<p>How much does applying Early Action help?? Does anyone know what percent of the class MIT accepts from Early Action??</p>
<p>You can find a bunch of statistics here: [MIT</a> Admissions: Admissions Statistics](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/admissions_statistics/index.shtml]MIT”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/admissions_statistics/index.shtml)</p>
<p>Applying early action doesn’t help, at least not in the sense that applicants tend to think it might. MIT doesn’t automatically favor EA applicants, and applying EA doesn’t give an application a boost. MIT applies the same standards for EA and RD applicants.</p>
<p>The way applying EA does tend to help is that many (most) EA applicants are deferred to RD, and have a chance to use the time between EA application and the middle of February to think about potential weaknesses in their applications, and to remedy those weaknesses by supplementing their applications or sending in updates. </p>
<p>But overall, you should apply to MIT EA if you’re interested in applying to MIT, will have your application together by the November 1 deadline, and don’t want to apply anywhere with a restrictive early program. You shouldn’t apply to MIT EA because you think it provides some sort of strategic advantage in the admissions process.</p>
<p>Early action is AWESOME! I <3 EARLY ACTION SO MUCH!</p>
<p>Applying EA helps you in ways not related to increasing the chance of acceptance. My three oldest kids, including one of my sons (an MIT senior) applied early (either ED or EA) to their first choice school, and each was accepted. They then had a pressureless second semester senior year in HS, visited their future home once or twice, met others many months in advance of matriculating, etc. I’m a strong proponent of EA/ED applications because of our family experience.</p>
<p>what mollie said: </p>
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<p>Also, if you get in, you get a tube rather than a folder. Tubes are awesome.</p>
<p>At the risk of drawing the ire of admissions offices (who dislike open discussion of this topic), the definitive book on this subject is [The</a> Early Admissions Game](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Early-Admissions-Game-Joining-Elite/dp/0674010558]The”>http://www.amazon.com/Early-Admissions-Game-Joining-Elite/dp/0674010558). It’s a few years old but the points made in the book are still valid.</p>
<p>30-second summary: At most schools, all other things being equal, applying early action helps you about as much as a 100 point increase in your SAT score. The data behind this conclusion are statistically significant to the 95% confidence level. MIT is an exception; at MIT there is still probably a bump from applying early, but it’s not as much or as significant as at the other schools (maybe 50 SAT points and 80% confidence level).</p>
<p>^ When has Admissions disliked open discussion of this topic?</p>
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<p>I’m sorry, but I have to disagree with this statement. Many selective universities, including a number of Ivies, have historically admitted one-fifth to one-third of their early applicants (as a strategy to boost yield), whereas the admit rate in the regular round is in the low-teens or even sub-10%. MIT, on the other hand, intentionally makes the Early acceptance rate and Regular rate EQUAL (or very close to the same), so there is no significant advantage, statistically speaking, to apply early. </p>
<p>“50 SAT points”? Seriously? What’s the difference between, say, a 2250 and a 2200 to MIT Admissions? Nothing!</p>
<p>JeffAtMIT, I’m not quite sure how to respond. I don’t even think that we disagree. I did say that MIT gives much less advantage to early applicants than other schools, and that the differences at MIT are not statistically significant. (Anything below the 95% threshold is usually not considered significant. Note that significance in statistics is a technical, mathematical term.) It is thus arguable whether or not there is in fact any advantage at all for early applicants at MIT. You are arguing that there is not. The book is saying that there probably is, but we can’t say for certain. These two conclusions are completely compatible with each other!</p>
<p>If you wish to make a stronger, rigorous statement that there provably is no early admissions advantage at MIT, then you would need some data to back that up, and you would end up writing an entire book yourself (or at least a fairly detailed journal article). Your own one-sentence argument is flawed: you can’t just compare admission rates and claim that this is a statistically valid comparison, because the two pools of applicants (early and regular) are not statistically identical, because some early applicants get deferred to the regular round, and because of any number of other confounding factors that you ignore.</p>
<p>It’s impossible to explain in more detail without reading the entire book. The book includes detailed, rigorous statistical regression analyses of the early admissions advantage for 14 top schools on a school-by-school basis by name, including of course MIT.</p>
<p>Seriously, if you can’t get admitted during RD, you won’t get admitted during EA. It’s really simple. MIT gets record number of applications. It doesn’t matter which pool you go into, if you are not qualified in the eyes of the Admissions officers, your not gonna either way. Don’t think applying EA is advantageous because there is:
- more than 500 kids (the general amount accepted during EA) who apply EA that are top 10%, have all A’s, stellar ECs and are extremely competitive at Math/Science.
