<p>The new USNews ranking lists Princeton's midrange as 1370-1590. That means 25% of the accepted students had a perfect score? Good God. You are some brave kids. I wouldn't want to be up against that.</p>
<p>Its funny. You see those numbers frequently on forums like this yet I never put two and two together to realize that 25% had perfect scores! So appx 1050 undergrads have perfect SAT scores. Wow.</p>
<p>50% of Americans are of less than average intelligence..wooOOooOOooOO!</p>
<p>Well less than 25% of princetonians are of less than average intelligence.</p>
<p>per common data set/u.s. news reporting standards, the reported 25-75 SAT midrange is not the midrange of composite scores, but rather the sum of the midranges for the separate verbal and math sections of the test. because many students are "lopsided" in their scoring on the two sections, it is reasonable to infer that the 75th percentile for composite scores at princeton is less than the reported 1590 (as it is less than the reported number for all schools). hope this begins to make sense.</p>
<p>I'll try to simplify even further.</p>
<p>1590 = 800 Math + 790 reading.
USNWR adds them for the sake of simplicity.</p>
<p>So really, 25% have 800 math, 25% have 800 reading. </p>
<p>That doesn't mean 1600 of course, since most get 800 in one but not BOTH sections.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info padfoot!</p>
<p>it's still pretty crazy lol.</p>
<p>Right - USNWR kind of confuses the numbers as it reports them.</p>
<p>It does give you a sense of what kind of students are in class with you. If you're a physics major, the 25th percentile of your class may well be an 800 math. If you're a math major, the 75th percentile is likely to be an IMO gold medallist. :p</p>
<p>Yeah I think only about 100 kids got a perfect score - 2400 - this past year. It's extremely difficult to do. (The old 1600 - a.k.a. "calling collect" - was somewhere in the low thousands...correct me if I'm wrong.)</p>
<p>I believe I read that half the applicants with perfect SAT scores are rejected. Someone like f.scottie or PtonGrad2000 would probably know.</p>
<p>I also remember the acceptance rate of 1600 scorers, when that was the maximum possible, reported as around 50 percent, but that must have been (see graphs in The Early Admissions Game) a combination of very different early and regular decision figures. Princeton would try to lock in academic stars in ED to avoid the cross-admit losses in the regular round, so the ED rate must have been quite high. </p>
<p>The equivalent data point from Harvard: from Nov. 2003 article in the Atlantic Monthly,</p>
<p>
[quote]
Marlyn McGrath-Lewis, the admissions director at Harvard College, says that "the double 800"—a perfect score—"is not that great a distinction anymore." In each of the past few years Harvard has received more than 500 applications with double-800 scores, and has accepted just under half of them.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>So about 250 people a year, or 1 out of 8 accepted students at Harvard, had 1600 on the recentered SAT.</p>