<p>I TOTALLY understand that there is NO ONE WAY or SETS OF THINGS we need to do to get into Harvard. But I thought at least there could be something like the "BASIC requirements" to make you "GOOD ENOUGH" to "COMPETE" among the pool of people that applied.
For example, a person with sat score of 1800 is most likely to be REJECTED, but a person with 2000 or up HAS A CHANCE (...2000?...well, in a way...) XD</p>
<p>So what do you guys think? What are the basics in your opinion? (i.e. the sat subject tests, sat/act scores, rank, GPA, and etc...and the ones I didn't mention like achievements, etc....)</p>
<p>It seems like you want some concrete baseline for an unhooked applicant. If your SAT is above 2000, you took challenging courses and got mostly A’s, and you’re a relatively interesting person that does interesting things, then you are “good enough to compete.” </p>
<p>The problem is, any realistically inclusive baseline of objective stats (e.g. 3.0 GPA, 600 subject test scores) would give you an inflated sense of your chances because there are tens of thousands of students that would meet such a criteria. Among that pool of relatively qualified applicants, those that will get accepted are the ones who do interesting things with their time.</p>
<p>When you apply to Harvard, youre buying a lottery ticket where you have 6 chances in 100 of getting the prize. If your SAT scores are above 2200, your grades put you near the top of your HS class, and youve done something else really interesting or really well, your chances may be better than 6/100. But, youre still buying a lottery ticket with long odds, and no one on this board knows how good your chances are.</p>
<p>Opensecret wrote:
“When you apply to Harvard, you’re buying a lottery ticket where you have 6 chances in 100 of getting the prize.”</p>
<p>I don’t really think this is true. It’s not an unweighted/random/unbiased lottery. If your scores and grades are not great, you still have 0 chances. If you are a legacy, you have greater chances. No?</p>
<p>^Yeah that’s not really true. People use the term “crapshoot” frequently but it’s kind of misleading. The people who get in aren’t luckier than the people who don’t; they’re better applicants.</p>
<p>^I agree with Dwight, but I think what people generally mean when they use “crapshoot” is that when you’re in the interquartile range of what is regarded as “the top applicants,” at that point it begins to become a crapshoot more so than being “better” applicants so to say because it is pretty difficult to be “better” than “the best.”</p>
<p>I would disagree with people who suggest that admission to Harvard, or any other top colleges, is “crapshoot” or “like winning a lottery”. There are hard data (Common Data Set) out there from each institution. Some instituitions such as Stanford release more helpful informations than others (such as Harvard and Yale, which took a mimimalist approach). If the test scores land an applicant in the top 25% of the admitted student body, the chance for admission to at least one of the HYPSM is actually very good. Applicants with scores in the bottom 25% are seldomly admitted without some hooks (URM, atheletic, etc). Adcom people actually spend the majority of their time debating the merits of applicants in the middle 50% range.</p>
<p>Even with top-top applicants, Harvard is still a crapshoot. I’ll use my son as an illustration. My son was accepted to: Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Georgetown, Middlebury, Williams, Pomona, Boston College and Vanderbilt. The only school where he got rejected: Harvard – even though his sister currently attends the school! Does it makes sense? No. What happened? Who knows? Obviously, Harvard was looking for something else, something he didn’t have. Yes, if your test scores are in the top 25% of the admitted student body, your overall chances of being admitted to HYPSM are pretty good – you just may not necessarily get admitted to Harvard.</p>
<p>No, it’s the definition of a selective admissions process. What Yale and Princeton value may not be the same as what Harvard values. To wit: my daughter, who is at Harvard, was rejected by Yale and Princeton. In her case, Yale and Princeton were looking for something else. Harvard was her lottery ticket.</p>
<p>And had your daughter applied in a different year, or from a different region with a different regional rep, or had her application come up at a different point in the process at one or more of HYP, she might have been admitted to all three, or none, or Princeton rather than Harvard.</p>
<p>How much randomness you see in the process partly depends on whether you look at it from the perspective of a member of Harvard’s Adcom, or that of an applicant. When my son who’s now at Harvard was applying to college, we figured his chances were best at Princeton (where he was a legacy), somewhat lower at Yale (where he was also a legacy), and much lower at Harvard (the toughest of the three, and no legacy status). He was wait-listed at all three, but in the end, only Harvard said yes. Why H but not P or Y? It’s a mystery we don’t expect we’ll ever decode. For all we know, it might as well have been random.</p>
<p>The bolded portion is key here. It may seem random to non-admissions officers but that doesn’t give you any basis to say it actually is. Just because you don’t understand why a particular applicant was accepted/rejected doesn’t mean there wasn’t a reason that made him appealing to Harvard and not Princeton or Yale.</p>
<p>Admissions officers at top schools repeatedly say that they put careful thought and consideration into their decisions. I don’t see why we should call that into question and say it’s random without any supporting evidence.</p>
<p>Yes I agree but that doesn’t make it a crapshoot…that means that your daughter was an appealing candidate at school X and an unappealing candidate at school Y.</p>