- a whole bunch of people who also wants to game admissions by believing EA is advantageous.
- No obligation for Admissions Officers to accept a specific quota of kids. EA is non-restrictive so they can feel free to defer the entire pool and accept only 100 kids if they find the applicants unqualified. This is contrary to UPenn which admits half of its class under ED.</p>
<p>So no, EA does not give you much help, you will get in only if you are qualified in the eyes of the Admissions Officer, not by believing in some erroneous speculation by other high schools students, who interestingly enough won’t believe the MIT rep.</p>
<p>gunit5, it’s not as simple as you say. What you describe is the process that the admissions office claims to use. And, to their credit, I think they do actually try very hard at MIT to judge EA and RD applicants equally. But, if you run the numbers with the actual, hard data from the admissions pool, as the book does, you’ll find a slight bias in favor of EA applicants. It’s not a huge bias, and it’s not statistically significant, and it’s much less at MIT than at other schools, but it exists.</p>
<p>MIT does not use computers to make their admissions decisions. Everyone knows this. The admissions decisions are made by human beings. Human beings are subjective. I don’t think it’s humanly possible to have a human being judge a thousand EA applicants and a thousand regular applicants totally equally. That right there should tell you that the two rounds aren’t judged equally. It’s human nature. I would in fact be very worried if there were absolutely zero statistical relationship between application rounds and admissions outcomes. If there were no correlation, then it would mean that the admissions decisions were being made by a computer or an algorithm, since that’s the only way to achieve totally unbiased outcomes.</p>
<p>hi deejaiy - </p>
<p>i gave some context for those numbers here: </p>
<p>[MIT</a> Admissions | Blog Entry: “Admissions Bulletin - RA News, EA Results”](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/the_selection_process_application_reading_committee_and_decisions/admissions_bulletin_ra_news_ea.shtml]MIT”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/the_selection_process_application_reading_committee_and_decisions/admissions_bulletin_ra_news_ea.shtml)</p>
<p>we don’t have a preference between the two.</p>
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Perhaps I’m allowing my day job to bleed too much into my after-hours life, but if a difference isn’t statistically significant, in what sense can it be said to exist?</p>
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But what factors would bias the admissions officers toward early applicants and away from RD applicants? </p>
<p>I’m also unclear why it wouldn’t be possible for a person to judge two rounds of applications with the same criteria, particularly when it’s a (fairly large) group of people judging the applications, and when they judge applications over the course of many admissions cycles. This sort of system seems to work well in other contexts – grant applications to the NIH, for example, are submitted in three groups each year and judged by review panels, and I’ve never heard allegations that any particular round is favored over another.</p>
<p>whoops doublepost</p>
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To draw an analogy that hopefully everyone can understand, if a pre-election poll indicates that candidate A leads candidate B by an amount within the margin of error of the poll, then one can certainly still correctly, truthfully, and factually state that there exists a difference in the poll, and that more poll respondents preferred candidate A, even if the difference is within the margin of error of the poll and thus not statistically significant. This analogy is actually not too far off, since the book’s analysis is based on polling data, as mentioned below.
Grant applications are considered on a rolling basis. EA/RA is not. Each round of NIH evaluations is based on perfect information – by the time the decisions are made, all the applications in that competition cycle have been evaluated. EA applications are judged with imperfect information – at the time that you decide on an early admit, you don’t know what the regular pool will look like, even though early and regular applicants compete for the same slots. These are just some of the many differences. I don’t think NIH grants are a good comparison at all.
