<p>What's the act and gpa minimums for a football player to attend Harvard? My son received a recruiting questionnaire from Harvard along with a request for information and a highlight dvd. We sent the information and also filled out the online questionnaire. Today he received a letter from the head coach requesting footage from two games and his transcript.........</p>
<p>Ivy League schools use a formula to come up with an “Academic Index” for their athletic recruits. The formula uses GPA (or class rank, if available), SAT scores, and SAT Subject Test scores to come up with a single number, or AI. You can use a calculator on this site [Academic</a> Index3 - College Confidential](<a href=“http://www.collegeconfidential.com/academic_index3.htm]Academic”>http://www.collegeconfidential.com/academic_index3.htm) to calculate a student’s AI.</p>
<p>The ACT can be used in place of the SAT using a conversion table.</p>
<p>In most sports applicants must have a minimum AI of around 210, I think (hopefully someone here will correct me if I’m wrong); the minimums for football are lower.</p>
<p>There are other AI rules, too, concerning falling within x number of standard deviations of the mean for all admitted students at the school, so Harvard, Princeton, and Yale will have higher minimums than the other Ivies.</p>
<p>I’m not up on those rules, but someone else will jump in and add more info.</p>
<p>Good luck to your son.</p>
<p>In football a safe score fro the ACT is a 28, but 27 is still recruitable (according to multiple Ivy coaches). But grade point average goes into the equations, thats assuming he got decent grades I think. Good luck.</p>
<p>He has really good grades just has to get his act up</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>He will also need to take two SAT Subject Tests.</p>
<p>I think the way it works is that all athletes, football or otherwise, must be within 2 1/2 standard deviations (SD’s) of the mean AI of the current freshman class. Let’s say the freshman AI at Harvard is 218 (just a guess, but I bet that’s within a couple of points of being right). One SD would be about 14 points. So the first band would be prospects between 204 and 218. I think Ivy programs get 30 football players a year (and I’m not sure if that’s still accurate). 8 will be from the first band (mean minus one SD). 12 in the second band (which in my example would be an AI of 190-203, or mean minus two SD’s), 8 would be from the third band (AI of 183-189, mean minus 2.5 SD’s) and two from a fourth band (AI of 183 down to the Ivy league-wide floor of 171).
HYP would have the highest mean AI. I think Dartmouth would be a bit below that. Then the rest of the Ivies. You can infer from this that the lower your AI, the more of a stud you have to be since there are relatively fewer positions available in the lower bands.</p>
<p>^^ Ive been reading info about AI and have seen “standard deviations” everywhere, and above is the first post that actually gave the number. Can someone please explain how that number is derived (SD not AI)and is it the same for all colleges or is a percent of the Ai?
Thanks a million.</p>
<p>I’m no statistician (though I played one in college). In most distributions, there is the old familiar bell curve around the mean. This is the case with normal distributions of AI’s at colleges. One standard deviation means the distance from the mean under which 68% of the outcomes (in this case, AI scores) fall. Two standard deviations is the distance from the mean under which 95% of the outcomes fall. That’s the statistical theory behind this.</p>
<p>In the real world, I read elsewhere that in the distribution of AI’s, a standard deviation is 12-16 points. In another source, I read it’s between 13-15 points. And now you can see how elegant my mathematical analysis was. I just averaged 'em and came up with 14 AI points.</p>
<p>I would think that populations with large numbers of outcomes (like this) would behave similarly. In other words, it is (IMO) highly likely that whether the freshman class is 500 or 2,000, the distribution of scores would be similar. It’s at least in the same ballpark, that is to say, it one standard deviation from the mean of freshman class AI’s in another school grouping might be 13 or 12 or 15 or 16, but it’s just not going to be 5 or 25.</p>
<p>Thank you!</p>
<p>The general idea is that for Ivy athletes one wants at least 2100 SAT, 2 SAT IIs in the 700s (or 32 ACT plus 2 SAT IIs in the 700s.) However, for football, it seems 1800 SAT plus 2 SAT IIs in the 600s might do–if son is a highly desireable recruit.</p>
<p>The GPA, and class rank needs to fulfill the AI formula as detailed so succinctly by posters above.</p>