<p>Let me amend that last estimate to maybe 10% of the average acceptance rates for that college.</p>
<p>edad,</p>
<p>I would guess that if you pulled out recruited athletes, legacies, and URM's the range would be much narrower. Just a guess, but I think these groups represent approx. 40% of the student body at many LAC's.</p>
<p>I liked the scattergram test. Here's another possible test of the crapshoot thesis: let's ask the admissions officers to weigh in and tell us how large the admissions "cusp" is for them; that is, the number of cases that are really close calls that they have to agonize over in committee. I'll bet that since they know their targets for no-FA kids, ALANA students, recruited athletes, legacies, IS/OOS, etc., that cusp is not all that big (at least once you move out of the HYPSM tier). In other words, the process remains mysterious, yet anything but random or irrational.</p>
<p>What is ALANA?</p>
<p>curious --</p>
<p>If you look at the scattergrams for various schools, there are a couple of types of patterns that you see pretty clearly:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The most selective schools -- HYPS, but also pretty much all of the Ivies, MIT, Chicago, top LACs -- have no pattern, except that they reject most of the kids, and the ones the accept are usually near (but often not at) the top in SATs and GPA, with some outliers. It is fairly clear that no function of SAT/GPA lets you identify a more-than-50% likelihood of admission (maybe not even more-than-25%). Obviously, some of those colleges have more admits, some less, but the lack of a clear pattern stands out.</p></li>
<li><p>With the state universities and large second-tier private universities, there is usually some kind of line you could draw based on a SAT/GPA function for a particular college/high school pair, where 75% or more of the kids over that line (sometimes 100%, but rarely) get accepted, and then there's a band of 50-50, and then below that very few kids get accepted. For some colleges and some schools the line is sharper or fuzzier than with other pairings, but it's there. However, it's important to recognize that the middle band where the college picks and chooses may account for 1/3-1/2 of the kids taken from that particular high school.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>This hypothetical function is sometimes more weighted to SATs, sometimes more to grades, but it's definitely there for most of the large schools. With the smaller colleges and LACs, if a lot of kids don't apply from a high school in a 3-5 year period, there's no pattern to see, of course.</p>
<p>Curious, your 40% estimate seems high. Then I could have a different perspective because my D was admitted in the bottom 25% by SATs and rank and she was not an athlete, legacy, URM and had no specific, definable hook. My D also attends a college without a football team and a very small number of athletes and serious sports teams. The SAT spread is still 200 or so points.</p>
<p>For those late to the thread I thought I?d summarize where we are so you don?t have to read everything.</p>
<p>The plan is to collect data on the results of the admissions process as it rolls in over the next two weeks. We are asking folks to look at the results and tell us into which of three classes they fall. </p>
<p>Group 1: The results were transparently predictable either because they were totally consistent with the USNWR rankings, or the relative SAT scores of the schools, or your preconceived notions of reach, match, and safety for your kid. </p>
<p>Group 2: The results contain an apparent anomaly, acceptance by a school that, on the basis of some other rejection, the student should have been rejected by or the reverse. However, you know the reason why this probably occurred. For example the student was a recruited athlete at one school but not at the other or because he/she was a legacy at one school and not the other.</p>
<p>Group 3: The results contain an anomaly for which you have no good explanation.</p>
<p>We are trying to find out the relative percentages of the cases in which the data fall into these groups. </p>
<p>Some posters have argued that it?s a waste of time but I am curious to see if the results are consistent with my expectations and I hope enough of you are too so that we get a decent sample size. At this point we have about three sample points, but the bulk of the data should arrive next week or shortly thereafter. I am hoping for around 100.</p>
<p>
I think U of Chicago admissions are more holistic, to the extent that they really place great weight on the writing, and the are open to submission of supplemental materials. (Writing is one of my d's strengths). My d was deferred EA from Chicago and submitted some extra materials after that, so in a sense she had two bites at the apple with her application. She started off light & frivolous (and attention-grabbing), ended up with a submission that showed her more serious, academic side. </p>
<p>But the bottom line is that you can't equate the schools. They both accept a similar percentage of applicants, GPA & score range are similar, but they are not the same. Brandeis is not looking for the same students that Chicago is, the people who make the decisions at Brandeis don't make them at Chicago, and they aren't dealing with the same set of applicants.</p>
<p>no, I wouldn't equate those two in any case --just would expect some overlap but of course you're right and in fact what you say goes for any two schools you choose to compare.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Could you explain the last comment?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>In the UCs (esp. the one considered the best of the system), i.e. Berkeley, Asians are overrepresented compared to population numbers. In the meantime the underrepresented minorities are more underrepresented than ever.</p>
