<p>Likewise, anecdotal examples do not automatically disprove statistics.</p>
<p>Everyone knows a guy who's son's friend's mother's cousin's hair stylist's dog's favorite toy's tree's polar bear's uncle's son go rejected even though he cured cancer.</p>
<p>Just like everyone knows the guy who lived as healthily as possible and still died at the age of 23 because of a heart attack.</p>
<p>Come up with as many counterexamples as you want; still doesn't disprove statistics.</p>
<p>here's a sample of currently enrolled Cornell students stats:</p>
<p>Currently Enrolled: Cornell Year: Junior
Sex: Female, Major: Sociology
HS GPA: 3.8, SAT: 1320 </p>
<p>Currently Enrolled: Cornell Year: Sophomore
Sex: Male, Major: History
HS GPA: 3.7, SAT: 2280 </p>
<p>Currently Enrolled: Cornell, Year: Freshman
Sex: Male Major: Industrial and Labor Relations
HS GPA: 4.2, SAT: 2111, ACT: 32 </p>
<p>Hope this helps</p>
<p>"Everyone knows a guy who's son's friend's mother's cousin's hair stylist's dog's favorite toy's tree's polar bear's uncle's son go rejected even though he cured cancer."
^^^ Yeah right! Ok, believe what you want to. I've been on CC for 3 years, and have seen too many times when students make the mistake of thinking they will get into a top college, because the "odds" suggest they will, only to be stunned when it doesn't happen. But 18 year olds with 85 posts know better, right?</p>
<p>"Yeah right! Ok, believe what you want to. I've been on CC for 3 years, and have seen too many times when students make the mistake of thinking they will get into a top college, because the "odds" suggest they will, only to be stunned when it doesn't happen. But 18 year olds with 85 posts know better, right?"</p>
<p>you've been on CC 3 years- good for you. and how many times have you seen the odds suggest that a student would get at least into one of his/her choice colleges- and this has actually happened?</p>
<p>"I urge everyone reading this thread to take statements like that to an experienced teacher of statistics and ask if the teacher agrees. I am very confident that the teacher will identify this conclusion from those premises as an example of mistaken reasoning about statistics."</p>
<p>Please tell me you actually read the statement you quoted. The poster you quoted makes a number of assumptions- and then draws the only logical mathematical conclusion from them. If you have a problem with the assumptions- thats one thing, and you can say that you do object to these assumptions. But please explain how the world that is the incorrect conclusion given all the assumptions he provided? Please, do elaborate beyond invoking the experienced statistics teachers that, unfortunately, are not going to post on these boards any time soon.</p>
<p>"how many times have you seen the odds suggest that a student would get at least into one of his/her choice colleges"
I put "the odd's" in quotation marks to the make the point that "odds" or "chances", in the end, have no bearing on whether a student gets accepted anywhere. Therefore adding up the "odds" and concluding that a student will get in SOMEWHERE is sheer lunacy at worst and deceptive at best. At every top college there are thousands and thousands more qualified applicants than there are are spots for. And as for how many times a student with great stats., grades, etc... DOESN'T get into a top college- do some research of acceptance threads for past years- there often seems to be no rhyme or reason why a student does or doesn't get accepted. Application decisions are made by those who see the whole package submitted by students- recommendation letters transcript, essays, etc. - something that none of us on CC are privy to.</p>
<p>enderkin/mondo, the approx 1600 who got 2350+ in a year included those with many sittings, not just one sitting. It was the total for the testing year, I spoke with the statistician/psychometrician at ETS who does this.</p>
<p>To tokenadult: your statement that a marginal candidate with high scores and high GPA is still a marginal candidate is mind boggling. Did you read what you wrote? Someone with high scores and high GPA is not marginal and someone who does all this over 4 years of high school is highly likely to be superb in essays, etc.</p>
<p>For all of you: Avery in Early Admissions Game has plotted admit rates based on SAT scores.</p>
