<p>If you just look at the scattergrams at our school you really don't get the full picture. My son has better grades than many and higher scores than most of previous Ivy admits, but many of them did science research and he refused. The big question mark was how would his work experience stack up against that. They probably had more school ECs, my son's biggest EC is messing around on the computer on his own. Basically that counts for very little though he's taught himself an amazing amount. I figured his odds at his top schools were about 1 in 4. (Considerably better than the 1 in 10 for most of these schools, but still it's considerably less than 50/50.) Since he didn't get into 2 of those top 4 or 5 schools and waitlisted at one, now I'm sort of wondering if that means I should have encourage him to apply to even more reaches, but the fact is he's into three schools where he'll be very happy - I don't know that he'd be better off at one of the Ivy's.</p>