<p>I was interested in asking this questions after looking through this thread:
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1626413-why-do-seemingly-perfect-students-get-rejected-from-ivies.html">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1626413-why-do-seemingly-perfect-students-get-rejected-from-ivies.html</a></p>
<p>Just wanted to hear stories/thoughts about the matter. Do you know of anyone that you might have thought was underqualified and beat out some of the overqualified classmates? What were their stats? How did they sell themselves as superior to those with higher credentials?</p>
<p>The Ivies don’t show GPA distributions in their Common Data Set files, but they do show class rank distributions. 1% of Yale freshmen ranked outside the top 25% of their HS classes, but still inside the top half. 1% of Cornell freshmen ranked in the bottom half of their HS classes. So yes, there must be a handful of students who get in despite fairly low GPAs. I suspect those few students have extraordinary hooks, so they probably aren’t “selling” themselves so much as bypassing the normal process through channels such as athletic recruitment or connections to major donors. </p>
<p>^^The last sentence is undoubtedly true. If you aren’t one of those, you aren’t getting in.</p>