, keeping in mind the biases that College Confidential adds to your data and how the people of College Confidential may have changed over the past years. You certainly have a lot of data to work with. Have fun.</p>
<p>I don’t think College Confidential samples are representative. It could’ve been that a couple of really awesome people happened to post on the 2017 thread earlier, and other admits became shyer of posting. As lidusha said, this has varied a lot over the years.</p>
<p>But, you know, we haven’t actually looked at the data ourselves. At least not in recent years.</p>
<p>OP,</p>
<p>Just a survey of my son and some of his close friends, 2016ers, will reveal an IMO winner, several USAMOers, and several Physics Olympiad team members/semi-finalists. His one IMO friend of 2017 chose CMU over MIT (I’m guessing finances were a part of it).</p>
<p>^ Good for your son, but that doesn’t give us any information about the MIT class of 2017 compared to the MIT class of 2016.</p>
<p>I wasn’t commending my son (if, indeed you were addressing me, lidusha); I was simply making the point that there were IMO, USAMO (and my son was neither of these), etc. kids in the 2016 class as well as the 2017 class. As others pointed out, the CC sample is pretty small so I imagine it’s hard to draw any conclusions.</p>
<p>If you noticed…all the asians in the 2017 who got accepted have done AIME/USAMO/some other Olympiad </p>
<p>and i’m asian</p>
<p>what is life??? lol</p>
<p>I would take the self-reported posts on CC (I would hesitate to call this data…) with quite a bit of skepticism as there is no reason to suggest that they are at all representative. Certainly MIT admissions are competitive and perhaps even increasingly so but there is no reason to suspect a large jump this year (more formally the prior that admissions are roughly as competitive this year as last year should overwhelm the low quality signal of the CC results thread).</p>
<p>^Agreed.</p>
<p>Admission to MIT has gotten more competitive over, say, the past 15-20 years, but not over the past year.</p>
<p>CC posts definitely aren’t a good representation.</p>
<p>It is more competitive. A few years ago MIT received 13,000 applications for 1,100 spots and admitted approx 1,500. This year they received 19,000 applications for 1,100 spots. Where the yield was approx 64% a few years ago, it’s an unprecedented 72% and they aren’t taking students from the waitlist this year.</p>
<p>I was on campus a few weeks ago and inquired about the huge influx. MIT is not on the Common App (the source of huge increases at other colleges) which means students who apply are motivated because they have to complete a separate application outside of that system. Other than that, there’s no explanation for the almost 50% increase in applications.</p>
<p>But don’t be discouraged. Their admissions is both driven by stats and holistic considerations. Just be yourself and let the process work the way it is designed - to build an interesting class of smart students - not necessarily a class of applicants with perfect stats.</p>
<p>
<em>ahem</em> I’m an Asian part of MIT Class of 2017 who never participated in math/science olympiads and related contests. No sweeping generalizations, please.</p>
<p>sorry lanayru, its just that by looking at the 2017 thread…i got scared!! any tips on how to get into MIT, at least in writing the essays?</p>
<p>[The</a> Match Between You And MIT | MIT Admissions](<a href=“http://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/match]The”>What we look for | MIT Admissions)</p>
<p>Stop looking at the admit threads.</p>
<p>I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again - if I knew about College Confidential before applying to MIT, I might never have applied. Now, I’ll be graduating in two days. CC has a very biased community, and usually only the super high stats people report. You need strong stats, but you don’t need perfect stats. You do need to be interesting, and interested in taking advantage of MIT’s opportunities to do something awesome - CC as a whole tends to really undervalue the non-numerical parts of MIT’s application even though they’re the most important components.</p>
<p>
The Match between you and MIT posted before is a good starting place. You should read some essay writing guides/accepted student examples (published books, CC, etc.). I thought they really helped jumpstart some ideas.</p>
<p>Piper is so accurate with the comment " if I knew about College Confidential before applying to MIT, I might never have applied." I definitely fall into that category as well and I got in EA. I am an international EC, and I am scared by some of the things I read on CC.</p>
<p>However, when I consider the students that I have interviewed over the years who have gotten in, barring a tiny number of obviously astonishing candidates, most of the international applicants admitted do not match well with the CC results thread.</p>
<p>Indeed, I have to deal with the opposite problem each year. I have met with a large number of admitted students over the years who seem convinced that MIT admissions must have made a huge mistake as “MIT takes all of these astonishing geniuses and yet somehow they admitted me.” Usually a trip to CPW fixes that as they meet a bunch of other admitted students and realize that they really do fit in. CC can be helpful, but it can also be soul-destroying. Keep in mind that those who choose to post here have their own reasons for doing so.</p>
<p>Indeed I read one post a while back from a poster who claimed that they were not admitted that year despite having an astonishing list of accomplishments, and I wondered what happened, until I saw that that poster had previously posted that they had gotten in, and a few years earlier had again posted that they had a list of astonishing achievements and had been turned down for that year’s class. Take most of what you see on CC with healthy skepticism.</p>
<p>thanks lidusha! :)</p>
<p>Thanks everyone 
i have been enlightened lol</p>