<p>Same thing with Harvard or any ivy league school- Alot of people apply so they’re “force to be picky”.</p>
<p>lol, I’m not on either side in this argument. i could really care less about school rivalries except when used in competition like UT vs A&M or UT vs OU, or when used to ■■■■■ someone (mostly the latter, lol). I just saw a fallacy that I felt the need to correct :P</p>
<p>Jeptha: I’m not playing the “what if” game. Lets be realistic. </p>
<p>Let me clarify my point because some of you seem to be missing it:</p>
<p>The lower the acceptance rate, the harder it is to get accepted to a university. These percentages are a way to compare the selectivity of different universities. The end.</p>
<p>“Defining College Selectivity:
The term selectivity within college admission refers to the total number of students applying to a college divided by the number of students actually admitted. If this percentage is 33 or lower, then the college is considered selective. Highly selective colleges are schools whose percentage is vastly lower.”</p>
<p>This website uses the ivies to explain selectivity:
[Defining</a> Ivy League Schools: Understanding the Meaning of Selectivity](<a href=“Suite 101 - How-tos, Inspiration and Other Ideas to Try”>Suite 101 - How-tos, Inspiration and Other Ideas to Try)</p>
<p>Not a complicated concept.</p>
<p>"Same thing with Harvard or any ivy league school- Alot of people apply so they’re ‘force to be picky’. "</p>
<p>That and the fact that their classes tend to be fairly small compared to public universities. Usually from 2-3k.</p>
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<p>Reread post #53. Student quality and popularity matters…A LOT</p>
<p>Lower acceptance rate doesn’t necessarily indicate that it’s harder to get accepted. It just means that a lower percentage of the applicants were accepted. Now if the two schools had the exact same applicants, then yes, the one with the lower acceptance rate would be the harder one to get into, but you can’t ASSUME that a lower acceptance rate means it’s harder to get into.</p>
<p>Lol Kyle, acceptance rate is irrelevant. Look at the GPA that it takes to get into McCombs, then look at Cox. Average for McCombs is a 3.9. SMU requires only a 3.3 on indicator courses. I know a friend who barley got above a 3.3 GPA on indicator courses with his overall GPA around a 3.0. He got into SMU. Keep in mind, I’m talking about external transfer applicants. Same thing goes for high schoolers applying though. There is a difference in the average GPA accepted. It isn’t about the ratio of how many got accepted out of the amount of applicants, but rather how hard it is to get accepted. UT is a bigger university, which in return, accepts more students for undergraduate studies/liberal arts out of the thousands who apply. 40k undergraduate students, but don’t get it twisted when it comes to business/engineering/etc.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/udean/admissions/external.asp[/url]”>http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/udean/admissions/external.asp</a></p>
<p>Kyle, I am being realistic. Your counterargument doesn’t necessarily disagree with my argument, it merely simplifies it to a point where it doesn’t account for the “why.” The entire reason a school is competitive is the number of students applying to the school in question is more than the available spots in said school. When this happens, the school is forced to accept the most academically strong candidates from the pool of applicants within a certain amount of error (This error would be stuff like first generation students or students who show more promise from their essays/extracurricular than a student who just shows better stats). This means that the difficulty of being admitted in any school is directly linked to how strong your competition is and how much competition there is. </p>
<p>Unless of course you are speaking of something else I said, in which case I just wasted a bunch of time typing all that out, lol.</p>
<p>Hate to gang up on you Kyle but your Acceptance-Rate-to-Quality-of-School correlation theory is off. Any one of the above posts alone contain enough reasoning to prove your theory wrong. The confidence that you defend it with comes off as arrogance.
I don’t know where you quoted this from (I didn’t bother reading the link), but percentages are created by dividing a part over a whole.
Total # Applicants / # Accepted does not create a percentage.
In fact, the lower that number is, the HIGHER the acceptance rate actually is.</p>
<p>yea, that math is kind of off. I think what that website meant was accepted/applicants. As the number of applicants increase, the whole number gets smaller, which is where the % would come from. :P</p>
<p>The website got it backwards. Sorry about that.</p>
<p>Frever you’re a bit off. I never offered an Acceptance-Rate-To-Quality-Of-School correlation theory. What I said has nothing to do with the quality of a school.</p>
<p>I said that a school with a lower acceptance rate is typically harder to gain acceptance to. The more competitive schools with more selective admissions usually except fewer and have a lower admission rate (The ivies for example). Obviously the number of applicants (along with other factors) affects this number, but that doesn’t invalidate my point. </p>
<p>DenuMx you said:
“or admissions, overall, SMU is a lot easier to get into compared to UT.”
