<p>Rejected at all five ivies, plus Amherst and Swarthmore. So it IS true that SAT 2400 is a guarantee of nothing. And there really wasnt anything glaringly wrong with my application package — I had 18 A’s and 6 B’s in highschool, no C’s or anything. No discipline issues. I read my recs and they were excellent. And I honestly know that I did not come across as arrogant or entitled, it’s just not my nature.</p>
<p>Of course there was a reason for all the rejections, there has to be because I was accepted at ZERO of the 10 top schools I applied to (7 rejections and 3 waitllists) – I’m just saying there was nothing obviously bad in my app packages.</p>
<p>So, good luck to everyone and thanks for all the info CC-ers this past year.</p>
<p>There is nothing except perhaps having the required stats AND billionaire parents who donate multimillions to the Ivy that you applied to that will guarantee admission to places like Harvard.</p>
<p>Having sky high stats, being valedictorian, having great ECs isn’t enough to guarantee admission. Those schools have the luxury of being able to pick and choose among tens of thousands of outstanding students the ones who’ll most contribute to an active campus that is diverse in all meanings of the word. This means that you may be turned down in favor of someone with lower stats who comes from an underrepresented state, region, or country or has an unusual religion or is planning on majoring in one of the least served majors</p>
<p>And Stupefy – you got into Williams and Georgetown. Of course if you were rejected by schools you preferred, you have a right to feel disappointed, but I hope that you’ll soon celebrate your successes and also will realize that there was nothing wrong with your app. There just isn’t room for everyone who qualifies for admission to the top colleges.</p>
<p>The valedictorian at my school had a 36 ACT score and got rejected by all the Ivies, excluding Cornell, which he didn’t apply to. He’s from PA too, like Stupefy. I guess it just blows to live in PA for college admissions.</p>
No offense, but that’s a lot of Bs for top schools. If there’s anything to take away from this, I’m guessing that might’ve been it. Or it could have been ECs. Or the admissions officer might not have like your name.</p>
<p>Stupefy, I think that one factor that is underestimated in importance is how much admissions people seem to like to see improvement! so if FBBG got those B’s in 9th or 10th grade and when on to all A’s 11 it may be better than A’s all four years. I’m sure your going to rise to the top of the schools you did get into and ultimately get into a great grad program, if that’s what u want. There may have been nothing “wrong” with your application at all but it was just not what “they” were looking for that particular reading.
Have confidence that you can still achieve your goals!!!</p>
<p>"Stupefy, I think that one factor that is underestimated in importance is how much admissions people seem to like to see improvement! "</p>
<p>Given the plethora of straight-A applicants to top colleges, it’s possible that admissions officers would find more memorable a student who got a few Bs or even lower grades as a freshman and then due to some event turned their academics around and got top grades plus helped other students get on track. </p>
<p>The bottom line is that what would make one stand out at one’s high school – straight As – awesome scores – may not make one stand out in the admissions pools at the very top colleges, which are flooded with applicants with great stats and ECs.</p>
<p>This also is an example of why the chances posts are worthless. I noticed that when Stupefy posted a chances post, many posters assumed she’d be a shoo-in to places like Harvard. Her getting such responses may have added to her disappointment about her admissions.</p>
That is very true. Weight of expectation really got me
Not only cc, but my friends and family and guidance counselor and teachers…sigh. Idk how I’m going to show my face at school now</p>
<p>Believe me, Stupefy, people care far less about your acceptances/rejections than you do. The fact that you – whom your counselors and classmates know are an outstanding student – were rejected by top colleges only will serve to underscore to those people how competitive those colleges are. The counselors, etc. aren’t going to think something is wrong with you. They’ll think something is wrong with the colleges that rejected you.</p>
<p>You have no reason to be embarrassed. Frankly, your GC should be embarrassed for assuming you or any student would be a shoo-in to such colleges. </p>
<p>Enjoy the acceptances that you have. Realize you’re fortunate to have those acceptances, particularly Williams, because it also is among the country’s top colleges, and is very difficult to gain acceptance to no matter how outstanding one’s stats are.</p>
<p>I’d like to pitch in with my own example - I was in the position of having a superscored 2400, so-so grades freshman year that I raised to graduate top of my class senior year, and a good performance on the USAMO as well as a couple of other fairly impressive extracurricular achievements that tied in with my academic interests. I was also a varsity athlete, although not an extraordinary one. Results - rejected from the top three ivies, MIT and Stanford, and to my surprise Caltech. However, I doubt that there was some sort of black mark on my application because I was offered merit scholarships from three top-25 (or thereabouts) schools. Unfortunately, none of them is exactly what I’m looking for, but I do have some options.</p>
<p>A big thank you to everyone who posted in this thread, though! I thought I was the only one with sky-high stats that got cut down to size by admissions committees; I’m feeling much better now knowing I’m not entirely alone (and so probably won’t be the only overachiever at whatever university I end up attending).</p>
