I’m not talking about ivies – everyone should be surprised when they get into those. However, this came up in conversation with a bunch of friends recently.
A student who applies to something with, say, a 20-30% acceptance rate and is at the lower end of the 25-75% statistics for GPA and test scores, is that surprising?
I say definitely, but some people are saying no, the student’s within the range of accepted students, so why should they be surprised? Of course there are ECs, etc, but assume nothing spectacular – just things like National Honor Society and varsity sports.
The colleges have to accept someone. Those within the range are eligible to be in the pool of considered applicants. If not those chosen few, it would have been some other group which fit the same stats.
Depends on the person I guess… an optimist wouldn’t be too surprised because they expect good things to happen. a pessimist would probably not expect to get in and thus would likely be surprised.
The fact that it’s labeled as a reach for the student means that they are surprised if they get in. Otherwise, it’s not really a reach. But maybe you’re thinking about ‘reach’ slightly differently.
While not hard and fast, our HS defined reach as being a school where students had about a 25% - 40% shot to get in, Schools with under a 25% chance of admittance were not really encouraged and are classified as longshots. Therefore, while far from a certainty, applicants did have a reasonable shot at getting into a target school. Guess everyone can set their own definitions.
We’ve been working under the assumption that a target is a school where their numbers are at about the 50-75 percentile for accepted students. If they fall within the 25-50% range of accepted students, we’ve been calling it a reach.
I wouldn’t assume we could just go by acceptance rate; a school with a 50% acceptance rate is better than a very strong target for someone with perfect grades and scores, but is a reach for someone with a 2.0.