<p>Please ignore the Paper Tiger. He’s making stuff up. I never revealed my race or ethnicity. Nor is it remotely relevant to the discussion. I did say, however, that I was offended by a Daily Princetonian article that made fun of Asians. But I’d be offended by the same article if it made fun of any other racial or ethnic group. The Paper Tiger also gets a kick out of calling people who never applied to Princeton: “Princeton rejects.” Fwiw, this is not necessarily even much of an insult. The Revealed Preference study showed that Princeton was the only HYPSM school that practiced yield protection. The study’s researchers found that at Princeton, there was no linear relationship between SAT scores and probability of acceptance. In other words, Princeton rejected many (high SAT scoring) students who its admissions officers thought were going to enroll at HYSM instead. This is exemplified later by the fact that once Princeton dropped ED, its yield rate dropped accordingly, whereas Harvard’s stayed constant. This is why Princeton is the red-headed stepchild of HYPSM.</p>
<p>And the revealed preference study is not an actual analysis of cross-admits. We don’t know sample sizes other than the entire sample being 3200. For HYPSM, the sample could be 5 kids – hardly reliable.</p>
<p>It’s quite possible that Princeton no longer practices yield protection after it was caught by the NBER researchers who wrote the RP paper. But you’d have to show me a graphical representation to disprove their claim. Read this and weep:</p>
<p>"According to a fascinating NBER working paper my brother forwarded me, released by four scholars last October (including Caroline Hoxby, whose work I’ve always found worth reading), schools routinely engage in such manipulation to improve their rankings:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The authors back up their assertions with data on admissions rates for top students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton, as indexed by combined SAT I percentile scores:</p>
<p>At Harvard and MIT, one’s chances of admission generally increase with SAT score (although the Harvard probabilities are flat between the 93rd and 98th percentile). At Princeton, on the other hand, a candidate in the 98th percentile has a substantially worse chance of acceptance as compared to a candidate in the 93rd percentile. This is unlikely to be the result of legitimate admissions preferences – as if the 98’ers were all timid bookworms, while the 93’ers were happy well-rounded types. This is especially clear since the chances of the students at the very top are the most favored of all. As the authors explain, “if the student’s merit is high enough, a strategic college will probably admit the student even if the competition will be stiff. This is because the prospective gains from enrolling a ‘star’ will more than make up for the prospective losses from a higher admissions rate and lower matriculation rate. (Recall that the crude admissions rate and matriculation rate do not record who is admitted or matriculates.)”</p>
<p>In other words, it’s quite clear that Princeton, and presumably many other schools, are departing from their standard admissions criteria in order to reject well-qualified candidates and to increase the yield. (Rejecting good students also improves–i.e., lowers–a school’s overall admissions rate, by making the school appear harder to get into.)"</p>
<p>It’s completely unnecessary. Your claim was no correlation with SAT and acceptance. Those admissions data prove you wrong. Objectively. SAT is correlated with acceptance.</p>
<p>Related to the article, it was published in 2005. For your post to hold any weight whatsoever, you would need to prove:</p>
<p>1) Princeton’s true goal was to game the yields – something that mere data does not prove, unless you are also saying that Stanford either does not accept students with high SAT scores because of yield, or is unable to get them to matriculate. Your reasoning must apply to all schools equally.</p>
<p>2) The change is due to Princeton’s reacting to being “discovered” by the study.</p>
<p>Your sense of cause and effect is very skewed.</p>
<p>No. My claim is that there was no LINEAR correlation with SAT and acceptance. </p>
<p>Here are my exact words:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>We obviously cannot read the minds of the Princeton admissions officers, so in that sense we cannot prove “intent.” But we can certainly hypothesize from Princeton’s non-linear representation, especially since it deviated from HYSM’s linear representation. What else could be a more plausible explanation other than yield protection?</p>
<p>What is the relevance of a linear, versus say, quadratic correlation then? I acknowledge that I misread your post.</p>
<p>What I don’t understand is what claim you are making about Princeton. Use a more general categorization than linear, because there are many types of correlation that are still all positive.</p>
<p>Look at the graph. It makes no sense without inferring a manipulative intent. Why else would a Princeton applicant at the 93rd (and 94th, 95th, 96th, 97th) percentile have a better chance of acceptance than one at the 98th percentile?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The RP study revealed that the correlation is NOT positive between the 93rd and 98th percentiles. There is a “dip” in the graph.</p>
<p>The fact that in that year, the students at the 93th percentile were simply more attractive than those at the 98th percentile. We are not talking about enormous sample sizes here.</p>
<p>Iamtbh, let’s have this be very clear. The study was conducted in 2005. Prove the following:</p>
<p>Princeton practices yield protection now. Stanford does not.</p>
<p>Anything posted to the contrary or without acknowledging that those statements are as yet unproven will be considered admission that they are, indeed, totally without empirical merit.</p>
<p>iamtbh, has it ever occurred to you that a 93-97th percentile student might be more attractive to an institution than a 98th percentile student because of heavier involvement in EC’s?</p>
<p>This “manipulative intent” theory of yours is nonsense.</p>
<p>“Look at the graph. It makes no sense without inferring a manipulative intent. Why else would a Princeton applicant at the 93rd (and 94th, 95th, 96th, 97th) percentile have a better chance of acceptance than one at the 98th percentile?”</p>
<p>No, it hasn’t. Because that makes absolutely no sense at all. Has it ever occurred to you that a 93-97th percentile student might be more attractive to Princeton than a 98th percentile student because s/he is less likely to be admitted to HYSM?</p>
<p>iamtbh, I will take a 97th percentile SAT student that has significant EC’s over a 98th percentile student that only stays in the classroom any day and I would expect Princeton to do the same.</p>
<p>again, stop with this manipulative theory of yours</p>
<p>maybe you should have had more EC’s and Princeton might have accepted you, but it is ok, Stanford is a good school also…</p>
<p>As an international, I had no desire to apply to Princeton because its global prestige pales in comparison to that of HYSM. So I didn’t. That said, I cannot prove a negative (i.e. the fact that I did not apply to Princeton). But then again, neither can you (prove that you were admitted to HYSM).</p>
<p>Yeah. It says a lot about how I KNOW without a doubt that, internationally speaking, HYSM is more prestigious than P. You seem to admit as much by letting my claim go unchallenged.</p>