Good point, @tsbna44. The group of perfect SAT/ACT scorers could be much larger.
Thatâs not how it works. First of all as @lindagaf has mentioned, test scores are worth a lot less than they were with schools increasingly going test optional. Second, the applicants with perfect test scores/GPA probably have other qualities that make their applications compelling to admissions officers, qualities that may not be easily quantifiable.
If the overall acceptance rate is 5%, you should assume that your chance is 5%, assuming your stats are competitive. If you want to be more optimistic, you could randomly double your chances, but still thatâs a 90% chance of being rejected.
Jeff Selingo, a nationally prominent journalist on selective college admissions, has referred to schools like these as âhighly rejective.â Itâs true. Apply, by all means, you may be one of the lucky ones. I strongly recommend that you also seek out more attainable schools that you would be happy to attend.
Best of luck to you!
I believe the SAT is slightly more popular than the ACT (55% share). The guesstimate (they donât publish) is that only about 500 kids who take the SAT get a 1600 so it is a very small group. The most recent info I could find showed that 5,579 students scored a 36 on the ACT- so roughly 10 times as many as the SAT. Iâll add this - multiple recent articles have pointed out the fact that the number of kids scoring a 36 has soared in recent years.
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In the spirit of giving credit where credit is due (!)âŠAkil Bello coined the term âhighly rejectiveâ schools. Here is his twitter feed, which is informative and enjoyable.
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Part of that growth could be explained by those with extra time on tests gravitate to the ACT, as the ACT questions are easier, and the test more one of time pressure than difficulty (as compared to the SAT). I am in no way making a judgment that some students who get extra time donât need it, however, OTOH we all also know there is some abuse in getting testing accommodations.
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Because they have lots and lots of expensive test prep and retake multiple times so they can get high superscores. This is not a mystery. These are the students I have worked with for years.
Things have changed a LOT in the last five years, when test scores were given a little more importance. They are still part of the picture, mainly because of rankings. Itâs hard for USNWR to use ECs and teacher recs as part of their metrics. They like numbers. A teacher rec or an essay doesnât have a number as far as ranking purposes are concerned.
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Here are some stats from Brown (last 4 years) so only gotten more competitiveâŠ
I think having perfect anything always helps and rarely hurts.
I also think having perfect anything means less when others have the same perfect. As someone who has perfect elbows I speak from experience 
Lastly, I think striving for perfection at the expense of happiness, balance and the pursuit of true intellectual curiosity is ill advised for a lot of reasons, keeping in mind that for some kids that is who they are. As it pertains to CC it would seem that if you define yourself narrowly as academically perfect (and achieve it at the expense of other unique interests) you are competing against a very heavily populated and qualified playing field, may only marginally improve your odds and be miserable if it doesnât work out.
Just a parentâs point of view.
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The admit or acceptance rate for a given group of applicants isnât the probability of admission for that group, because applicants within that group arenât all the same. To infer probabilties, we need more data than what the schools provide. Grades and test scores are positively correlated, but not fully correlated, with other aspects of college applications, so as a group (but not individually), applicants with better grades and test scores tend to appear to be admitted at higher rates.
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Agree. As I mentioned a while back on CC, a perfect SAT score used to be so rare that it was worth of admiration and a write up in the local paper.
Agree even more! I worry that weâve made âperfectionâ too easy to attain (e.g., so many people have 4.0s today) and I donât think it sets up young people well for the imperfections of life.
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Just based on one private competitive HS (about 35% matriculate at T30s/top15LACs), whether or not perfect/near-perfect scores are a boost( based on %admits they may be)scores/rank are NOT the overriding factor:
Three recent VAL/SALs had either a >1540 or a 36ACT. rejected at 8 or 9 of 10 Top schools, rejected at matches too, went to the state flagship which for them was a âsafetyâ.
Two other recent VAL/SALs with those scores: accepted to 1 or 2 HYPMS each, also got into other Top schools.
The same scenario played out for TopGPA/TopScorers with success at top20-ED schools, vs not successful.
The difference? The ones who were successful had taken more rigor AND per my kids who have been in class with them, no question they would have had good recs. The unsuccessful ones had either dodged the hardest classes OR had significant personality issues, which I cannot imagine wouldnât have been revealed in recs.
Scores and grades just do not seem to be an overriding factor at our school.