<p>I'm not from CA so someone else may know more - GPA and SATs count a lot in their admissions. Don't know if they are thinking about tweaking this.</p>
<p>What do you mean by a crapshoot?</p>
<p>Depending on your answer, you plan makes more or less sense.</p>
<p>If you mean what Barry Schwartz -- the Swarthmore professor who wrote this <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-schwartz18mar18,0,7478180.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail%5B/url%5D">http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-schwartz18mar18,0,7478180.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail</a> meant, then, of course, you would expect to find a strong correlation between SATs/grades and college rank. His point is that, once you have the basic qualifications, you might as well pick names out of a hat.</p>
<p>I don't think anyone argues that college admissions is a crapshoot if that means that there is not a correlation between grades/SATs and admissions decisions. These are not correlated at a factor of 1.0, but are strongly correlated.</p>
<p>strongly correlated, but within a range of at least +/- 100 SAT points.</p>
<p>
Yes -- we didn't have access to any scattergrams, but Georgetown SFS was initially on my daughter's top-3, "dream school" list -- looking at admission criteria it was dropped. Colleges actually give a lot of information about their criteria, both directly in stating how much they value and consider various factors (such as weight put on interviews); and in the way they structure their own applications or application supplements. Sometimes the short-answer questions are quite telling, just by the nature of things they ask. I still thought Barnard was a huge reach for my d. with her test scores, but she has told me that she thought she has a good chance of getting in all along -- maybe wishful thinking, but she also interviewed on campus and talked to students there, so she may have had feedback that I was not aware of.
My daughter is not an athlete, legacy, or URM. She has a reasonably good but not amazing GPA for elite admissions, was in the top 5 of her high school class but not val or sal, and (as already noted), test scores at the 25th percentile or below. I think there is far too much emphasis focused on the athlete/legacy/URM hook. Yes, it helps, but many who fit that category also have high GPA and test scores, and some of the admitted students in the lower score range don't - so the impact on score range is probably not as great as you imagine. It is not that simple -- colleges are looking for far more than those 3 qualities. </p>
<p>I think that your idea of assembling data could be useful, but only if you expanded the data you sought and recognized that different schools are looking for different things. I would tend to agree with you about athletes and Stanford -- at least for those of us on the west coast who live nearby. Most of the kids from local bay area high schools who get into Stanford are recruited athletes, at least among the public schools. But maybe that's a function of geography -- it's pretty easy for the Stanford coaches to get to the local high school games and to meet the local high school coaches, and to watch those local kids as they come up on their teams through high school. I'm sure the coaches travel as well... but the point is, they don't have to travel to keep a close watch on the local athletes. </p>
<p>But then you have to factor in some other things: What type of athletics does the school have? (Div I, Div III?) If the student is an athlete, is the student recruited or not? How strong an athlete if not recruited, and what was the sport? </p>
<p>Outside of athletics -- what other categories does the student fit? Is the student talented in art or music, and if so, what type of talent? Again -- you would need some sort of weighting, to distinguish between the amazing and the merely proficient. And what majors does the college offer that might fit the talent? </p>
<p>I don't think CC is ever going to give you the data points you would need, because CC itself is a highly biased sample. But the bottom line, unless you have data points as to the student profile and the school, you would never see the whole picture. </p>
<p>My guess would be that if you teased out SAT profiles of admitted students who were math/science oriented from those who were arts/humanities oriented, you would see very different score ranges. </p>
<p>I think you would also have to sort out the differences between ED/RD profiles; look at geographic factors; type of high school; etc. You would really need a detailed questionnaire and thousands of data points before you would start to have a reliable pattern emerge about any school.</p>
<p>I didn't read the entire thread, but in reply to the OP, the schools that my senior didn't get into were a result of our misinterpreting what the schools wanted. Mine had one upset that didn't make sense to us and was accepted at a very tough reach school, but not at another with less stringent requirements. I called the second school and they were nice enough to tell me they were looking for a different type of student. That wasn't obvious on their website or at the visits, so we wasted the application fee and my child wasted several days putting together a very complex application package. The questions I asked after a rejection were very different from the questions asked before applying. Parents and students don't always know in advance what a school wants. That is why our children apply to a variety of schools. I have spent time reading the board for that school, and realize now that my child is nothing like the kids on CC who have been accepted there. It would never have been a match. The school did us a favor.</p>
