<p>Hawkette, thanks for your subjective analysis.</p>
<p>“For the measurement of yield, Duke is not in the top 30 colleges. Not sure why you feel that this is something that I care that much about. Plenty of good schools have yields of 40% or below. In Duke’s case, they get a lot of good applicants. And even with a 40% yield, they enroll a lot of good students. After all, it’s who you end up enrolling that matters.”</p>
<p>And even with a 40% yield, Duke enrolls a lot of good students. I guess the students that enroll at Duke just aren’t good enough.</p>
<p>“You’ll have to decide whether you want to accept standardized test scores as an appropriate proxy for measuring student body strength. You will also have to decide if having a stronger class is of value to you. I personally accept standardized test scores as a reasonable proxy and I definitely prefer the strongest class of peers.”</p>
<p>The average test score is higher at Harvey Mudd compared to Duke.</p>
<p>So Hawkette, are the students smarter at Havey Mudd than they are at Duke?</p>
False, Duke gets killed with regards to cross admits when it comes to HYPSM but it splits 50-50 with Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth and Brown. It wipes the floor with Cornell. When have you met a non-engineer choose Cornell over Duke?</p>
<p>I’m sorry. You don’t get to pick and choose.</p>
<p>That’s subjective.</p>
<p>I have 2007 numbers. I’m too lazy to look up other numbers.</p>
<p>Harvey Mudd…</p>
<p>V 690-760
M 740-800
W 680-760</p>
<p>Duke</p>
<p>660-750
680-790
680-780</p>
<p>Close, but Duke loses… (Amazing writing scores for Harvey Mudd too, but that’s subjective).</p>
<p>Objectively, Duke students aren’t as smart as Harvey Mudd students.</p>
<p>"“You’ll have to decide whether you want to accept standardized test scores as an appropriate proxy for measuring student body strength. You will also have to decide if having a stronger class is of value to you. I personally accept standardized test scores as a reasonable proxy and I definitely prefer the strongest class of peers.”</p>
For both critical reading and writing, both undergraduate schools at Duke are on par with Mudd. Arts & Sciences lags behind Mudd for math, but Engineering is on par. </p>
<p>It’s not picking and choosing – it’s comparing apples and apples.</p>
<p>Quite frankly, I’m amazed and disappointed at how quickly people seized the opportunity to bash Duke on this thread before it had even been mentioned. I’m a huge Carolina fan, but even I’m surprised at how much people sneer at it on these boards. :(</p>
<p>“You’ll have to decide whether you want to accept standardized test scores as an appropriate proxy for measuring student body strength. You will also have to decide if having a stronger class is of value to you. I personally accept standardized test scores as a reasonable proxy and I definitely prefer the strongest class of peers.”</p>
<p>The strongest class means everybody at the school.</p>
<p>If I had to sit in a class with somebody who had a SAT score 40 points lower than mine, or heaven forbid, the average SAT score of the class or school was 40 points lower than mine…my eyes would spin and poker chips would fly out of my mouth…$ 100,000 poker chips. ;)</p>
<p>And I don’t know how I could look at myself in the mirror if I met somebody who went to a school with an average SAT score higher than mine. At times like this, I would hope to be a vampire.</p>
<p>Um, ring<em>of</em>fire, what is your source for this? Is it from the article that hawkette misunderstood? If so, I believe that Guttentag’s information is highly suspect as has been noted several times in this thread.</p>
<p>If your source is hawkette’s statement in post #10 about the percentages of students who choose Duke, I believe that it has been shown pretty convincingly that hawkette was wrong (even though hawkette has not acknowledged her mistakes).</p>
<p>Are you accusing Guttentag of lying midatlmom? How dare you! These heads of admission usually have a lot of information about cross-admit data, so I doubt he is too far off. At best, Cornell gets 25% of the students that both Duke and Cornell admit.</p>
<p>Cornell is clearly a less desirable school, although it is also a world-class institution.</p>
<p>It is ironic but Duke’s inferiority complex always comes across very clearly in these forums. The obsessive need to compare Duke’s “prestige” with the Ivies/MIT/Standford shows it well. No one has ever questioned Duke’s academic strength but it is undeniable that it lacks the cachet that these other schools have. And this could be for many reasons including both historic and geographic.</p>
<p>The only reliable data on cross admits comes from the Revealed Preference Study and from our own individual anecdotal experiences. I have personally contacted the Dean of Admissions at Duke to confirm his office statements on cross admits and they WILL NOT CONFIRM IT. The best they will say now is that they feel " that they are comparable to peer schools" . I also know of a news reporter that was writing an article on this topic and the Dean’s Office would not go on the record confirming any data. They stated that the data “was not available”.</p>
<p>Do not take my word for it. Just call the Dean’s office and ask. Duke has NO STATISTICS of how many students return their response card and how many indicate which university they are choosing over Duke, which in fact is the only way the Dean Office could have any cross admit data.</p>
<p>Duke gives merit aid. The ivies don’t. That’s also a factor why some few students choose going there as well.</p>
Duke isn’t as prestigious as HYPS and possibly not as prestigious as MIT or Caltech. I really don’t think anyone would disagree with that. Duke is certainly on par with the others Ivies, however, as is Chicago. </p>
<p>In terms of name recognition, Duke matches or exceeds all of the non-HYP Ivies. Internationally, of course, its reputation drops considerably.</p>
<p>
Try again. In fact, financial aid is a primary reason why students would NOT choose Duke. Princeton has long been loan-free, and Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Penn, and Columbia have also gone loan-free. Brown is loan-free for students making under $100K, and Cornell is loan-free for students making under $75K.</p>
<p>In comparison, Duke is only loan-free for students making under $40K.</p>
<p>I am always amused by people who try to make a point while completely ignoring the real facts. Let me re state it for your benefit. NONE of the Ivies give MERIT AID. Merit Aid is defined as money that students get for being brilliant, top notch and academically deserving. The loan free money you are talking about is NEED based. On the other hand, Duke does give MERIT scholarships as a way of competing with the Ivies.</p>
<p>Goblue,
For that great universe of students out there who will apply to both schools (anybody???), that is probably a decent way to distinguish between the student bodies of Duke and Harvey Mudd. </p>
<p>Both schools will enroll excellent and deep student bodies with a large number of high achievers in all of the testing areas. However, given Mudd’s heavy curricular focus on engineering, mathematics, and the sciences (representing 97% of their majors), it seems logical that they would outperform Duke (23% in Engineering and Biology) on the Math depth comparison. </p>
<p>As for the modest differences in Critical Reading and Writing, I think that the individual reader would have to judge if this difference is consequential in the same way that the difference is for the Math comparison. I, for one, do not. </p>
<p>BTW, dstark, this discussion is in the wrong thread. This is the yield thread. Here is the selectivity thread.</p>
<p>Or were you just trying to muck this thread up so much that no one would bother reading it anymore? Some people will do anything to divert attention from legitimate comparisons that might reflect badly on their favored schools…… :p</p>
<p>And some people will do anything to avoid acknowledging their mistakes :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Dstark–keep on posting where you prefer (because it’s sort of difficult to separate the yield threads from the selectivity threads from the PA threads from the sports threads from the weather threads . . .)</p>