Is Harvard really as ,uch of a crapshoot as everyone claims?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvard University
41

<p>julyinoh, you forgot to add something that can make that person a truely "auto-accept". Without this element, that person is still a crapshot, just "more likely" than other crap shot applicants. </p>

<p>Ethnicity!
if a black/hispanic/native American has your credentials, it's auto-accept.
If an asian...then I'm not so sure.</p>

42

<p>Acceptance to Harvard- or any top-ranked school- is not so much a crapshoot as it is a wavefunction- a probability distribution of likelihoods. Think of your application as a particle with wavefunction /psi. Now, the wavefunction is the function that expresses the given state of a particle at a given time, so just as the state parameters would be things like x, y, z, t, possibly other parameters (spin, etc.), your application's parameters (EC's, essays, etc.) give the wavefunction expression.</p>

<p>However, the wavefunction does not collapse into a state until after measurement (in this analogy, measurement is done by the Admissions Office), so the application has a probability distribution of acceptance. There's a certain probability that it will collapse into the rejected states and a certain probability that it will collapse into the accepted states, and these parameters determine the probabilities. One cannot, however, determine the exact state until after the measurement has been performed.</p>

<p>...You know, that was a fun analogy.</p>

43

<p>Haha, its actually pretty accurate for med school admissions too. Pick up a copy of the MSAR and look at all the little dots on their MCAT acceptance chart. There ARE people with extremely high scores on the MCAT that don't get in to ANY med schools. It's a waveform thing too.</p>

44

<p>"(in this analogy, measurement is done by the Admissions Office)"
isn't that very subjective, thus "crapshot"?</p>

45

<p>Your methodology is flawed, because college students do not identify themselves in the same racial category as in the US. Someone who might normally identify themselves as white might label themselves as Hispanic for the application process etc.</p>

46

<p>1/2 and 1/2....it's a lot of luck. So good luck!</p>