Is an A- a no-no at Harvard?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvard University
21

I think it would also depend on how your high school weights A-s, in my opinion. If an A- is considered the same as an A at your school (a 4.0) then I don’t think it’d be a very big deal. My high school counselor actually asked our H rep about this two years and was told that Harvard Admissions using whatever weighting method the applicants high school provides them with and according to my counselor, they do not recalculate gpa for domestic students (not sure about international).

I’d also like to note that I had A-s in 7 of my 24 classes when I applied (rest were As with a few A+s) and I was still accepted. I was also ranked 11 out of 430 students. This is of course purely anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt :slight_smile:

22

@rrick1 Unfortunately for that theory, there are schools that send 10, 20 and even more students to a single Ivy in a given year.

23

@rrick1: According to Harvard’s Common Data Set, rank IS NOT considered. For example, at Stuyvesant High School, 130 to 150 students routinely apply to Harvard in any given year, and Admissions has accepted anywhere from 8 to 24 students per year. And they don’t just pick the students with the highest GPA’s, as some years Harvard has passed over Stuy’s Valedictorian and Salutatorian and chosen students with lesser stats. Harvard is looking for students with great GPA’s and test scores who also bring something extraordinary to the table, and often times those student’s have high GPA’s, but not the tippy-top ones.

24

@ricck1 That’s not true at my school. My school does not rank and sends about 5-10 kids to Harvard every year. We also send about 5-15 kids to each top school every year.

25

You are stating the exceptions to the general rule. Yes a few top public and top prep schools (Stuyvesant, Exeter) send multiple kids to Harvard and other ivies, but your average public school sends zero to 1, if any. With over 40,000 public and private high schools in the US alone, you can readily see that most schools are not sending any students to Harvard (or any of the ivies.)

26

My sons’ high school no longer assigns ranks. I think many high schools have taken a similar path. They pick a valedictorian and a salutatorian, but it doesn’t strictly follow GPA. What’s the meaningful difference between a kid with a weighted 4.33 GPA and one with a 4.29 GPA? Especially if it’s a result of the student with the higher GPA taking a slightly easier schedule?

I think it’s fair to say that Harvard and schools like it pay some attention to approximately where a student stands in his class. They’re looking for students who are in the top group of a class. If there are one or two students who clearly outdistance their peers, if an applicant isn’t one of them, he or she probably isn’t going to get the fat envelope from Harvard. But if there is a cluster of a half-dozen or more kids who are roughly comparable, small differences in GPA aren’t going to be the deciding factor. So, strictly speaking what Harvard says in the Common Data Set is likely true. But maybe a little misleading.

27

It’s not really an exception: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/making-harvard-feeder-schools/?page=single

Most high schools don’t send multiple students to Harvard. But, if I’m reading the graph correctly, 74% of students at Harvard were singletons (the only student from their high school admitted to Harvard). That would mean 26% of Harvard students came form high schools that sent multiple students to the college. Some high schools are indeed represented more than others

28

@gibby,

Actually, what you cited shows that @ricck1‌’s exception IS an exception. Here’s what the poster said:

“You are stating the exceptions to the general rule. Yes a few top public and top prep schools (Stuyvesant, Exeter) send multiple kids to Harvard and other ivies, but your average public school sends zero to 1,…”

Then you point out that there are precisely seven schools in the US that are generally the exception to this rule. That’s out of 38,000 high schools in the US. Seven out 38,000 sounds like an exception to me.

As well, these students don’t comprise the rule, itself, as they make up only a small part of the freshmen each year. Your quote shows 5% of incoming freshmen come from these seven schools. That’s roughly 85 students out of well over 1600.

However, that doesn’t make ricck1’s original point, which seems to be that Harvard will only take the top two or three students from a school’s graduating class (except for those schools generally considered Ivy feeders). I imagine that Harvard is more or less telling the truth, that they don’t formally use class rank. Nonetheless, I think that generally, Harvard is looking for students who are among the academically-strongest in their graduating class. In fact, the rest of what they tell us affirms that. This is what looks to me to be more of “misleading by telling the truth.”

