<p>I believe this topic was addressed in another thread and they did a great job of describing the safety/match/reach issue. I’ll give it a try though:</p>
<p>Google "Common Data Set (insert School Name)
In the 9C section it will break down the range of SAT scores of accepted applicants in to below 25%, 50 to 75% and above 75%. A reach is a school where you fall in the below 25%, and match is if your scores fall in the 50 to 75% and a safety is if your scores fall above the 75% level. You can split hairs about being a “high match or a low match” depending on where your scores fall in that 50% range. They have info on GPA as well. There are certainly outliers to every addmission process. However, after you look up several school “common data sets” you begin to see a pattern of where your particular scores are going to put you. In some instances your GPA and ECs will allow you to be one of the kids they accept of the 1000s of kids who apply that fall within their match ranges. The common data set information gives you a pretty good indication of where you fall overall. Of course, there are acceptions to every rule and lots of “hook” issues that are not really portrayed in the CDS. It’s a good rule of thumb though.</p>
<p>You use the Naviance scattergrams to estimate your probability of getting in. Of course it’s not black and white, but it is usually good enough to determine a probability to within one significant digit. Clearly you can tell if your chances are 10% or 90%. Then use my previous post. Sometimes the data looks random or just not enough data, so call it a reach because you just don’t know. </p>
<p>If you have a preference ranking, and a list of admissions probabilities, you can estimate your probability of actually attending a particular school. That can be useful as a good guideline on how many applications to fill out. I.e, don’t waste your time in applying to schools where your probability of actually attending is minuscule. That probability is roughly the probability of getting in multiplied by the product of the probabilities of getting rejected at all of the more preferred schools.</p>
<p>The above is a common way of thinking, and it is both wrong and dangerous, at least as applied to colleges that are reasonably selective (i.e., ones that accept fewer than 50% or 40% of their applicants). First, the most selective colleges (say, USNWR top 20 universities and top 10 or so LACs) reject many more than they accept among even those applicants whose “stats”, had they been accepted, would have put them in the top quartile of the class. So with a selective college, being above the 75th percentile line isn’t remotely like being a safe applicant. Second, for most colleges the statistical profile of the class that matriculates is significantly different from that of the group that is accepted, mainly because the acceptees with the highest stats tend to have the most options and therefore to go elsewhere most often, while the acceptees with the lowest stats (who may include recruited athletes) almost all matriculate. As a rule of thumb, assume that the 75th percentile of the entering class is close to the median of the people who are accepted. So really, being above the 75th percentile at most tells you that this is a match, not a safety. And being below the 25th percentile, at all but very large colleges, tells you not that the college is a reach but that it is out of reach, unless you are being recruited as an athlete or have some other obvious and compelling reason for the college to recruit you – and the college is in fact recruiting you. At most LACs and small universities, the bottom 25% of the enrolled class in stat terms will consist almost entirely of people who did not go through the normal admissions process.</p>
<p>A safety is a school that admits on stats – as many of them do – and you have the stats, plain and simple. Or, better yet, a school that might be a reach or a match, except you have already been accepted rolling admissions or early action. Those are really nice safeties. And, really important, a safety is a school you know you can afford to go. A school certain to admit you but not certain to give you the financial aid you need to attend is a huge reach.</p>
<p>Any school with a really low acceptance rate can never be a match. In addition to the selectivity of the school I looked to see what percentage of the class was in the top 10% of their high school class as a rough estimate of how important GPA was. (I don’t think the “average GPA” is a helpful figure at all.)</p>
<p>I disagree. For my D, Naviance indicated that for several very selective colleges, about half the kids in her “Naviance neighborhood” were admitted. Harvard was one of them. She didn’t want to go there so she didn’t even apply, but it was clearly a match. I think they admit kids from the Boston area at a higher rate because they say that they want to be the ones to educate future regional leaders. I never would have believed that without the Naviance data to back it up. For another uber selective school that she did apply to and was accepted EA, it would have been a reach for most people, but her stats were terrific and there was enough Naviance data to indicate about a 50% chance for her. Naviance also showed some other schools that you would think would be somewhat less selective than HYPSM took virtually no one from our school. With one significant digit, I would have rounded the probability of some of those down to 0. Our Boston school produces virtually no Hoyas. Go figure. Naviance was very useful for us, and D only ended up applying to 5 schools, and is going to her first choice.</p>
<p>^We had the same experience with Harvard. It looked like 50/50 odds from the school Naviance data. But it still seemed risky to consider it a match, though secretly I did think my son’s odds were good since he also was a legacy and I thought his ECs would stand up to scrutiny. As it happened he did get in there while being ultimately rejected from MIT (25% odds I thought), Caltech (not enough data), and Stanford (the very few kids were accepted had much lower grades and scores, but I knew through the grapevine they were athletes/URMs/legacies so I thought he had no chance at all and I was right.)</p>
<p>I guess that I don’t understand what you are saying. What would have been the downside of considering it a match when the data indicated that it was. I can understand not completely relying on the data for safeties that seem to not jibe with conventional wisdom - there the downside risk is huge - but I don’t understand that downside for a match where you have a lot of data. It seems like one wants to get as accurate of an estimate of admission chances as possible to guide a strategy of applying to the right number of schools and a reasonable range of degree of difficulty.</p>
<p>I didn’t want to get my hopes up. My son didn’t care as it wasn’t his first (or second or third) choice anyway. In the end we both fell in love with Carnegie Mellon, so it all worked out for the best.</p>
<p>As I said upthread, I don’t think it matters if you have matches as long as you’ve found safeties you are happy with. My older son had two tech schools he liked enough, my younger son had American (which he loved) and an EA acceptance at Chicago (which he hadn’t visited, but liked well enough on paper). S2 didn’t like any of the obvious matches for him (Brandeis, GW). S1 was a stellar techie student - and his choices seemed to be either MIT or RPI with very little in between in terms of selectivity - especially with an interest in computer science.</p>
<p>Why do people always seem to think that there’s nothing between MIT and RPI for computer science or other technical majors? Haven’t they heard of Cornell?</p>
<p>^He had heard of Cornell, I can’t remember why he didn’t apply, he probably should have. I do remember he wouldn’t apply to Rice because he didn’t want to go anywhere with hot weather.</p>