When you say overall I assume you’re talking about undergraduate OVERALL, not specifically business schools. </p>
<p>I don’t want to flood the boards with such a silly discussion. I think most prospective students applying to college understand that those schools with an acceptance rate under 20 or 30 percentage are most likely going to be harder to gain acceptance to versus those with an acceptance rate over 50%. It’s pretty simple.</p>
<p>Here’s an interesting example that might contribute to this argument: In Fall 2006, California State Long Beach had about a 50% acceptance rate, but with the current financial crisis of California limiting the number of seats available for students, they could only accept about 32% in Fall 2009 (it’s also worth noting that the university became much more popular over the last couple years because its status as one of the best “value colleges”).</p>
<p>Does this sudden dip in CSU Long Beach’s acceptance rate indicate miraculous improvement in its academic programs, or is it simply a case of the university having far too many applicants for limited seats?</p>
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<p>Kyle: You preface a comment with “Let me clarify my point because some of you seem to be missing it:” and then you go on to write “The lower the acceptance rate, the harder it is to get accepted to a university.” The preface to your comment indicates that you’re being very deliberate in your wording and subsequent message.</p>
<p>In your next post, you write “I said that a school with a lower acceptance rate is typically harder to gain acceptance to.”</p>
<p>Which one is it, (definitively) harder or typically harder? It seems like you’re backtracking because you know you’re wrong.</p>
<p>I add typically because others are offering hypothetical situations and particular cases to disprove my point. There are always exceptions.</p>
<p>I stand by what I said.</p>
<p>Kyle: You deliberately write that “The lower the acceptance rate, the harder it is to get accepted to a university.” The fact that you so vehemently defended your point and then backtracked when others disproved your point makes you look like an (insert derogatory term) who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. If you don’t understand the topic you’re talking about, it’s usually best to avoid said topic.</p>
<p>If someone were to ask me how hard it is to get into a school, I would know that that person is curious about what caliber of student that college accepts. Acceptance rate is a college specific statistic that does indeed reflect that college’s standards, but -importantly- it is also strongly determined by that school’s popularity and what kind of prospective students it attracts. To better compare colleges, to find which one is “harder to get into,” you need a more standardized statistic that doesn’t attempt to bridge two distinct populations (I have no doubt that UT attracts different applicants than SMU). Something like average class rank or SAT scores would be much better suited for determining which school might be harder to get into.</p>
<p>I’ve always wondered this, does UT include auto-admits from the top 10% in their acceptance rate? And if so, has UT ever isolated their acceptance rates into two categories: Auto-admits and everyone else?</p>
<p>I only ask because I think it’d be interesting to see what the non-top 10% acceptance rate is. In addition, I’m kinda curious to see the difference in yield between the two groups, too.</p>
<p>damnit, crs, you me geek out there for a second lol.</p>
<p>CRS I am not backtracking. As I just stated, I stand by what I said. Perhaps I should have been more careful with my wording so individuals like yourself wouldn’t pick apart what I said and find a counter argument.</p>
<p>There are plenty of websites, student resources and other individuals that would agree with what I have said. The stats are there. Throwing in “what if” and “well not ALWAYS” doesn’t make what I said untrue. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t get on your high horse and start questioning my knowledge of any subject. I gaurantee you aren’t in any position to do that.</p>
<p>If you would like to discuss this further feel free to message me.</p>
<p>Kyle: You are backtracking because you’re switching your position regarding acceptance rates and its influence on the difficulty to get into a school. </p>
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<p>I used a “what if” aka hypothetical (<sounds better) example because they’re easier to follow and take less time than finding a real world example.</p>
<p>My problem with what you said is that you state that an acceptance rate is the metric to use when comparing the difficulty of getting accepted for different schools and that if School A is lower than School B, than School A must be harder to get into. You can say that there’s a correlation between an acceptance rate and the difficulty to get accepted, but not a causation.</p>
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<p>A. Don’t guarantee anything that you can neither prove nor disprove. Again, choose your wording more carefully next time.
B. ‘gaurantee’ is spelled g u a r a n t e e. Did you not pick up on the red squiggly lines that immediately showed up after you misspelled the word?</p>
<p>I’m not arguing with you anymore.</p>
<p>This seems to excite you too much. You are beginning to pick fights about the most childish things.</p>
<p>You win, but only because I don’t want to flood these boards with such a dumb discussion.</p>
<p>Moving on…</p>