29

There are more than seven schools that are the exception to sending 0-1 students to Harvard each year. My school is not one of the seven mentioned schools, yet my school has sent as many as 10 students to Harvard! Not all 26% of those students come from those 7 schools.

30

@sjsprint,

How large are the graduating classes at your school?

31

@notjoe About 200

32

@notjoe: I understand the confusion you had with my post. I should have stressed that 26% of Harvard students come from schools which send multiple students to the college. Thanks @sjsprint for pointing that out.

33

You exactly proved my point. The majority of accepted students ARE singletons, (except for the New England prep schools.) So when schools, especially public schools, are allowing kids forty deep to apply to Harvard is absolutely ridiculous. They don’t stand a chance and counselors should really not be encouraging them to apply. It is purely for inflated statistics.

34

@gibby, thanks for the clarification. So that’s about 430 students. I think @ricck1’s point still holds pretty well, that these schools are the exception. I’m taking a wag that that represents maybe around 70 - 80 schools (85 for the seven named, 345 @ roughly 5 students per school provides another 69 schools). That’s still out of 38,000 high schools in the US, or about 0.2% of high schools. Even from the smaller pool of high schools that send someone to Harvard in a given year, that’s maybe 70 or 80 out about 1300 high schools with at least one student going to Harvard. At the upper limit, it’s not more than around 180 such schools. Out of 1400 total, then.

Thus, most schools (on the order of 90% - 95%) that send anyone to Harvard are sending a single student, and I’d be willing to bet that although Harvard doesn’t formally look at class rank, they’re taking students who are at or very near the top of their classes at most of those schools.

Ricck1’s other assertion - that you have to be first, second, or third in your class to get into Harvard seems to me to be less true, but not too terribly far off. For most students at most schools (roughly 90% - 95% of schools sending anyone to Harvard in a given year), the applicant usually needs to be in that group of students where in terms of academic achievement, the differences within the group of students as measured by GPA are relatively trivial. Subject to all the usual exceptions and caveats to this general rule (it’s a really super-competitive high school, the kid is a world-class pianist, the kid cured cancer, he’s a recruited athlete, he’s otherwise hooked, etc.).

In fact, I’d be willing to bet that this explains much of the multiple admission of kids from Ivy feeder schools - from Harvard’s perspective, the difference in academic achievement between their No. 1 pick from the school and their No. 10 pick from the school is relatively small. At least in Harvard’s view.

35

I’m not sure how many schools are in the business of “allowing” students to apply to Harvard. At our school, that’s the student’s choice. I will point out, though, that under Harvard’s admission rate, a school very well might have forty applications to yield a couple admits.

36

I find @notjoe’s and @ricck1’s points compelling.

In addition, when you look at school’s like Stuyvesant (with a 3% entrance exam acceptance rate), there is so much self-selection in their pool of students that many or most could be the valedictorian at any normal HS so 25-30 out of 800 being accepted to Harvard should be no surprise . Top private feeder schools also have a measure of self-selection through their own entrance requirements coupled with the benefits that many of the kids will enjoy that accrue to wealth, legacy, and privelege.

Dartmouth reported that in this year’s freshman class 30% were valedictorians and 10% were salutatorians of the kids who reported rank. I assume they are looking for the same attributes in the kids who don’t report rank as the one’s who do, so it’s probably safe to assume that about the same number of the unranked ones were probably number one or two in their HS as well. When you take into account that Dartmouth had an admissions rate that was nearly double that of Harvard (11.5% vs. 5.9%) and a class size of only 1150 vs. 1700 (so recruited athletes and notjoe’s “otherwise hooked” students are a much bigger percentage of the total), it is not a stretch to imagine that Harvard (with the second lowest acceptance rate in the country) has a higher percentage of valedictorians and salutatorians than 40%.