<p>As an admissions counselor -and- a parent who has gone through the application process with her child, I know how stressful this can be for both parents and students. Parents do not want their children to be hurt and they do not like the fact that their child's happiness is completely out of their hands, placed in the hands of an unknown and possibly arbitrary admissions committee. As parents, we want to be assured that the admissions committee has dealt with their children fairly ... but comparing statistics will not accomplish that, although it may make parents feel as if they are doing something on behalf of their children. Unfortunately, that "something" cannot possible prove whether a decision was fair or not. </p>
<p>I have spoken with many parents who believed their children were not offered admission but some other friend with a lesser record was given admission. What the parents may not take into consideration, and what does not show up in a comparison of stats, is the number of honors courses a student has taken, the -quality- of the extracurricular experiences, the strength of the essay, the strength of the references. </p>
<p>Parents best serve their children by helping them to identify a number of schools of varying competitiveness which would suit their children's needs, and then help their children to feel happy about being admitted to any of those choices. When parents support their children's focused passion for a particular school, or when they set their own expectations about which schools are appropriate choices, they are setting their children up for negative experiences.</p>
<p>The bottom line? Comparing stats when stats alone do not determine admission is a waste of energy.</p>
<p>BTW, I should add that while Standford definitely reached to the middle of the applicant pool at our high school neither accepted kid was a slouch - approx 97 weighted average and 1350-1400 old style SAT scores. Just that there were quite a few kids with higher numbers. It's a bit of a contrast with the Harvard scattergram where all but two kids have GPAs over 100 and SATs over 1500. One of the two was just a bit short and one was at 1240 with a 97 GPA. I'd guess that one had a hook. </p>
<p>Obviously stats don't tell the whole story - but the chances of getting into Harvard from our school are clearly not good without 1500+ SAT scores unless you have something else special in your application.</p>
<p>Mathmom: re the UC's, the emphasis on SAT scores has been reduced and the new holistic review at Berkeley and UCLA expressly looks at more than SAT and GPA (formerly, there was a formula based on grades and SAT's and students were "automatically" in if they had above a certain score; other students who fell below that had their entire applications reviewed). The UC's also stopped participating in the National Merit scholarships, except for the $2500 winners. All these measures are in response to the elimination of affirmative action, which has resulted in far lower admission rates for certain unrepresented minorities (and a soaring in the admission rates for Asian students). The resulting process, which also does not consider legacies (but does give some atheletic scholarships and favors Californians) is quite egalitarian, and the economic diversity is wide-ranging.</p>
<p>Last year we were able to see the 3 year scattergram history for Garfield High School because they had a public sign on. They quickly took that offline but in the meantime, it gave us a chance to see how a good public school stacked up to an elite private.</p>
<p>For the most part, the good public and the top elite got similar treatment from the universities. There was consistancy and you can imagine there would be when both types of schools send some kids to the same top universities year after year. With constistancy, the GCs are able to predict acceptances. With consistancy, the adcom and GC depts get fewer hysterical calls from legacies and heartbroken applicants. </p>
<p>Looking at Garfield's scattergram history we could see that G'town held the line with GPA--nothing under 4.0 for the good public, nothing under 4.2 for the elite private, SAT scores above 1450. UPenn was the same. HYP was the same though the SAT scores were above 1500. Barnard took a few that were off the typical Ivy acceptee, so did Brown. I imagine that those kids were athletes or had incredible ECs. An applicant has to be compelling to be an anamoly. It isn't random. Adcom aren't pulling names from a hat. Says me.</p>
<p>Different schools have different scattergram histories. My guess is that G'town takes more anamolies from Jesuit schools. My second guess is that the range for SAT and GPA depends on the school. The lower the decile, the lower the acceptable range of stats. I'm not sure lower decile schools keep scattergrams but if they did, I imagine that their small data would suggest that G'town, for example, would take a 1200 SAT and a 3.5 GPA. If I think about it, that fits G'towns mission.</p>
<p>For all that mini says about the mercenary aims of private universities, I know executive board members who are passionate about the university's mission. Thus the different standards held for different schools.</p>
<p>The short answer is that a few of the top schools do take anamolies from good publics and elite privates. If you look at your school scattergram history over the past five years, you will be able to see which schools do that--you will see one or two dots per year that are off the +1450 SAT and 4.0+ GPA line (usually not off both lines though). I know one friend saw a dot off her child's G'town scattergram line in one year. She was so excited--until the GC told her that it was a recruited athlete for a major sport.</p>
<p>I'm the OP and I'd like to request that new posters read post #67 before posting. If you have a data point to add please identify in which group you think it belongs: 1,2, or 3. Also, if you could please note at the begining of your post which group you feel your data point belongs in, so i can keep a running tally without having to read all the posts. No offense but some of them are a bit verbose.</p>
<p>Cheers,</p>
<p>That wasn't directed at you. I found that discussion really interesting.</p>