<p>Piccolojunior,</p>
<p>I just noticed that you are going to Harvard in the fall (seeing the posters side info). Is that correct? I wonder because I'll be going to Cambridge this fall too (MIT though, not Harvard)</p>
<p>Yes it is, and I hope to meet you there. :D</p>
<p>"There is clearly some room for error in the decision process."</p>
<p>Yes, there is, especially because it's open for subjectivity.</p>
<p>But then again, you <em>can</em> find some consistency in the whole mess. I got in to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and if I had just hit one, I might have attributed that to luck (maybe a specific officer took to an essay or something), but hitting all three has to contain some form of consistency...? idk just throwing it out there. I know a few others who were very high in the cross-admits also.</p>
<p>Well, while that is an incredibe accomplishment in getting into HYP, even then it is a little bit of luck. </p>
<p>I mean, Is it improbable that if you flipped a coin 5 times, they each would be heads? Yes. But it certianly happens!</p>
<p>When people say "room for error," do they mean that these students who were accepted to higher-ranked schools but rejected from lower-ranked ones should have been accepted to the lower-ranked schools, or that they shouldn't have been admitted to the higher-ranked ones? I think the phrase "room for subjectivity" better describes the situation than does "room for error."</p>
<p>lol not to bump an old thread but, if harvard’s admission process is indeed not a crapshoot. Why don’t the adcoms actually outline a clear evaluation of how the candidate is choosen? They don’t do this because they know people will try to replicate it, so that is why they decide who “they think” fits best in Harvard. Admission are not based on Stats, it based on a gamble adcoms take on student who they think will “successfully” and “academically” represent their student population. If your thinking that admissions is not a crapshoot, your just naive to put it at that.</p>
<p>I sure hope it isn’t a crapshoot! That is not fair!</p>
<p>People always say this, but I have never believed it. Obviously some decisions are going to be random, and sometimes luck will be involved, but I don’t understand how people can argue that we’d get equivalent results if we just stuck the top 20,000 or 10,000 applicants names’ in a hat and accepted the first 2,000 names we drew… If that were true, I feel like the best applicants would migrate to a school that had found a way to add a method to the madness and make it not a crapshoot.</p>
<p>I’ve been saying this for a long time. It’s not a crapshoot. Some applicants get in, and it’s because Harvard thinks they’re better applicants. It’s the prerogative of the universities to decide their own criteria for what that means.</p>
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<p>?? I’m yet to see one single college that doesn’t clearly outline how it evaluate applicants. Not only that, people have been “replicating”, as in your words, the formula for ages.</p>
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