<p>sry to bust your bubble. but i took the sat once. and never drilled nor study. ran with what i had. 1480 - far from perfect. i focused on being myself and just doing what i loved and talking about it. I talked to the lady for an hour almost during my H interview about family, pfizer, biotech, whatever I liked. Didn't talk about achievements. Same thing with Duke. He didn't even ask questions or talk to me about what i did in school. Jus.. what i wanted to do in life and what was important to me. He didn't even bring in the sheet. anyhow, point is.. numbers don't tell all... btw i got into Harvard and Duke. I think the interview was the difference. But to leave you guys forever mystified I got into Yale without any interview. Just wrote about myself and that was it. no supplement, nothing pscyhotically amazingly brilliant or added supplements. </p>
<p>but what i'm proudest of.. is my girl is going to BROWN! woot woot! i hope she gets into sford too! mail should be coming tomorrow! As for 1600.. i've proven my momma wrong and i'm proud. she kept pestering me about it after i got rejected from MIT. See. no one is infallable. i'm 10/11.</p>
<p>Going to Harvard was a dream, but for 15 years I was realistic about it (in other words, I was only hoping to get in, and not really expecting it) until someone from my school who I thought I was more qualified than got in EA. After that, I think I got too confident, and as the age-old adage goes, the higher you climb, the harder you fall.</p>
<p>In my opinion, the "crapshoot" theory isn't true. I think it's just that Harvard seems to place as much emphasis on diversity as on merit. I'm not saying that the students who were admitted were short of anything - in fact, I give my heartiest congratulations to them.</p>
<p>There seems to be a level of achievement beyond which all students are fair game. Then they pick from those students based on what they think the students will add to the class. </p>
<p>Don't get me wrong...all of the admitted students deserve to be there, are very impressive applicants, and are more than qualified. But there are other (maybe more) qualified kids out there who weren't accepted, because Harvard felt they didn't contribute to the diversity of the class as much. </p>
<p>Actually, in a way, this is good, because Harvard says that most of the students there learn just as much from their professors as from their classmates.</p>
<p>I'd just like to send another shout out to sarorah. That was really nice of you and made me feel better. But it's not so bad with me -- I'm more of a techno-nerd anyway and should be chill at CIT (or Yale, but probably CIT). (and to NoCreativity, I don't if this was your intent, but this is what I perceived as your tone: "haha, people with goals suck; I was just being who I was and I got in without drilling for tests." Well I got a 4000 and only read the PR review book for SAT II Chemistry [all others taken cold: Writing, Math IIC, SATI]; and though this may be incomprehensible to you, I'm actually rather satisfied with my high school years because I did what I wanted to do [except for the dearth of female companionship, but I did my best in that arena, too ;-)]).</p>
<p>Rejected. With lots of good extra-curriculars and strong music. I thought they only rejected 1600s who were just workaholics who didn't do anything else. Oh well, guess I was wrong. Got rejected from Yale too. </p>
<p>sarorah, I sort of disagree. If I were a college I would definately rather take someone who gets a good SAT score, has a lot of extracurriculars, and is involved--rather than a perfect score person who doesn't have much else. On one extreme, I know someone who retook a 1590 SAT who ended up with a 1600. I'd reject him out of principle. </p>
<p>It annoys me though if my 1600 actually hurt me, which is a rumor that I didn't believe before. If they are holding perfect scores against people, even people who have tons of ECs, than that I can't understand. Maybe I would have been better off with 1590. </p>
<p>Well, at least Brandeis is giving me lots of money :-)</p>
<p>You know it would be fun to do a study of the application process, send in fake applications that are basically the same but alter the scores slightly to find out just how much scores affect admission. Sure, it would be illegal, but the results might be interesting.</p>
<p>"There seems to be a level of achievement beyond which all students are fair game. Then they pick from those students based on what they think the students will add to the class.
