<p>Harvard needs to have enough of each type of student </p>
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<p>So, if the adcom considers another candidate with perfect SAT/SAT2, perfect academics, research projects, national level ECs etc., and they say: well, we just accepted 3 applicants with similar credentials, enough is enough, let's pass on this one and take somebody with 1300 to keep variety.. Wouldn't you call it crapshoot? Of course, it still comes to human judgment, but randomness and luck (the order and timing of your application review) will be always there.</p>
<p>one and take somebody with 1300 to keep variety.. </p>
<p>No adcom would accept a student with so-so stats just for variety's sake. The 1300 would need to bring something valuable to the community: major athletic talent, arts awards, etc... As for "we've already accepted 3 applicants with similar credentials.." I think it may make a difference for the RD pool that 3 were accepted EA who have very similar and very specific profiles (eg. left handed oboe players or lacrosse players). Within each pool itself, adcoms switch folders from pile to pile until the very last minute as new information comes in or as individual adcom make a plea for specific applicants to be reconsidered.</p>
<p>Consider another scenario. A perfect 1600/3x800/4.0 candidate applies to HYP. Harvard thinks he is too "standard" and rejects him (perhaps, by one vote). Yale and Princeton think he will go to Harvard anyway and reject/waitlist him to preserve their yield (rumors are, Pton uses this practice). In the end a 1600 gets rejected from all three schools. I am sure I saw a couple of cases in Roster threads, and ppl couldn't figure out what happened. Perhaps they didn't express enough love to Y or P in their application or they made a mistake by telling their interviewers they applied to Harvard. In any case, they can be victims of the admission game.</p>
<p>The scenario you describe is also called the Tufts syndrome. The schools most likely to practice this are schools like Tufts which resent being treated as safeties by applicants to HYP and who suspect that if an applicant is admitted to H, Y or P, s/he will turn down Tufts. The study did suggest that Princeton, which has a somewhat lower yield than H and Y, practices "strategic admission" (pp. 4-9) in order to boost its matriculation rate; as a result, applicants to Princeton who are in the 93-98 percentile have a somewhat lower chance of being admitted than those at the 90-94 percentile and at the 99 percentile. The comparison is with Harvard and MIT. </p>
<p>I don't know that expressing more love to H, Y or M would make a difference. I do know that expressing commitment to P via ED raises one's chances of admission.</p>