The Harvard Crimson has posted admissions data for the last few freshman classes. It’s called “Harvard by the Numbers”. The GPAs are unweighted but it shows a significant percentage of the freshman class had a 4.0 unweighted HS GPA. Some of the students had a perfect GPA but SATs in the 2000-2200 range (old SAT).
Even perfect grades and test scores are not enough for elite admissions. Outstanding non-academic factors (ECs, hooks) matter. These non-academic factors used to be called “personal qualities” (Rigol, 2004).
Students may get a better idea of what matters in elite admissions when Harvard releases their admissions data. The Crimson reported in September that the admissions office might have to release data going back six years as part of a lawsuit:
To back up what @donnaleighg says, one thing I’ve been surprised about in books like A for Admissions and The Gatekeepers is the degree to which great test scores can overcome ok grades in holistic admissions, because AOs are looking for potential. (Not to say great scores will overcome mediocre or terrible grades, because then it seems like the student isn’t working up to their potential.) Some of this is because the SATs/ACTs are seen (consciously or not) as more objective (or at least easier to evaluate) than grades across hundreds of different schools.
“What matters most is the QUALITY of the transcript. That is different than “GPA” or “grades” and obviously has to account for rigor.”
I absolutely agree. The transcript can tell a school a lot more than just GPAs and test scores. It can tell the school how those GPAs were created. I think the purpose of sending in transcripts goes far beyond confirming classes and GPA. Two students can have identical GPAs yet have very different transcripts. It may even tell the university a bit about the student beyond academics such as what courses interest them beyond those required for graduation and entry into college.
D attend NYU and to be honest her grades were not stellar and her test scores were lop-sided (above 75th percentile for admitted students in verbal, below 25th percentile in math.) But she was accepted to their studio art program which was talent driven. We knew from the start that her portfolio would account for 50% of her admission. Obviously NYU felt her grades were good enough and that her verbal scores were strong enough to show that she would succeed in academic areas when they admitted her. (Math was not a requirement for an art major–she was able to take a computer class instead.)
So once her portfolio was accepted, it did not shock me that she was admitted. But what did shock me was that she was not only admitted to NYU, but that she was placed in Steinhardt’s scholars program!
At the conclusion of freshman year, D asked one of the deans who oversaw the scholars program to give her a letter of recommendation. To me, what this dean wrote was very revealing of the admissions process and what a school is looking for in an applicant.
After saying a bunch of nice things about my daughter, the dean wrote a whole paragraph about how from the very beginning my daughter was a perfect fit as an applicant. She spoke of how my daughter was the embodiment of what NYU Steinhardt was looking for in a candidate and what their mission was. It was all based on her EC’s and the leadership roles or success she had in each EC.
Since Steinhardt is NYU’s school of art, music and education, the dean spoke of how she was such an amazing candidate because she was the embodiment of all those disciplines. She spoke of her talent in art and all the courses she had taken in it as a HS student. She spoke of her experience in Musical Theatre, choir and acapella. (D had leads in shows and leadership/ board positions.) And to top it off, D planned to become an art teacher. (Which she is currently pursuing at NYU in their MA Art education program with a good scholarship!)
So after reading that letter, I am convinced that there are certainly minimum benchmarks that need to be met, but after that, for many holistic schools, admissions is totally a matter of fit based on prior EC’s. Schools are looking for students who will help them develop a strong community and will bring their unique talents and leadership skills to make the school a better place for all.
D also won recognition (and money!) as a recipient of a Student of Excellence award at graduation from her program. Again, it was not because her grades were the highest in the program. It was because the head of the program thought she was a leader among her peers and was a real cheerleader for the program. (His words to me when I went up to him after the awards ceremony.)
My D did attend Harvard and she was the val of her class and she had taken more AP classes than anyone that was in her class. She had strong EC’s, no hooks and did well on her ACT’s. We still wonder why she was accepted but she was a competitive applicant among her high school peers.