<p>I wish I had read truazn, wish he had written last year, I would have been much less anxious but for my son it worked out exactly as truazn predicts, no HYP, 5 Ivies + Duke, etc.</p>
<p>"Likewise, anecdotal examples do not automatically disprove statistics.</p>
<p>Everyone knows a guy who's son's friend's mother's cousin's hair stylist's dog's favorite toy's tree's polar bear's uncle's son go rejected even though he cured cancer.</p>
<p>Just like everyone knows the guy who lived as healthily as possible and still died at the age of 23 because of a heart attack.</p>
<p>Come up with as many counterexamples as you want; still doesn't disprove statistics."</p>
<p>Well, this might be true at a normal school where qualified people are in short supply. I went to schools where there were more than 50 people with the 1500+ SAT and 770+ SATIIs and everyone applies to the top schools. So I could observe trends very easily. And the top people had that plus a lot more. And out of all those people, maybe <em>one</em> or two would get into Princeton. A few would get into Harvard. They would typically take a couple of people from our math team, even though all 6 people would be in the top 100 in math.</p>
<p>This is so cool. Very clever.</p>
<p>"Early Admissions Game" is a 4 year old book written about admissions statistics from over 10 years ago.Thngs have changed a lot in college admissions since this book was written. [ It's called the babyboomlet] In fact this book helped to start the widespread frenzy and "gaming" so prevelant college applications that goes on today.The secrets of this book are no longer secrets, or very helpful to taday's applicants, IMO.</p>
<p>menloparkmom, the broad trends of relationship between SAT scores and admission rates are still true. I spoke to Avery at Harvard some months ago and he and his research assistants had updated the numbers for a sequel and the relationship still holds.</p>
<p>What many people do not get is that the no of high SAT scorers is small, around 1600 for those scoring over 2350 (as one example) and of these approx 400 were multiple attempts and 300 were foreign students as in students from Europe, Asia, Canada etc. The US domiciled first attempts are around 1000. Any no of over 750s in subject tests but when you factor in 3 over 750s the no shrinks to 20,000 (of which less than 900 had over 2340), and now factor in high GPAs in challenging courses, the no shrinks even more.</p>
<p>Truazn is correct. There might be some outliers who get rejected, especially Asian but for the most part profs and colleges want some part of their college to be academic stars. The Ivies have around 1600 National Merit Finalists and if you factor in the low PSAT cutoffs for national merit scholar in a large no of states, it is clear how these colleges winnow the 14900 National Merit Scholars to less than 2000. And now, what truazn forgot to add, perhaps, you must also have 5s in 7 or 8 APs, mostly by junior year.</p>
<p>Now show me someone who has all these credentials. 20 CC people will point out to a dozen they know and that's the point: most of the high flyers are in this blog but CC makes it appear it is a reflection of the world at large. It is not.</p>
<p>And, in response to the previous poster, I don't know too many schools that have over 50 National Merit Scholars with all of them or most with scores over 770. How did he know this? All 50 showed him their scores?</p>
<p>sorry, should have said 50 with over 1500 and not National Merit altho it amounts to the same.</p>
<p>
[quote]
If you have a problem with the assumptions- thats one thing, and you can say that you do object to these assumptions.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yes, I object to the completely unwarranted assumption that admission decisions are "independent" in the sense used by statisticians. I'll quote one of the AP statistics teachers I asked about this here: </p>
<p>
<p>What is independence? It means that when you learn about the outcome of one event, it has no influence on your guess about the probability of success in another event. However, in this case, if a student gets rejected from 8 schools, that DOES influence my guess about how likely he is to get rejected from the 9th school. I'd say someone who gets rejected from 8 schools is more likely to get rejected from the 9th than someone who didn't get rejected from 8 schools.
