<p>No, I do not agree.</p>
<p>So do you care to explicate your fuzzy math?</p>
<p>I am not inteested in hassling further about this. Believe whatever makes you happy. </p>
<p>Either that, or lobby Yale to be more forthcoming with data about their applicant pools.</p>
<p>I will take that as a tacit concession. Again, what you are saying makes no sense mathematically.</p>
<p>I concede nothing, except that you have an ax to grind, are not interested in my analysis, and will under no circumstances accept it.</p>
<p>Wow. And I was sure Harvard's math was stronger. Let us see the numbers:</p>
<p>As you say:
At SAT levels of 1400, Harvard was accepting 5% of early applicants, while Yale was accepting 17.5%. At 1500, Harvard was accepting 24.9%, and Yale 49.1%. At 1600, Harvard was accepting 61.4%, and Yale was accepting 81.3%.</p>
<p>For the sake of example, lets take the smallest disparity (at the 1400 level) of 12.5% and assume that it regresses linearly (ie that at all SAT scores above 1400, there is a 12.5% disparity). This year, Yale accepted 9.7% of its applicants, while Harvard accepted 9.1%-a difference of 0.6%. Now, if the average SAT of a Yale acceptee is roughly the same as the average SAT of a Harvard acceptee, where does Yale make up for the 11.9% (12.5% - 0.6% = 11.9%)? Do they create people to accept out of thin air?</p>
<p>There are even more problems with Byerly's hypothesis if we consider that Yale accpeted proportionally fewer applicants than Harvard during the '04 admissions cycle.</p>
<p>To all who are interested:</p>
<p>Yale Alumni School Committee Newsletter Spring 2004</p>
<p>"While testing is only one factor among many in the evalutation process, it may be of interest to note that nearly 1,800 applicants scored a perfect 800 on the verbal section of the SAT I and almost 2, 260 received 800 on the math section."</p>
<p>That comes from 19, 674 applicants</p>
<p>so 9.15% had an SAT Verbal of 800
and 11.49% had an SAT Math of 800</p>
<p>by comparison Harvard this year (who knows what it had last year)</p>
<p>had an SAT Verbal 800 percentage of: 9.46%
and an SAT Math 800 percentage of: 14.1%</p>
<p>so, with the raw data presented here (and we don't know Yale's Class of 2009 numbers), Harvard has a slight edge in verbal and a significant edge in math. </p>
<p>:) hope this helped</p>
<p>I believe that their RD pools are very similar, but do you have any numbers on the EA pools?</p>
<p>I honestly don't think I have seen Yale (or Harvard, but I might be mistaken) calculate SAT's or GPA's or class ranks averages for the applicants. So it might be difficult to compare overall numbers. Maybe Byerly knows.</p>
<p>With 20,000 or so apps, I don't think this is seen as a useful exercise - particularly with respect to GPAs, which, I have heard on more than one occasion, are - along with "class standing" - seen as impossible to compare from school to school, state to state or nation to nation. (Increasingly, high schools and prep schools do not even report class standing: the number reported in USNews for matriculants (and called for in CDS forms) is often based on information from as few as 50% of applicants.)</p>
<p>All I have ever seen by way of SAT scores, etc for the applicant group are the traditional references to the fraction who scored 1,400 or more, the number who got 800 on the Math and Verbal, and the number of valedictorians. These numbers are relatively easy to calculate as a yardstick, and they probably don't see the need to go further. We will have to see what new yardsticks are used with the new SAT test.</p>
<p>I suspect that more detailed calculations are made for the admit group, or that at least an effort is made to analyze the stats of the matriculants vs those who decline to matriculate to see if there is any pattern with which to be concerned. I have seen detailed admit/matriculant SAT stat comparisons for Brown and Princeton, for example, but have not seen them published for either Harvard or Yale.</p>
<p>I know my high school calculates admit/acceptee GPA and SAT averages for each college seniors from my school apply to. The numbers are always quite interesting.</p>
<p>Do you mean a scattergram?</p>
<p>I do indeed. How many schools do that? I thought it was unique to my school.</p>
<p>They are fairly common in some areas, including many NE prep schools. </p>
<p>It would be interesting to see a few COLLEGE scattergrams from the other end of the pipeline.</p>
<p>Yeah those would be interesting to see. I have a nagging suspicion that the dot clusters in the prep school versions are higher than in ones that depict the general applicant/acceptee pool.</p>
<p>Some schools prepare quite extensive data. </p>
<p>SEE, for example: <a href="http://www.smes.org/college/Scattergramindex.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.smes.org/college/Scattergramindex.htm</a></p>
<p>Wow. My school puts it in graph format and sends it to students over the summer in a packet. Consulting the scattergrams can be a life-altering experience for some people.</p>
<p>Are you north of Boston?</p>
<p>PM me and I will give you further info.</p>
<p>Wow, that is interesting. My school only shows us a list of colleges students were accepted to. It doesn't even show how many applied and how many were accepted or denied.</p>