<p>OP - your stats do stand a reasonable chance outside of Ivies and top 10.</p>
<p>You should nt go with the goal of applying to all of top 20 schools using this somewhat flawed statistical analysis unless you have a very good safety with rolling admissions where you are admitted early. Otherwise, the sane advice that comes from CC’ers is to distribute your applications between reaches, matches and safeties.</p>
<p>Financial safeties, too!</p>
<p>I would argue that there is probability involved in college admissions, not only because of the randomness that is especially starting to affect the most competitive colleges. Different subjective information will be interpreted in different ways by different adcoms. It’s not “random,” but in a sense what the OP is saying is true.</p>
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<p>Target the top 40 and pick the 1/3rd of those colleges that appear to be the best fit; you should do fine.</p>
<p>Aw dang. I was hoping to get into Penn. Ah well.</p>
<p>Your shot at Penn is good enough to at least warrant an application.</p>
<p>Penn is a REACH for 4.0/4.9 2400, 36, 15 APs, and 4 subject scores of 800.</p>
<p>So nothing is stopping you from applying because it is a crapshoot for everyone. As LoremIpsum mentioned, just make your list broader than top 20 alone so you have a spread.</p>
<p>All top 15 private schools are reach for 3.7 GPA, 2200 SAT if your EC is not spectacular. 3.7 GPA is low for any top 20. You can try, but need to apply safeties.</p>
<p>If the top 20 colleges all used a truly random method of selecting their entering class–e.g., if they all put the names of each of their applicants on slips of paper of equal size and weight and placed all those slips in a large bin, and spun the bin to mix them, then picked the first X number of names while blindfolded, spinning the bin between each selection, and offered admission to everyone selected in this manner, then the OP’s logic would be impeccable. Then all the selections would be random and you could use the acceptance rate at each school as the equivalent of the probability of acceptance at that school (Harvard 6%, Brown 10%, etc), and aggregate those probabilities to calculate your odds of being accepted to at least one of the top 20 (= the odds against your coming up with a rejection at all 20). But so far as I know, Harvard doesn’t make its selections that way. Neither does Brown. Those scoring 2400 on the SAT have a greater chance of admission than those scoring 2200 at all 20 schools. HS valedictorians have a greater chance of admission than non-valedictorians at all 20. Legacies at each school have a somewhat better chance at that school than non-legacies. Recruited athletes have an advantage, but only at the schools where they’re recruited, and the weight of that advantage varies by school and by sport. And so on. </p>
<p>And within each school’s applicant pool, admissions rates are pretty sharply skewed by category. Brown, for example, tells is that applicants scoring 800 on the SAT CR are admitted at roughly twice the rate of those scoring in the 700-740 range (22.2% to 11.5%, respectively, for the class of 2014; both figures likely lower for the class of 2015). Valedictorians are admitted to Brown at roughly twice the rate of those merely in the top 10% of their class (21% to 11%), and more than 10 times the rate of those NOT in the top 10% of their class (2%). Applicants with 4.0 UW GPAs are admitted to Princeton at almost 3 times the rate of those in the 3.7-3.79 range (14.8% to 5.4%), and those with SAT scores in the 2300-2400 range are admitted at more than twice the rate of those in the 2100-2290 range (22.4% to 9.4%), though it’s likely that the admits in the 2100-2290 range are also skewed toward the top end of that range (e.g., 2250-2290s are probably admitted at a higher rate than 2200-2240s, and both of those groups at a higher rate than 2100-2150s).</p>
<p>Load up on matches—schools with a 40% or higher admit rate where your stats put you in the top quartile or high second quartile of the entering class—and add a couple of safeties, schools with even higher admit rates and/or where your stats put you well into the top quartile of the entering class. Once you’ve got those in place, there’s no harm in shooting for the moon on top 20 schools.</p>
<p>Where can we find this data?
(i.e. the acceptance rates at college A for 2300 SAT scorers is 60%)
I’ve looked at the common data sets and haven’t seen any data like that.</p>
<p>I’m interested because I just might follow bclintonk’s last paragraph to the letter.</p>
<p>But apllying to more means devoting the same timt to mroe apllications, i.e average time spent on each would fall. Hence, one can assume that the avearage quaity of the essays and small answers would fall. Thus, this might further decrease your chances.
i am assuming that you write different essays for each, crafted meticulously each college.</p>
<p>*for each college.
my bad</p>
<p>I am not sure if this has already been said, but you statistics are all wrong. I feel like you are treating the acceptances as independent. If there is one unsavory thing in your application, they will ALL pick up on it and you will get in NOwhere.<br>
A lot of my friends got reject from multiple Ivys. I have one friend who was rejected from 8 schools, he applied to nine. We’re going to UVa, in the fall.
Really it is a bad idea to apply based solely on rankings. Why do you think you will be happy at each one? Top 10s are almost NEVER matches or safeties, because they reject as many qualified students as they admit.</p>
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If I’m applying to 9 schools instead of 3, I would put more total time into applications. And my essays would not be 1/3 as good. But yes, I agree that applying to 20 schools would probably impact the quality of applications, at least for the ones you’re personalizing, and it might show for the schools you’re more lukewarm about.</p>
<p>What about Penn ED? I’m also retaking the SAT, because my 8th grade score doesn’t count.</p>
<p>To whomever said that you don’t increase your chances of getting a heads from flipping once than flipping twice, you’re wrong. The chance of not getting heads (getting all tails) for one flip is 50%, or 1/2. Therefore the chance of getting heads is 50% (100%-50%). If you take the chance of not getting any heads (all tails) for 20 times you do 1/2to the 20th power, which is 1/1048576. Therefore if you flip a coin 20 times, there is a 1048575/1048576, or 99.99% chance of getting a heads once. Is my math right?</p>
<p>^ True.</p>
<p>Common debate over gambler’s fallacy. If you flip a coin and get tails (or heads, for that matter), the chance of heads for the next flip will always be 50%. But looking at 20 flips in sum, the odds of not getting a heads is very small.</p>
<p>:( Would applying to multiple top tiear schools EA help?</p>
<p>ClassicRockerDad nailed it long ago. Read it and learn. Thread over!</p>
<p>MisterK, thank you. </p>
<p>BillyMC, let me try to explain to you why probability is a useful tool in dealing not just with random events, but with uncertain events. </p>
<p>Even if you assume that college admissions decisions are completely deterministic prior to them being made, your own knowledge prior to the decision is in fact uncertain. In that case, it is useful to model this uncertainty as coming from a random draw with certain probabilities. This modeling can then be used to determine where to focus your time and effort. </p>
<p>Now it doesn’t make sense to view each decision as completely independent because you are the same student no matter which school you apply to, and you face some degree of competition. Having some statistics that can help you calculate a conditional probability of admission, conditioned on your SAT and GPA from your own school, eliminates those factors from your estimate of your admission probability. Obviously whether you are a recruited athlete, or you spent your life surgically attached to your video games and have no ECs can guide you to increase or decrease that probability, but for the purpose of developing a strategy whatever probability you come up with can be used to answer questions like “is it worth applying?”, “how many schools to apply to?”, and so on. </p>
<p>The fallacy in the OPs analysis was that he viewed each decision as independent when they are not. However, the idea of using a probabilistic analysis, is I think indeed a good one. </p>
<p>I can go on with more detail examples of how to use these probabilities if anyone is interested.</p>