MITChris, you certainly state that you have no preference, but the numbers don’t lie, and the book that I referred to above is very thorough in its analysis. I don’t see anything in your blog post containing the amount of detail (admission rate as a function of SAT score, GPA, etc.) that would be needed to back up your assertion mathematically, and in fact I don’t think the admissions office should be posting such information publicly, since it is too revealing. The analysis in the book was based on data that the authors collected in a survey of college students that they conducted on their own.</p>
<p>I’m not picking on MIT in any way; the only reason I refer to MIT so much is because this is, after all, the MIT forum. Many other schools claim that they have no bias but the numbers indicate very clearly otherwise. These other schools are (IMO) outright lying about their EA/ED preference. For MIT the existence of bias is at least debatable, and I have never claimed that it exists in a statistical sense, only that one cannot know for certain.</p>
<p>In such a discussion it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. The big picture is that MIT succeeds better than any other school at judging EA/RA applicants equally. This is actually a huge accomplishment, and the fact that there is room for improvement should not detract from your success.</p>
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<p>Yeah, but the point of a poll is to predict whether there is a real preference in the entire voting population, not whether someone gets the most votes among those polled. The point of statistical significance is whether the change you see between two groups could be due to chance. If it’s not statistically significant, you cannot say that the difference between two groups was not due to chance. In the case of a poll that isn’t statistical significant, you cannot conclude that if Romney leads Palin in a poll that Romney would actually win the primary.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the cut-offs for statistical significance are arbitrary, and it’s also possible that not enough data points were analyzed and the total N was too low. So there could be a real effect. I’d have to see the numbers to see how large the effect was and how close it was to being statistically significant.</p>
<p>I didn’t read the study in question, but another issue is how they treat the early action pool vs. the regular action pool. It sounds like they normalize to test scores and GPA, but it’s possible that the early action people spent more time on their essays (that’s a cliche’ I know, but in general I would think MIT early action people would care more about the MIT application.) Also, it takes some confidence to apply early action, so their EC’s might have been stronger. MIT applicants tend to saturate the upper range of SAT scores, so the early action and regular action pool could look like they are of equal academic strength even if they aren’t. If there is a small effect shown in the study, one of these factors could explain it.</p>
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<p>It is not possible. That’s why NONE of the ~18,000 cases are judged by “a human being.” Applications are judged by a COMMITTEE in MULTIPLE rounds to ensure fairness. </p>
<p>From Admissions website: "These [application] summaries, along with your application, will then go to the selection committee, where multiple groups of different admissions staff and faculty members will weigh in. At least a dozen people will significantly discuss and debate an application before it is placed in the admit pile.</p>
<p>This is all very intentional; committee decisions ensure that every decision is correct in the context of the overall applicant pool, and that no one individual’s bias or preferences or familiarity with a given case has any chance of swaying a decision unfairly."</p>
<p>You can bring your wonderful book recommendation to the Ivy forums, where people will love it. A number of those schools fill HALF of the class with Early acceptances although their Regular pool is at least 3-5 times larger.</p>
<p>collegealum314: Pretty much agree. I don’t know how I can put it any more clearly. There is an observed effect. It is not statistically significant.</p>
<p>JeffAtMIT: I wish you would stop bringing up the Ivy strawman. I’ve already said MANY MANY times that other schools are MUCH worse. This includes of course Ivy league schools. I say so again in case you missed it the first four times. There is NO disagreement between us on this issue.</p>
<p>I don’t know what you mean by “You can bring your wonderful book recommendation to the Ivy forums.” The original poster asked a question about MIT, not about Ivy schools. The answer that I gave is relevant to the original question and to MIT specifically. It’s ridiculous to suggest that I take my answer to another forum.</p>
<p>No amount of quoting from the MIT admissions website constitutes valid statistical analysis. Indeed, as I said in my previous post, I sure hope the admissions office is not publicly posting their raw data.</p>
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I agree that, of course, it’s not a perfect analogy. I was just thinking of it because the grants are judged in multiple rounds, but money is only allocated once per year – the first-cycle grants are awarded based on the amount appropriated for the year, but technically at that point the institutes don’t know the quality of applications in future rounds. Many/most applications are also “deferred” to later rounds, in effect, by giving them scores that are just below the funding threshold, leading them to be revised and resubmitted. </p>
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Well, except that the numbers apparently aren’t different (whatever the trend toward significance may be), and are based on self-reported profiles. Numbers may not lie, but people certainly do. For kicks, we might as well analyze the self-reported stats posts from EA and RD admits from last year – they’re stickied up at the top of the forum.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, I think the EA and RD pools are each composed of several distinct groups of applicants, and there’s limited benefit in analyzing the two pools as groups without considering the subgroups that make them up. The EA pool contains Questbridge applicants, but otherwise is likely to shift toward the high-income/coast-dwelling/private school end of the applicant pool. (This is why Harvard eliminated its early program several years ago – they felt the early pool lacked diversity, and was composed mainly of people who were clued in to the admissions process enough to apply early.) The RD pool contains international students, who are often highly qualified but admitted in very low numbers. All of this variation between the two pools makes it questionably useful to distill their properties to a few numbers and compare them. </p>
<p>Interestingly, the admissions office does have the complete dataset, not just some self-reported profiles from a small percentage of applicants, and they do spend considerable time analyzing it, even if not releasing it.</p>