<p>Do cases like in this thread happen just because there were too many applicants of the given “specialty” applying in a given year, so a few high-scorers got passed over for high-achieving athletes, musicians, etc?</p>
<p>I haven’t seen the profiles of many class of 2010 students here on CC, so what kind of courses are we talking about for this year’s valedictorians? (For example, when did you take algebra, and when did you start taking AP courses?) I never rely on grade-point-average comparisons, because I never know how comparable the courses are at different high schools.</p>
<p>There are lots of very high scoring students, and they all tend to apply to similar universities. Many of them also are planning on similar majors.</p>
<p>When it comes to the top universities, it’s harder for them to find stellar athletes, students planning to major in underutilized majors, students who come from underrepresented states, countries, and regions whose stats qualify them for admission than it is for those colleges to find students with sky high stats.</p>
<p>For instance, even in my small college town, I know more students who have scored 36 on their ACT than I know students planning to major in Greek. </p>
<p>When it comes to Harvard, the bulk of the applicants I’ve interviewed are planning on majors like biochemistry or other things that will prepare them for premed. </p>
<p>Consequently, Harvard probably would prefer a student with good but not great scores and a strong demonstrated interest in philosophy or Greek over a student with sky high stats who plans to major in biochemistry.</p>
<p>Similarly, Harvard and similar school probably would prefer a student from rural Minnesota with acceptable scores to a student from a big city in the East Coast who has sky high scores.</p>
<p>No, from what I’ve seen, Harvard gets lots of prospective CS and economics majors.</p>
<p>The students who stand out in terms of majors are those who have a strong demonstrated interest in the humanities and arts. That’s because fewer applicants demonstrate such passions. Many applicants have been pushed by parents to pursue ECs and prospective majors in fields the parents think will be lucrative. This occurs even when the student has lots of talent and interest in arts and humanities.</p>
<p>Schools like Harvard probably could fill up their classes with outstanding students who are prospective biochem, biology, CS and economics majors, but colleges like Harvard are the type of schools that they are because they don’t fill up their classes with students who are very similar in terms of ECs and career goals.</p>
<p>They also want religion majors, Asian studies majors, fiction writers, poets, aspiring film makers, teachers, social workers, and playwrights.</p>
<p>I know one person with 2400 in a single sitting (without national or regional award) accepted to 2 colleges ranked 10-12 on the USNWR. Not sure that person applied to 1-9.</p>
<p>The other reality is that Harvard and, to a lesser extent the other other Ivies, has lately become the home of only two kinds of students (to grossly over-generalize:)</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Kids from extreme backgrounds, traditionally under-represented in college, minorities, overcoming hardship, unique talents, etc. So a kid who was raised by wolves on a refugee camp in Antarctica while teaching herself Aramaic and becoming an Olympic figure skater would get in, even with so-so grades and SAT scores.</p></li>
<li><p>Kids whose parents dating back to the 17th century went to Harvard and just donated half a billion to the school, regardless of whether Junior can read or not.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>It’s always been like this at Harvard, but it’s more like this now than ever.</p>
<p>The OP didn’t post all of her stats but to be flat out rejected from all the Ivies plus Amherst and Swarthmore shows that she probably didn’t stand out from the crowd even with 2400 SATs. Or else she consistently did something in interviews to massively **** people off, but that seems unlikely.</p>
<p>“Or else she consistently did something in interviews to massively **** people off, but that seems unlikely.”</p>
<p>Could be possible since she applied to many schools. She could have gone through the motions with interviews assuming that her high scores made her a shoo-in. She also could have been so stressed out by having to schedule lots of interviews despite having a busy EC and academic schedule that she gave the impression that she was doing the interviewers a favor by managing to meet for interviews.</p>
<p>I interviewed a student like that. I interviewed the student close to the time of acceptances. The student answered all of my questions with as brief answers as possible. It was obvious to me that the student was very used to and very bored with interviews. The student also got up and ended the interview when the student thought I was through. I wasn’t through.</p>
<p>I later learned through a mutual friend that the student had applied to a dozen schools, mainly top schools, and had expected to get into all because the student had very high stats and had some other attributes that normally are known as being desirable by top colleges. </p>
<p>The student didn’t get into my alma mater.</p>
<p>I have not seen any evidence that the top schools now are filled with the type of students mentioned in post #138.</p>
<p>Another possibility with the OP is that there was something wrong with the OP’s essays. Sometimes essays that students and even teachers/parents think are great are not.</p>
<p>I think there are 3 kinds of 2400 SAT scores.</p>
<ol>
<li>Attend prep class and seriously aim for it. The local SAT prep ads in my area show this.</li>
<li>Self prep with moderate effort.</li>
<li>Minimum self prep.</li>
</ol>
