<p>How much of a factor is intra-high school competition? Is it really that bad for everyone else's chances if some people have already gotten into certain much-coveted places early? I'd like to think that is not true, that everyone has an equal chance regardless of other people's successes, but I'm not so sure that's the case.</p>
<p>What do you guys think?</p>
<p>i think it depends on how much interhigh school competition there is. for example, at my school (class of 06 has less than 200 people), there are anywhere from 20-50 people applying to EACH of the top schools. yea...i know.</p>
<p>it aslo depends on the school and the usual acceptance rate for a particular university. for example, i live about 20 minutes away from u of penn, and go to a relativey good school, so penn admits many students (as many as 25 of a class of about 200). in a case like that it doesn't matter much. on the other hand, our school has not sent anybody to stanford for many years, so when someone was recruited for lacrosse, that pretty much stopped stanford acceptances from our school for the next couple of years..</p>
<p>Do admissions officers really work it out via schools? I have heard this before but it seems strange to me. If you have 2 brilliant students in one year at a school but you took a football player last year from the same school, it does'nt make sense to ignore the brilliant students. Or is it because there are so many brilliant students they can just fill in those spots anyway?</p>
<p>Where i am from acceptance is purely by grades so its quite different. I was wondering why they dont do that in the U.S then i realised there would be so many people with perfect or near perfect scores they would have to work out a way of culling numbers at top schools anyway. Its so hard to make the process fair...</p>
<p>We had 5 kids get into Hahhhhvahd ED, I don't think it makes that much of an issue.</p>