<p>oldfort,</p>
<p>Your advice is well-taken. Thank you. ;)</p>
<p>BalletGirl, part of the problem here is that the title of your post includes the words "Ivy League" and then you talk about "top 20 universities" and "top 15 LAC", not just Ivy League. There is a considerable difference in the acceptance rate between top Ivy's and some of the non-Ivy "top 20" and top LAC. If you plan to apply to a wide range of those schools, or all 35 of them, then you are in pretty good shape. </p>
<p>As another poster pointed out, your numbers do not take into account the fact that many top students are accepted into multiple top schools. I think the number is significant.</p>
<p>You may not like anecdotes, but I know a LOT of students with SAT I scores of over 2300, top 5%, great gpa, many AP courses with scores of 5s, national awards, who did NOT get accepted at multiple top schools last year. They all got accepted somewhere, but several went to schools that were not too near the top of their lists.</p>
<p>And don't kid yourself that there weren't a lot of students with over 700 on all three SAT I, top 5%, who were rejected by MIT last year. </p>
<p>Be very sure to cover all the bases on your selections. The admissions game is very unpredictable.</p>
<p>BalletGirl:</p>
<p>I also think that you underestimate the number taking the ACT, which is also over 1 million kids. Of course, some (many?) kids take both tests, but....</p>
<p>Oldfort: I disagree that a 2200+, great ECs.. etc has less than 10% chance, particularly if your include Cornell for non-residents. H, Y & P receive thousands of apps from students who will attend if they win the admissions lottery ("Gotta Play to Win"). For example, we had several kids at our HS who threw apps to HYPSM last year, but yet did not have the quals to even be be accepted at our state flagship Unis. If you carve out the applicants clearly wasting their money, the admission % of highly qualified apps will be higher than 10% -- still low, but higher than 10%.</p>
<p>Writing from way out west. Sorry, I have anecdotes, not statistics, but there are many perfect or near perfect SAT scorers at the tops of their classes in the west who will not consider going East for school. Many apply one reach to Stanford, and then end up at a LAC or strong California or other state school. They simply never enter the race for the Ivies because they can't imagine living in the North East. This should decrease the demand side in OP's stats.</p>
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<blockquote> <p>I therefore conclude that if you are high senior wanting to go to a top school and you have SAT scores above the 2100 mark, excellent grades, strong recommendations and ECs than the chance of your being able to get in to one of the top schools is quite high.<<</p> </blockquote>
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<p>I think your statement is essentially correct, but the weakness in the statement is that you don't know which <em>one</em> of the top schools it is that will take you. Thus the anxiety remains. </p>
<p>FredFredBurger has it right. With stats that strong you have a pretty decent chance of getting into one or a few of the top 20 schools -- provided you apply to them all. But unless you actually are going to apply to them all, you are back to guessing and hoping that you will end up being one of the lucky few at the 3 or 4 schools you do apply to.</p>
<p>I think there's a major flaw in your calculation. Only 3% of all test-takers in a given year score above 2100. Yet not all test-TAKERS are college applicants in that given year. The majority of students don't wait until their senior years to take the SAT. Most of them are now much more well-prepared. So you're talking about juniors, sophomores and even freshmen. The portion of seniors who score above 2100 must be much higher than 3%.</p>
<p>Is anyone else curious about Oldfort's anecdotes -- what kind of school IS this, where average students go to Harvard and the GC apparently picks up the phone and 'gets kids in'. Is your child's school some kind of secret backdoor into the Ivy League? I'm not familiar with any other schools like this. Is anyone else?</p>
<p>Many private school's college counselors have very good relationship with those top schools. It is not a secret back door, they just spend more time reaching out to those colleges' adcom. They travel to every college that seniors are interested in applying to - networking, make sure adcoms know what kind of students go to our HS. They also speak to most of adcoms a month(a few weeks) before the decision. They go through each candidate in detail. Adcom won't necessary say who is getting in for sure, but they would give a good indication. Our college counselor was instrumental in getting our daughter off the waitlist at an ivy. Our school is not on the same calibre as some of those top private boarding schools (they get 30+ into Stanford, going to Cornell and Duke is a step down), but our school is ranked one of the best in the state. The school has 100% placement. They don't achieve that by sitting back.</p>
<p>BG, though I see where your calculations could be flawed, I must say that you convincing make the argument of cream rising to the top.</p>
<p>If you're a smart student who has worked hard (something which is not necessarily tied to a 2100, but is a gestalt of transcript, essays, recs, etc.) chances are in your favor that you will attend a "top" school.</p>
<p>What's also funny is that as our notion of college competition is changing, so is our notion of what a top college is. I have a cousin who is a high school teacher and used to think of schools like George Washington U, Vanderbilt, Lehigh, Boston College, etc. as the Ivy League's bedridden little sister. Now she thinks of these schools as "cream of the crop," and every year she sees more and more top students attending and every year they are happy with their school.</p>
