<p>My son's Naviance page shows that Harvard accepts about 15% of the applicants from his high school and that the average SAT score for an accepted student is 2107/2400 (Upper Middle Class Public School). Does this seem low, or are the scores listed on college confidential just so skewed?</p>
<p>My son and daughter’s high school (a large New York City Specialized Math and Science Public High School) does not use Naviance; they use their own proprietary software. The software doesn’t list average SAT scores, but I just checked and over the last 9 years, the lowest SAT Score Harvard accepted was a student with a 1960 SAT with a 93.8 GPA. But, that seems to be an outlier. Most accepted students (and there’s more than 140 of them) have had 2200+ SAT’s with GPA’s between 95 and 98.</p>
<p>My school also uses Naviance and I might be wrong but I think the scores you are seeing are the lowest/highest accepted, not the averages. At my school, Harvard accepted around 11% and the lowest score was 2000. So I think your son’s is probably accurate.</p>
<p>The median 50% of SAT scores for Harvard admits is about 2080 - 2380, which are almost exactly the scores posted by the original poster. This suggests that those scores do represent her son’s high school “average” SATs of Harvard admits.</p>
<p>Each year Harvard rejects a significant number of students with perfect SAT scores and accepts an equally significant number of students with scores below 2000. With all due respect to the posters, the obsessive parsing of “acceptable” SAT scores does a disservice to many otherwise qualified applicants and gives disproportionate importance to a metric whose value is being deemphasized by a growing number of schools.</p>
<p>Oh I definitely agree with the previous two posters, I was just talking specifically about what I think the Naviance numbers mean, not saying that a 2107 or a 2000 is unnaturally low for Harvard or anything! Sorry if that was misinterpreted!</p>
<p>No problem, Shelly. It’s just frustrating to see people circle back again and again to SAT scores. My D went to a tiny rural high school in Northern New England, her roommate to a largely Hispanic high school in the Salinas Valley, and another girl on their floor to an “elite” prep school. There’s certainly a floor, but where it’s set depends on such a large number of factors that establishing ranges can be awfully misleading.</p>
<p>I agree to some extent with Claudeturpin, which is one of the reasons I posted the Naviance statistic from my son’s high school. It is at least one example that not all Harvard students scored a 2300 or above on their SATs. That said, the score struck me as low compared to what is generally reported, especially on college confidential, and given that it remains a metric used by colleges to assess their applicants I was wondering what others thought. Certainly, it is not the only thing considered by admission committees and I’m confident most Harvard applicants are also busy working on the other components of their application (and their life): ECs, sports, grades, hobbies, etc</p>
<p>You may want to look at the chart that shows each person who got in.
That will give you a much better sense for the distribution of SAT scores.</p>