<p>Admissions decisions are carefully considered, but several critical inputs to the strength of any particular file are uncontrollable by the applicant - namely the particular niche the school is looking to fill, plus questions of geographic and racial diversity. Because such a large part of what goes into the decision is effectively unknowable and resistant to influence by the applicant, it is random from the outside.</p>
<p>To answer the OPs question, statistics released by Stanford and Princeton suggest that for an unhooked applicant a top 5% rank and 2100+ SAT score is necessary for an unhooked applicant to be a reasonable contender, though “reasonable” is still a longshot - 80% of the kids with these stats still get rejected.</p>
<p>It’s not unknowable if you just listed the inputs; you clearly know them. And even if there were a list of mystery criteria of which the applicant isn’t aware, the fact that these criteria exist means that it’s not random but simply appears that way to ignorant outsiders like us. It may very well be “uncontrollable by the applicant,” but so are many things on the application. That doesn’t make it random.</p>
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<p>Being “random” is not relative; it is either random or not random. If there is a difference between the outside perspective and the inside perspective, it is that we as outsiders are ignorant of the decisions being made and so to us it seems random, especially if we frustrated with a system in which we are emotionally invested. That doesn’t make it actually random in reality.</p>
<p>I dread to use the word “quota” but this is essentially how all elite colleges run their admission process. It starts out as geographic, and all applicants from the same geographical region are reviewed by the assigned admission officers. So a 2400 SAT score could be very competitive in one year but not really competitive the next year if there are multiple applicants with perfect scores. The same thing goes on for the extracurricular activities. Once an applicant is passed on to the full committee, other factors start to kick in while the committee try to build an interesting student body. So decisions at time may look random from the individual perspective, adcom people have gone through lenthy discussions for each applicant. They cannot talk openly about the key factors behind each decision but the decision is not random.</p>
<p>Random probably isnt a helpful term here, since it has multiple meanings (ranging from formal definitions in statistics to slangy ones in everyday speech). I think what were debating here is the predictability of a dependent variable (admit vs. deny) based on independent variables (such as grades and test scores). </p>
<p>We can probably agree that knowing someones grades and test scores increases our ability to predict we know that someone with Bs and a 2000 SAT probably wont make it, where a valedictorian with a perfect SAT has a much better shot. If we add in even more variables, the quality of our predictions will go up. Its likely that our predictions will be particularly good with many of the people at the low end of the pool for long-shot applicants with weak stats, we can predict that theyll all be rejected, and well be right well over 95% of the time which is pretty good in predicting any human decision process.</p>
<p>Where it will get much harder is with the substantial number of more-than-qualified applicants, most of whom will be rejected because Harvard doesnt have room for them all. I think the debate is how much those decisions are predictable based on applicant characteristics (assuming we knew both the relevant characteristics and how Harvard values them), and how much other exogenous factors creep in and out of the process. </p>
<p>Admissions decisions arise from a social psychological decision process social in the sense that multiple people interact with one another in making the decisions, and psychological in the sense that human emotion and cognition are involved. Experience and research tell us that such processes are subject to a variety of external, serendipitous factors, many of which the decision-makers dont realize. </p>
<p>One of many examples appeared recently in the New York Times in the form of decision fatigue. (<a href=“Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? - The New York Times”>Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? - The New York Times). Psychologists studied the parole decisions of three-judge panels at a prison. The judges were professionals who took their work seriously. But the best predictor of parole decisions was not characteristics of the candidates, but the time of day the case was reviewed. If you came up early in the day when the panel was fresh, you had an excellent chance of parole. Late in the day, you were out of luck. [Decision fatigue] routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it. </p>
<p>So, its likely that your chances of admission are affected by how late in the day your case comes up, and how tired the admissions officers are when they get to you. And thats only one of many examples of factors beyond the individual case that can influence the decisions. (If I wanted to make a long post even longer, I could go into detail on many other equally significant factors that make decision-making less rational than we like to think it is.)</p>
<p>If youre accepted, its nice to think the process was systematic and you absolutely deserved it. Thats how my Harvard son feels, and Im happy for him. But there are a lot more applicants who get rejected at H and the other elite schools, and many of them go into a funk because theyre convinced that theres something wrong with them, and there must be something they did wrong. I think its important for them to understand that they may have done everything right, but theres significant serendipity in the process.</p>