<p>It is good to have a dash of reality, too-- like your safety school, because there's a chance you may end up attending it.</p>
<p>Oldfort -sorry if this is going a little off topic but what specifically do you think your college counselor did to get your daughter off waitlist? I understand that of course top private school college counselors have many contacts with top colleges because that is the reason parents send their kids to prep schools, and the students have already met tough admission criteria for the prep school so there are a high percentage that are going to meet criteria for Ivies, and college counselors can express concern that "I can't recommend your college to my seniors next year because you keep turning good candidates down..." but what are the magic words that the CC said to get her off the waitlist?</p>
<p>It's rare that you see a thread where most people are right :-)</p>
<p>I agree that there is a whole industry feeding on the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) of the college admission process. </p>
<p>I think the takeaway from this thread is that if you're a great student and you choose your applications carefully then you will go to a great school with your intellectual peers. This occurs because as more great students attend schools that were once considered lesser, those schools become great BECAUSE more great students go there.</p>
<p>I kept posting to such threads like this one (yeah there've been more than one), that the 3% is misleading. Because the 1.4 mil SAT-takers every year include students from 7th grade. You should be looking at the number of seniors who are taking the SAT. I'm sure the % of those who score higher than 2100 would be much higher.</p>
<p>Muffy333 - for another real life example of a GC dealing with college admissions over a student being waitlisted read the excellent book The Gatekeepers. It goes into some detail on this subject for one kid at a top private school re two top colleges.</p>
<p>The BIGGEST flaw in Balletgirl's 'clever' prediction is not considering SUPERSCORING, which is the biggest tool college bound students use..</p>
<p>Balletgirl is correct. Just chanced on this thread this morning. I used her thinking without knowing last year for my son who is now at Columbia. Applied to all Ivies, Stanford, MIT and sat back and predicted he would get into 5 of them. School counselor was shocked at my chutzpah. He had perfect As in the strongest curriculum anyone had ever taken in the 100+year history of NE private prep school (not boarding) incl 2 languages to AP Lit level, 770+ on 3 SATs, 2350 SAT 1, single sitting, one solid EC, varsity tennis, no community service (30 hours reqd by school), everyone else in school had multiple comm service projects, zillion hours volunteering, jobs, research ,etc. </p>
<p>I figured the schools needed very high SAT scorers for USNews and to compensate for the holistic EC kids and the URMs, and since son was already in top 1% of school (GPA etc) I guaranteed him admission.</p>
<p>Made one mistake: counselor, out of Asian stereotyping, insisted on MIT to which son did not want to go, but out of fear of antagonizing her he sent in EA to MIT (Pton was preferred school), I predicted rejection, he got deferred, then Pton waitlisted him RD, then rejected. So, other than HYP,Stanford he got in everywhere he applied. </p>
<p>Read Avery's book, Early Admission Game, as SATs increase, all others things being equal, your chances go way beyond 10%.</p>
<p>
[quote]
your chance of getting into ivies is still less than 10%
[/quote]
more correctly this should be writtern as "your chance of getting into a specific Ivy is still less than 10% and it is pretty much true. The OP was talking about the chance of getting into at least one of the Ivies ... and that the odds of getting into at least one are pretty good. Both statements could be true ... and I believe for well qualified candidates both are true,</p>
<p>6y6y6,</p>
<p>The CEEB is 2006 data specifically for SENIORS.</p>
<p>Accl*Mass Force</p>
<p>The data is for seniors, so I think that superscoring is less an issue since, I believe, many students do not take the SATs more than once their senior year.</p>
<p>^They could always use their junior SAT scores (to superscore).. Most students give their SAT in their junior years.. by the time they are senior, they only have 1 or 2 chances left to give the SAT again.. so once again just by taking the senior scores is also invalid</p>
<p>The data is for the senior class. That does not mean that the tests are necessarily taken during the senior year. From the report itself:</p>
<p>"Data in this report are for high school graduates in the year 2007. Information is summarized for seniors who took the SAT Reasoning Test at any time during their high school years through March 2007. If a student took the test more than once, the most recent score is used."</p>
<p>A table is given showing the last year in which seniors took the SAT:
Senior 1,001,667
Junior 485,401
Sophomore 6,339
Freshman 1,124
Total 1,494,531</p>
<p>I was surprised the number of senior year test-takers was so high. I had thought it would peak with the junior year.</p>
<p>It would be really interesting to see highest superscored results. Too bad they aren't available.</p>
<p>Here's the link to the pdf: <a href="http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/news_info/cbsenior/yr2007/national-report.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/about/news_info/cbsenior/yr2007/national-report.pdf</a></p>
<p>Here is a similar thread Tokenadult started:
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/413821-sat-score-frequencies-freshman-class-sizes.html%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/413821-sat-score-frequencies-freshman-class-sizes.html</a></p>
<p>2blue, thanks for your clarification.</p>