<p>I am looking through acceptance threads at ivies/top tiers and the people's applications are so good. Example: I was looking through Penn's decisions thread and a majority of the people accepted had 2300+ or 34+ and spotless EC's. Here's my query. If you look at websites that report average scores (i.e. college board), they are much worse than what people put on here. Why?</p>
<p>Either people are lying, or they just got rejected.</p>
<p>Don’t let it discourage you. Instead, take pointers from them and enhance your app that way.</p>
<p>One thing to keep in mind when viewing CDS data (25% & 75% SAT scores, ave. GPA, % in top 10% of graduating class, etc.) is that not all applicants are the same. An applicant who wants to know his/her chances needs to understand which applicant bucket they fit in. Here are buckets that are commonly referred to as receiving special consideration in Admissions, in order of importance:</p>
<p>-Recruited Athlete? (scholarship or non-scholarship…doesn’t matter)
-African American, Hispanic/Latino, American Indian = (URM)?
-Legacy?</p>
<p>-Non-URM Life special circumstances (e.g. applies to all including white European and Asian/Indian):
…-Low income and/or high societal hurdles?
…-1st Generation college?
…-inspiring enormous obstacle overcome? (this does not include the normal obstacles in growing up)</p>
<p>-underrepresented Geographic region?
-Gender? (females compose 56% of the college applicant pool).</p>
<p>A URM male with 1900 SAT, 3.6 uw GPA in a non-competitive HS, might be accepted into Penn over a white female with 2250/3.9 uw GPA.</p>
<p>If the applicant does not fit into any of the above categories (e.g white middle class female), and assuming very good but not exceptional letters of rec and ECs, then the applicant should understand that the bottom 30% - 40% (depending on how small the uber selective college is) in stats of the accepted students are almost entirely special admit (hooked) applicants from the above categories. Therefore, an unhooked applicant should be looking at his/her bucket as containing those students with stats in the upper 60% of the enrolled students, disregarding the bottom 40% entirely.</p>
<p>I’ve read a few times that an un-hooked applicant is a match to a selective college, in terms of stats, only if their stats are at he 75% in the CDS data. This makes sense to me.</p>
<p>The sort of Admissions boost for each category depends on the unique goals of each college. To get an idea of how much some of these categories matter to admissions officers, look at the admissions point formula used by University of California, San Diego, currently ranked #35 in USNWR. Note that UCs by law are not allowed to use the category of URM I listed above, and are not bold enough to put in print the # points added to a recruited athlete 
. <a href=“http://www.ucsd.edu/prospective-students/freshmen/eval-process.html#process[/url]”>http://www.ucsd.edu/prospective-students/freshmen/eval-process.html#process</a> All schools use some sort of system to create sub-categories of applicants, or Buckets as I called them above, to review applicants…they don’t have point scales like this, but the result is the same.</p>
<p>dunnin: You’re saying low income is a separate pool from others, correct?</p>
<p>How low would low be?</p>
<p>X-</p>
<p>I believe the UC San Diego formula is $60,000 or less family income for a four member family. That seems very high to me,so I could be wrong in what I read. I would put “low income” at $40,000 or less for a family of 4. It is a separate category for UCSD, and for other schools it might be, or might be lumped into “life hurdles” as an aggregate category.</p>
<p>Don’t colleges claim that they don’t look a your income when you apply?</p>
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<p>Um maybe a couple people lie, but I think the vast majority are telling the truth as far as basic stats go. College Confidential attracts students who care a lot about college admissions. Generally these types of students are highly motivated and have very strong stats. Also College Confidential, from what I can tell, seems to be used mainly by whites and Asians. As a whole, these two races have stronger stats than other races. I don’t know about the socioeconomic status of College Confidential, but I’d bet that the upper classes represent well on here, and these students also have strong stats. </p>
<p>Compared to the general public applying to top universities, CC students applying to the same universities have stronger stats. This doesn’t necessarily translate into more success in admissions, as at these schools there are other factors than stats that are involved in the decision.</p>
<p>Edit: Maybe one reason for the higher stats on CC is that members (regardless of their decision) are probably more likely to post their profiles if they have higher stats. I still do not think this is enough to solely account for the discrepancy though.</p>
<p>Response bias.
Only people who got in and have really high scores post.</p>