"</p>
<p>colleges have been trying to drill this into applicants head for the last 10 years</p>
<p>I think they cosider how many times you took the SAT to get 1600 (even if they say not) and if it was an aggregate 1600 from two seperate sittings. A one sitting first pass 1600 looks better than one that took the combination of 3 differnt sittings..... don't you think?</p>
<p>1600 Sophomore year
800 Writing Sophomore year
800 Math IIC Freshman year
800 Physics Junior Year</p>
<p>AMC 12 136.0 (but didn't qualify for USAMO)</p>
<h1>8 in USA in Gold-Division USACO (as of March)</h1>
<p>Play piano for school worship group
Lennox Young Artists Competition Semifinalist</p>
<p>but...waitlisted</p>
<p>bet you can't guess my nationality lol (I'll also bet that hurt my application quite a bit...but no worries, I've got acceptances to other places, so I may drop my waitlist position)</p>
<p>"Would that really be illegal? Or do you just mean against the rules of the college?"</p>
<p>Uh...yeah...it's called fraud...after all, you have to put your SSN on that thing, sign it and all...if you get caught, you run the risk of never getting into college, EVER, plus possibly fines and jail time...DON'T TRY IT without first getting the backing of people high up, say, a news station...</p>
<p>While a perfect score is certainly very impressive, the difference between a 1500 to a 1600 can be rather insignificant...a few questions on a test should not be weighed as heavily as grades and workload, for instance.</p>
<p>Congrats and condolences- best of luck at Harvard or elsewhere. We all have the ability to do great things if we make the best of the opportunites that we are given!</p>
<p>Im going off topic a little but anyways...only one kid in the past 4 years has gotten into Harvard at my school. I live in SoCal and go to a really good school with a ton of smart people (me not being one of them) who are very competitive. </p>
<p>I have no idea what SAT score he had but Im pretty sure from the talk i hear he got a 1600. I'd say anything below that and your chances drop dramatically even if only 50% of the 1600ers got in thats still a larger number than the average 10%.</p>
<p>Among other things, sending in two apps that were the same but with different scores would be called stupid, because even with thousands of applications, one would hope the college noticed two people handing in exactly the same essays, letters of recommendation, transcript, etc.</p>
<p>I never realized how arbitrary this stuff all was until I did some HR as part of my on-campus job and realized that rejection has nothing to do at all with your worth as a person or even, a lot of the time, your skill or your aptitude. It might be a sentence on your application, a tic in your interview, a sense that you're not "a good fit" or a last-minute agonized decision by an admissions officer. </p>
<p>Those who didn't get into Harvard (or other school of choice)--I know it's crushing. But Harvard's just a school, and (as plenty of people on these boards will be glad to tell you) there are bad things about it. There are lots of schools out there that are just as good as or better than Harvard--maybe Harvard is the best at attracting speakers or impressing Koreans, but we live in a country with plenty of great schools, a lot of which are pretty comprable to each other. And to a large extent, it doesn't matter whether you go to Harvard or Yale or Brown or Princeton or even, gasp, a school that's not ranked in the top 10 or top 15 by some self-important magazine editors. It matters what you do when you're there.</p>
<p>Well it's good to know that other people do see that there is something seriously wrong with ivy league admissions. It's not even based on who's the best anymore, it's more like a talent show. Most exotic thing done wins admission over the guy who sat for 4 hrs everyday to study for his SAT!! Stuff like that really irks me. There are, though, some perfect scorers out there with lousy GPAs that don't give a crap about life, and they apply to the ivies just for the heck of it to see if they'll get in, and those type of people shouldn't get in and they usually don't. But it's to the point where adcoms are throwing away really good future students for really "no reason" or seemingly to boost their statistics on how many 1600 applicants they rejected.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Exactly, that's where the essay comes in. ECs show some personality, yeah, but it plays too much of a part in admissions today. People can just go and sign up for some international program or some model agency and stick with it for a while and easily stand out. Are international programs or model agencies unique? Not really. Unless it's some international math program that you had to actually 'work for' (tests, etc) to get into. </p>
<p>Of course there is more than just the test scores. But for most it takes a lot of work to achieve those excellent scores. And you know, you can get awards for getting nice scores that a lot of people don't get. Like the Presidential Scholar Award if you get a 1600 in a single setting. Only like 932 people in the nation got a perfect score last year. That's pretty unique like that international math program. Basically it's the luck of the draw. I still feel sorry for those kids who deserved to get in and didn't. But yeah we should accept whatever happens and move on.</p>
<p>"People can just go and sign up for some international program or some model agency and stick with it for a while and easily stand out"</p>
<p>I really dont know about that, I mean if you stand out you obviously have to try no matter what it is. If life were that easy compared to school then we all wouldve dropped out before 1st grade.</p>