<p>He/she probably meant 1890 but mistyped. 890 is beyond awful - 2 300’s and a 290??? At that point you cannot argue that the score was due to low income, “lack of cultural experience” (some crap that was used to justify a 1300 URM’s acceptance to Stanford), etc.</p>
<p>@ Post #2: Where do you even live? I mean, 10k a year? </p>
<p>You wouldn’t even be able to eat where I live.</p>
<p>bumppppppppppppppppp</p>
<p>acceptances seem like such a crapshoot</p>
<p>sometimes I get the impression that if you’re Asian, it’s better to suck at math and science and not be ranked number 1 -.-</p>
<p>touche, tikiman 
you may be right. be a banjo playing, black rights activist touting asian!</p>
<p>Not sure how “Out there” this is for you guys, but my school had a black guy ranked about 6th in his class of 70, GPA was maybe 3.7-3.8ish. His SAT was decent, maybe 2000, don’t think he took the ACT… no AP’s under his belt, no SATIIs, decent extracurriculars (2 years in theatre, 3 in yearbook, small stuff in between). No leadership positions… Maybe a good interview, and he got into Harvard. Waitlisted, but they still let him in eventually. AT HARVARD. It was a shocker to all of us… I think the first kid to get into an IVY league school (school is about 5 years old).</p>
<p>“mexican- also low-income, Questbridge Finalist, family makes 20K, 2200 SAT, tutoring, teen committee, top 15% ranking, went to mexico to help/volunteer, took ap calc ab senior year, good essay writer. accepted at YALE. going to YALE.
And this is bad because…?”
LOL, my thoughts exactly.</p>
<p>“What I think is more disturbing is how you guys know their stats so well =P…”
ditto to this : P</p>
<p>my story is…every one at my school is super smart. so, they all get accepted to a great school. <em>yawn</em> :[</p>
<p>An athlete in the top 80% of the class (yes top 80, not top 20) got into columbia and goes there.</p>
<p>I smell a ■■■■■ trying to flame up AA thread. There is like a .25 percent chance this happened. I don’t even see Harvard accepting a 890 SAT Black athlete because the ivies have to have a team average that is at least reasonable…</p>
<p>I’m guessing he meant 1890. I mean, 890 is just horrendous. I hate to sound arrogant, but seriously, what is that, like 300, 300, and 290? It doesn’t matter if you’re poor or a minority. You would have to totally blow off all the education provided to you in order to get a score like that.</p>
<p>I agree with you tiki. It seems like you could do better than 890 by guessing.</p>
<p>Actually, like 10 out of 180 kids got into Ivy institutions from the '09 class. And two kids from the '10 class got into UPenn and Rutgers for athletic scholarships, but they’re also both in NHS. And the UPenn guy has over 1000 points in basketball, and this is as a junior.</p>
<p>One guy: 3.0 UW GPA, 32 ACT (only know these because it was a huge outlier on naviance), did research one summer at local uni (10-20 from my former HS do this, so not that impressive), no other ECs I know besides that. Took AP calc AB senior year and AP physics senior year, but besides that no other math/science ECs. Persian or Italian or Mexican (impossible to tell b/c no one knows, let’s just say dark). Not great writer, from what I heard. Accepted to Caltech (not attending, going to state school because of costs). </p>
<p>Three other guys from same school: 3.7-3.9 UW GPAs (so all like top 4% in top public high school). Pretty much straight As in all math/science classes. All had pretty close to perfect or perfect scores on standardized tests. All took calc junior year and had 2 or 3 science APs total. All three were very involved in two plus of the following: Math team / volunteer math tutors (one also tutored as a paying job outside of school) / teaching assistant / engineering team / science olympiad (not including other stuff like sports because Caltech doesn’t care about these). Two out of the three had national SO medals. Two out of the three (diff. two) had research. All pretty good writers. Two asian and one white, if it matters. All three waitlisted. </p>
<p>Huh? I don’t think the top one is a URM, and even if he were, Caltech doesn’t seem to care much about racial/gender diversity. One potential explanation is that the three latter candidates were all basically the same, so taking one (since Caltech seems to always take just one from my former HS) would have been difficult I guess. I don’t know. I don’t think the latter three were entitled to get in, but compared to the first guy I think they should’ve. Yeah…</p>
<p>@michaelwiggins: the kid that got in without any SAT IIs??? I’m prettyyyy sure Harvard requires at least 2 SAT IIs, as a minimum, basic, everyone-has-to-do-it kind of standard…so how did he pull that off?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Forgot to mention it, but he also got into John Hopkins and WashU. Never knew why he chose UCB…</p>
<p>Whats so bad about the first one? Atleast he’s going to pomona. Although it is strange he got rejected by all the ivies.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well there’s no college called John Hopkins…maybe he didn’t like St. Louis?</p>
<p>You know, colleges often don’t like the cookie-cutter types. </p>
<p>White girl, GPA around 3.8, SAT’s around 2000-2150, no major awards from what I’ve heard, one of senior body leaders, captain and founder of the varsity ultimate frisbee team, got into Stanford.</p>
<p>The thing is, no one was outraged that she got in. I’m thinking she got in on her personality. Yes, her personality. She’s a natural leader, and just by looking at her face you can see loads of integrity and maturity, two items that seem pretty exclusive to most prestigious-college applicants nowadays. The stories I’ve HEARD about kids who lied or cheated or backstabbed his/her way to the Ivy Leagues, etc. Given how much our entire school admired this girl, we all felt it was justly deserved.</p>
<p>i had a friend who was top 10 in our school, amazing SAT scores 1500+/1600, but his problem was, he was too confident so he only applied to ivy leagues. he ended up getting rejected from all of them and had to go to a community college for half a semester before transfering to another university.</p>