This makes sense because, in a typical HS, for a guidance counselor or teacher to write the proverbial “this is a once in a career type student” that Harvard looks for, the kid has to be at or near the top of the class. The teachers talk amongst each other and generally know who the top kids are.

In summary, if say 45-55% of the kids at Harvard are number one or two in their class, when you add back all the feeder school kids, the hooked athletes (15%), URM’s( 20%), super-geniuses and virtuoso’s, legacies (13%) etc. ( %'s before adjusting for overlap with the vals and sals) and internationals (10%), there really isn’t much room left at the inn for kids who are not at the very top of the class.

In an average American high school, you would probably need to be at least one of the top five students in the class to have a shot if you are unhooked. Of course, this is not rule and there are bound to be many exceptions due to extenuating circumstances, serendipity, or what have you. My two cents worth.

37

And yet, when I look through the stats of accepted students in the Class of 2019 SCEA decision thread, I see a smattering of accepted students with 3.7 and 3.8 unweighted GPA’s and I’m assuming that those students are not ranked as the top five student’s in their class. So, I guess there is still hope for some less than perfect students after all!

38

@gibby,

“…accepted students with 3.7 and 3.8 unweighted GPA’s and I’m assuming that those students are not ranked as the top five student’s in their class.”

You might be surprised. Some schools have a much different grading culture, where perfect grades don’t ordinarily occur, and a 3.8 may be in that top handful.

39

Isn’t the question how many of these schools have students even applying to Harvard or Yale or any other Ivy. If there are 38,000 high schools in the US., 37,000 probably never have a kid to apply to any of these schools. On CC we get a skewed view of the world. These schools are not on everyone’s radar.

40

@Tperry1982‌,

It’s a good question. If roughly 400 freshmen come from roughly a hundred or a hundred 4ifty schools, are applications proportionate to acceptances? Are those schools producing 8000 applications (and thus achieving an admit rate of roughly 5%)? We know that all the other schools from which students are admitted each send one student, so that’s roughly another 1200 or so schools. If they’re generating the other 26,000 or so, that means that there are more than 20 applications coming from each school.

I find that unlikely. For one thing, I know that the number of students who apply from my sons’ high school each year varies from one or two to as many as five or six, but the school sends at least one student most years, sometimes two. The number is self-limiting precisely because students from the school are aware that Harvard isn’t likely to dig deep into our pool of graduating seniors, and thus, only students at the top of the class bother to apply. If students know it to start, the senior guidance counselor will inform them thusly. As well, students learn from on-going experience of the classes that go before them. In the school, everyone knows who applied from the class of 2014, and who got int and didn’t. Folks are generally aware roughly where their peers fall in the school’s unofficial rankings (the school provides no formal rankings).

Now, one could posit that possibly many students at many schools don’t realize quite how selective Harvard is, and thus, students further down in the pool might not be as discouraged to apply, meaning that at these schools, you DO get 20 applications.

But it seems to me that this might happen for one or two years at a school with ineffective guidance counselors, but that after a while, students (and their parents) would figure out, even without help from the guidance counselor, that students who are 15th or 20th or lower in their class are unlikely to get in.

Thus, I surmise that schools who send 0 - 1 (or even 2) students to Harvard are more like my sons’ high school, with a handful applying each year. That’d suggest that applications come from around 5000 schools or so each year. Over the course of a few years, it’s probably mostly the same schools generating applications each year (Naviance shows my sons’ high school with at least one applicant per year for the last 14 years), but there are likely some schools that only occasionally generate applications. I’m going to take a wag that the total number of schools that “ever” (say, within the space of a half-decade) generate applications is around 7500 -10,000.

So, if that’s the case, then most schools don’t have any applicants, but schools that do comprise more than a tiny percentage of high schools in the US.