How about something like this to help us figure out a school’s overall admissions philosophy – to add something concrete to what seems so often to be largely random:
Four columns:
Average SAT (and convert ACT to SAT score format so we can consider all scores with just one column)
Average GPA
Percent in top 10% of class
Admit rate
I suppose we could draw some reasonable conclusions about the admissions philosophy of each school, including but certainly not limited to:
If test scores/GPA are relatively low considering admit rate, that may mean that a school is relatively more holistic.
Conversely, if test scores/GPA are relatively high considering admit rate, that may mean that the school is relatively more stats-focused.
Any stat that seems "out of whack" can point to how that school values that stat (and the other three in comparison...).
Wouldn’t a weighted GPA tell you much about how those transcripts were created, relative to others from the same school? Certainly not as revealing as the full transcript, but a very useful single metric.
And while a weighted GPA and/or transcripts tell you about relative performance within a school, it says nothing about about being able to compare top students from school vs. another. The best way to do that are through scores on the ACT, SAT, SAT subject tests, and AP tests.
However, for super-selective schools, the test scores, GPA, and rank will be near the top of the scale, while the admit rate will be low. The less-visible subjectively-graded components of applications could very well be the ones that differentiate between applicants more (since those with realistic chances will have test scores, GPA, and rank near the top of the scale and not be very distinguishable from each other on these components), but will not be reflected in the table you will make.
It could, but past threads on how high schools can have weighting systems that actually discourage taking more rigorous schedules indicate that there are many situations where the result could be not what you want. Examples include students choosing AP environmental science instead of physics, AP statistics instead of precalculus, AP whatever-lite instead of foreign language level 3 or 4, or other choices made to get extra weighted GPA but leave gaps in the student’s preparation for college.
My subjective sense is that admission is reasonably predictable except for the handful of schools with single digit admission rates, where even school officials will say they have a hard time deciding who to admit. But I think it’s a lot more predictable at elite schools with somewhat higher admission rates.
E.g. Berkeley is certainly an elite school and I believe is the most competitive public for admissions, but from what I’ve seen it’s pretty predictable who gets in based on class rigor, class rank, GPA, and test scores. Of course they don’t consider legacy status, are prohibited by law from considering race, and athletic recruits are a tiny percentage of overall admits.
@bluewater2015 , I have seen quite the opposite (although the sample size was just a couple of neighbourhood HSs classes of 400-600). The highest rigor, rank, GPA, test scores were definitely needed to get into Berkeley but there were plenty of kids with similar (top) stats and impressive ECs (try international olympiad winner) who didn’t get into Berkeley but were apparently good enough for CalTech, MIT, Princeton.
Sure – it’s an incomplete picture without being able to quantify the qualitative parts of an application.
I’m just thinking it might show, or at least suggest, slight differences in philosophy… assuming that all schools we look at have enough superstat kids, with strong ECs, to fill their entire class.
I’m not sure where we draw the cutoff line for schools. Maybe we could start with:
@koshkas In addition to the things I mentioned that private schools may consider that UCs don’t, one other thing to keep in mind is that Berkeley and many other publics (as well as some privates) admit by specific major, and it’s a lot harder, for example, to get into CS than into English.
Comparing scores between students at different HSs is an easy way to normalize different HSs, but I wouldn’t say it’s the “best way”. Nearly every study that controls for a measure of HS GPA and a measure of HS course rigor finds that SAT I scores add little value in predicting academic success in college beyond what is available in the rest of the application. I can link to some, if there is interest. Tests that are more focused on specific courses, such as AP, tend to be more helpful in predicting academic success (but not as helpful as transcript). However, they have their own set of problems. If you weight AP scores heavily, then you can be putting students who attend HSs that offer no/few AP classes at a disadvantage.
In my opinion the “best way” would be to use a variety of sources beyond just scores. For example, FERPA has shown that some elite colleges rate LORs on a scale of 1 to X, giving a LOR score that can be compared across students at different HSs. You can also compare essays, ECs, awards, and a variety of other factors in addition to tests. The combination is far better than any 1 source alone.
posts #133 and #135, I start to think that any algorithm has to be school-specific to be useful, i.e., at the “get-to-know-your-school-really-well” stage. Ivy schools however are likely to be more similar to one another than to others.
For the tippy top schools, I suspect that they can easily pick their students without test scores.