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Thanks, @2Devils. Helpful examples. If a perfect GPA and perfect SAT/ACT yields a ~35% of admission (per headline above), then they certainly are not the overriding factors - so, agree. Interestingly, 2 out of the 5 students you mentioned got into HYPSM (40%!) - but I know itâs a small sample size.
Our HS does well with admissions, in general, so at least one VAL/SAL/Close-to-that rank gets in to one of those schools almost every year. What is interesting to me is that the few problematic personality-issue kiddos I have heard about along the way seem to end up at that rank about half the time.
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Maybe I am misreading you but isnât that exactly what it is? What it is not is the probability of admission for individual applicants.
I find it interesting that we readily concede that being a legacy gives an applicant a substantial boost but find it hard to say the same for perfect SAT/ACT scores, even though their impact on admission is roughly the same (25-30% for, say, Harvard) and that - for both - other factors also come into play.
To estimate the empirical probability, the underlying trials need to be identical, which isnât the case here.
Legacy gets a boost at some colleges because s/he gets a second look, or wins a tie-breaker, etc. I donât think any school uses test scores as a tie-breaker, for example.
Except their impact on admission is not roughly the same. It seems like you are just making up numbers here, for one side of the equation at least.
Having âperfectâ grades and stellar test scores is better than not, but grades and test scores do not give a 10x advantage over the rest of the applicants, a substantial portion of whom also have great grades and test scores.
For a sobering reality check, read the bioâs of the Presidential Scholar winners over the last couple of years. (Itâs online somewhere, I donât have time to hunt it down). Virtually all of them are perfect scorers (there are some who are nominated for artistic talent, but the majority are 1600 scorers). The fact that they had perfect scores- and in most cases, the highest GPAâs possible at their schools, are the LEAST interesting facts about these kids.
I remember the last Presidential Scholar winner from my kids high school several years ago. He was outstanding in every possible way, but I remember the âchatterâ that as distinctive as he was (not talking "I formed my own non-profit to build houses in Haiti stuff; he was the real deal and had been since he was a little kid. Activist, agitator, politically engaged, artistic, athletic⊠you name it) the other kids at school were worried he wasnât going to get in to his HYP first choice because âhis scores probably donât reflect how smart he isâ. He hadnât done SAT prep, hadnât shown up for the last three administrations of the test, clearly he âwasnât a good test takerâ even though he was brilliant.
Nope. Until he was named a Presidential Scholar finalist, nobody knew that he had taken the test once- sophomore year- gotten a 1600 with no prep, and therefore didnât get sucked into the prep mania everyone else was experiencing.
And his scores indeed were the least interesting thing about him.
So donât conflate having perfect stats with being a shoe-in at HYP. But frequently, the perfect stats kid ALSO has the other stuff HYP is looking for and THATâs why their admit rate is so highâŠ
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I am really not making stats up (or not deliberately) - I recall reading in the Harvard lawsuit that admit rates for legacies were around 30% and, from elsewhere, read about similar admit stats for perfect SAT/ACT scores (although it was framed as rejecting 60-70% perfect GPA and SAT/ACT applicants). The up to 10x was a rough estimate - derived from thinking about Harvardâs 3.4% this year vs. 35% in the headline.
The issue is that we have incomplete information.
Time for a little thought experiment. Letâs say that for a university the acceptance rate for a 1500 SAT is 12%. So, if you had 100 applicants with a 1500 SAT, you would expect 12 acceptances. Now, have the same 100 applicants apply 10 times. You would expect 120 acceptances and you get 120. Everything is good. Except, when you look at who got accepted, you see that the same 10 got excepted every time and 2 were more random. Who were the 10? They are the highly recruited athlete, the inner city URM with a great EC, the kid of the Prime Minister of some country, etc. If we knew all information that the AOâs had, for the normal 1500âs, we would tell them their probability is closer to 2%.
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As others have pointed out, even if the 35% in the headline is accurate, it includes a large portion of kids who not only have great grades and test scores, but also have some other significant boost. They are recruited athletes, artists, and/or academics, legacies, URMs, first generation college, major award winners, from an underrepresented state or demographic, etc. If you strip all that away, the boost for grades only is not nearly as significant as you estimate.
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Statistics is harder than just playing with numbers. Even if the admit rate for legacy is 30% while the overall rate is 5%, it doesnât mean that legacy gives 6x boost. You need to control for the other variables to find out the correct number.
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