<p>There are very little hard data out there on Ivy admission and the most recent academic study I saw was from a couple years back (6-7?). I cannot find the original source right now but I do have the plot of admission rates against SAT score (as a percentile) from that study in my files. The bell shaped curve for Harvard and Princeton is the most striking thing in the graph. However, since the SAT score is plotted as percentiles, it is not really good to differentiate the very best SAT scores (a 780 is still probably 99% just as a 800). However, the peak is approximateby between 90 to 95 percentiles, and the admission rates declined approximately 50% toward the higher percentile range. For MIT, the admission rates actually increased toward the upper range (at least doubled). So it is interesting to see a MIT adcom officer claims that the SAT scores do not matter very much for them :-).</p>