</p>
<p>There were other replies to much the same effect. I agree with everyone posting here (yes, that means you, ramaswami) that a student with test scores above 2300, which are rare </p>
<p>and good grades in a strong college-preparatory curriculum is a student with a very decent shot at admission to a competitive college. But after the college looks at the high school courses taken and grades in those, and then looks at test scores, the college will still look at extracurricular activities and "roommate qualities" important for choosing students for a residential college community. It is still possible for a student with high scores to fail to gain admission to that student's favorite college </p>
<p>and it is still possible for such a student to be not so much rejected as crowded out by legacy students, student-athletes, development candidates, and other students who have other desirable characteristics. </p>
<p>Anyway, what I'm objecting to is not getting good grades--I think that that is a very expedient thing for a high school student to do--nor to getting high test scores. Prepare well to make the best case you can to get into college is always my advice to students. But because we are also discussing here a factual point about how to solve statistics problems, I'll keep hammering away at the error in statistical reasoning that has shown up more than once in this thread (and often in other threads on CC). I think the OP and the other bright young people reading this thread deserve to leave high school with a correct understanding of statistics, even if they never took an AP statistics course. It is plain enough, or should be to anyone who thinks about it, that the aggregate admission results of the GROUP of students who score at the 2300+ level and have good grades doesn't tell the whole story about the INDIVIDUAL chances of any one student with those credentials, because an admission committee at any highly selective college will consider other factors too. And to reemphasize this point, even if the admission committees act without communicating with one another beforehand, they don't act "independently" in the statistical sense (as explained in the quotation above) because they may all be alike in considering some disqualifying factor in the same student, whose admission result may end up being alike at all the colleges. The multiplicative rule applies to tosses of a fair coin, but it doesn't apply to the actions of college admission committees if one is only grouping students by test scores and grades and not by other characteristics of interest to those committees.</p>
<p>You can't determine the percentages for one individual's chances of getting into an Ivy League school, only the percentages for the population. Now, if you were to do that, you would basically be saying something around the lines of, "if the candidate is extremely qualified, the chance of him/her getting into at least ONE of the eight Ivy League schools is very high", which is basically a no-brainer. Seeing as only so many students score over a 2300 and have the GPA you said, it would be assumed that those students have a way better chance than most. However, one can't be completely confident because there have still been cases where those kids have been rejected, due to some factor or another. So, basically what you're concluding is that there's a higher chance, but there's still space for error. Nothing has been gained from this argument...</p>
<p>I think what truazn implies is not someone with high scores and high gpa and nothing else but he is presenting these as more measurable but the truth is someone with all this is also highly likely to write good essays and have decent ECs. The posters comment about how the adcoms would be turned off by someone who is racist or sexist is of course true but it is incorrect reasoning to imply that someone with these scores will have something negative; it is more probable that such a person will have decent ECs and someone bright will be smart enough (most times) to hide their racism.</p>
<p>Tokenadult-
independence in this case does not apply to your guesses as to the odds of admission. in other words, it doesn't matter whether or not one admissions decision changes your perception of the odds of admission at other schools.</p>
<p>the actual relevance of independence in this case is whether or not the admissions decision at one college for a particular student affects the odds of being admitted at other institutions. while your view of the odds may change based on results, that is irrelevant- it is about the actual odds, and not your perception of them. the odds of admission for X school and Y candidate depend only upon Y's qualifications and X's criteria- not on the admissions decisions made by other schools regarding Y.</p>
<p>colleges for the most part do not communicate with each other and coordinate decisions. Unless something shady and perhaps illegal is going on, Yale will not see that Bob has been admitted to Harvard, and then decide that they will be less likely to admit Bob as well because he has been admitted to Harvard.</p>
<p>what truazn is essentially arguing is that the average person with the aforementioned shot has a very tiny chance of being denied at all the competitive schools of his/her choice. sure, you cannot exactly determine the odds of someone's admission based on analyzing the odds for those in his/her specific demographic groups- but you can get a rough idea. that's what this thread is about. the only point people are attempting to prove with this thread is that people are freaking out too much. No one is trying to prove or argue that everyone with the same stats has the same chances for admissions, nor that all schools admit using the same criteria. those are merely assumptions made for simplicity that do not affect the overall outcome of the argument- that people are freaking out too much.</p>
<p>Ramaswami, my high school had 73 national merit finalists in the graduating class. This was published in the newspaper. The average SAT score was 1400/1600 and there were almost 200 in the class. I estimated that about 50 people were higher than 1500. I went to a magnet school so that's why there were so many people with high test scores. </p>
<p>BTW, "national merit scholar" is not the same as national merit finalist.<br>
At least before 2006, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation selects the 2000 best in the country. (It expanded to 2500 sometime in the past 10 years, and now they use national merit scholar" to mean anyone who gets scholarship money from anywhere and is a national merit finalist.)</p>
<p>My high school had 11 national merit scholars under the old definition (top 2000 in nation.) Two of these guys got into Harvard. One got into Princeton. Most of them were rejected from Stanford. Yale wasn't very popular--most didn't apply there so I don't know much about how they select people. As far as I know, everybody who tried for it got into MIT.</p>
<p>And the National Merit Scholarship requires an essay and a counselor recommendation, so the notion that these guys wrote terrible essays or had bad recs is probably wrong. Also, nearly all the national merit scholars were put on the wait list at Harvard, so the notion that all these guys had som hidden fatal flaw like a criminal history or terrible rec is probably false.</p>
<p>Based on this experience, I think it's a lot harder to get into HYP than people seem to think on this thread.</p>
<p>I think there is an overemphasis in this discussion on prestige for prestige sake. Some of this is born out of cultural prejudice (often an Asian family's preoccupation, as is pointed out by the OP) and almost always out of insecurity, (i.e. self-worth unhealthily tied up in whether ones goes to HYP, etc.). There is often too much attributed to what "prestige" can actually deliver, that is to say, it is way overrated in terms of tangible outcomes.</p>
<p>Many of the distinctions being made in this discusssion, and throughout much of CC (higher Ivy/lower Ivy and the like) are what Freud referred to as the "narcissism of small differences." One can get an Ivy League quality education (and often much better than at places like Harvard and MIT) at many schools in the US. </p>
<p>Prestige-seeking, in and of itself, and what is often associated with prestige-seeking, risk-aversion, unwilling to challenge the status quo, an extreme concern with making the grade, etc. is actually an enemy to a real education (from the Latin e(x) ducere, to lead out of one self). </p>
<p>For argument sake here, let's say there are 35 colleges and universities (including LACs) in the US that can provide an Ivy League quality education. This is what I believe to be a rule of thumb to be competitive (not necessarily a surety at any one) at all of them:</p>
<p>2100+ on SATs with a pretty even distribution across M, CR and Writing.
700+ on each of two SATIIs
A very high GPA in a rigorous academic program </p>
<p>Consistency over time and demonstrated excellence in an EC or two
Accomplishment/Talent in a Performing Art and/or in a Sport
Natural leadership skills emerging from the ECs above</p>
<p>Passion and Drive (demonstrated by perservance amidst difficulties in academics/ECs)</p>
<p>Evidence (through rec's, essays, etc.) of HARD WORK</p>
<p>I think it's a rather straightforward formula:</p>
<p>Academic Accomplishment + Talent + Passion + Hard Work</p>
<p>I think if you can ring the bell loudly on all four elements of the equation then you have an excellent chance of getting into one of the countries top schools. </p>
<p>Academic accomplishments alone, irrespective of how high one's SAT scores, will most often not suffice.</p>
<p>Academic accomplishments <em>require</em> talent plus passion plus hard work.</p>
<p>"Prestige-seeking, in and of itself, and what is often associated with prestige-seeking, risk-aversion, unwilling to challenge the status quo, an extreme concern with making the grade, etc. is actually an enemy to a real education (from the Latin e(x) ducere, to lead out of one self)."</p>
<p>It is easier to challenge the status quo when you have some credentials like an HYP degree.</p>
<p>Anyway, I see nothing wrong with trying to attain an academic distinction that reflects one's academic performance, talent, and hard work. My advisor talked about the Nobel Prize ten years before he won it. Does this imply that he has an "aversion to risk taking," or was somehow not genuinely passionate about science? Is there something wrong with having aspirations for getting credit for what you do? </p>
<p>For those who follow football, what if LSU was undefeated and was left out of the national championship game? This happened to Auburn a few years ago. There was a lot of complaining about the BCS system and why there should be a more meritocratic system for choosing the champion. Yet no one faults them for wanting to go to the national championship game rather than a perfectly good BCS game like the Sugar Bowl or Rose Bowl. Many of these guys will go on to lucrative pro careers, so they don't need to go to the national championship. How come people always complain about students when they want to get some credit for what they have done?</p>
<p>"It is easier to challenge the status quo when you have some credentials like an HYP degree."</p>
<p>I think that is bogus and a cop out.</p>