“I know that PG thinks that once a student crosses the bar in terms of SAT scores and GPA, the admissions odds are the same for all. I think every school that puts out a Common Data Set does a detailed breakdown of admissions odds by score ranges, which shows that is not exactly true–though some break down the admissions odds by narrower score ranges than others.”
I didn’t say that. What I’ve said is that it’s a total waste of time to figure out that your chances at s school with a 10% acceptance rate are now a 15%, because the larger point is that you have an 85% chance Instead of a 90% chance of getting rejected, which means you have to act as though you’ll get rejected and be pleasantly surprised if you’re not. And focusing on 10% vs 15% completely misses the bigger picture.
And Quantmech- I think it is misleading to look at the granular breakdowns that some schools provide and to conclude that because last year the percentage admit rate for kids with 800’s across the board are greater than the percentage admit rates for kids at 770, that therefore, a kid with 770’s can meaningfully up his admissions chances by retaking the exams.
I’ve known some of those 800 kids (in populous states they are the kids that get nominated to be Presidential scholars, for one thing). Believe me, the sky high scores are the LEAST interesting thing about them. The kid who was an actual Presidential Scholar (not just a nominee) from my kids HS a couple of years ago- just a fascinating, mesmerizing, brilliant and kind kid.
So sure- he got in to blah blah and wherever. But the schools weren’t admitting him for his scores. And when I read the little bio on him on the Presidential Scholar website-- having known the kid- I was a little sad that due to time and editing constraints, they left out so much stuff!!!
It is hard for parents whose kids are so great and fantastic and hard-working to concede that someone else’s kid just might be a more compelling admit. But some day if you’re bored- read through some of those bio’s of “ordinary” HS seniors. You don’t need legacy or connections or diversity to become a nominee- and the kids who end up winning (most of whom have perfect or near perfect scores) really do seem like a bunch of people you’d want to hang out with for four years.
So yes- a handful of kids for whom the published stats are not accurate. For everyone else…
The ED chances aren’t exactly the same for every applicant either. Many athletes and legacies and other special admit programs are ED applicants, so the gpas and scores look like it is easier to get in ED if your stats are a little lower.
Funny, the Presidential Scholar from my kid’s school got rejected from the Ivy she applied to. She was all of those things as well. Even that is no guarantee.
"Admissions committees are as fallible as the rest of us.
By whose definition of infallible? AdComs must be doing something right because their graduation rates are the best in the country. So they are obviously admitting kids that can do the work, thrive and graduate. Even those kids who have “hooks” that took all the spaces that denied kids did not get."
Of course they are fallible. lol Defending the infallibility / divinity of Adcoms has to be among the least defensible comments on cc ever.
The question is not whether they are able to get good results and graduation rates. It would not take a genius to pick a class with high graduation rates from the pool of candidates at any to 20 school. The question is whether they can meet the institutions established objectives better by using their judgment than could be achieved using a more structured and objective process. Did they add any value? Were they able to successfully able to discern the low stats kids who will actually have higher graduation rates than average? Did the Adcom really get it right? If so, which Adcom members exhibited the most discerning judgment? All Adcom members must have pushed for different candidates from time to time. Which members were best able to discern low stats candidates who will be successful? Do they track the success rates of candidates? Which Adcoms were most likely to support successful candidates?
Schools do not publish this information, so I can’t disprove the Adcom’s infallibility / divinity, but I am not the one making the extraordinary claim. Furthermore, if you know many college applicants, you know that the better candidates usually get admitted to good schools, but some of the college’s individual decisions (on both sides) are truly epic fails to separate the true talent from total bull s***.
All very interesting questions, Much2learn. With regard to blossom’s comment, I agree that there is no point in re-taking a 770 in the hopes of getting an 800 and increasing the admissions odds. The effect is likely to be negligible, if not negative. Hardly any schools separate out 750 from 800 in their score range data, in any event.
Suppose that a student never looked at CC (and the parents didn’t either), and the GC wasn’t on top of things, and the high school didn’t send a lot of students to “top” schools. Then suppose that the student had an extremely strong record, though nothing in the “knock your socks off category.” If that student thought that he/she had fairly good odds of admission, then I would think that he/she was just under-informed, as opposed to suffering from hubris.
People who have read CC know what the situation is. But before the data were out on CC (or at least, before a large compilation of anecdotes was out), students had to depend on information from other students’ experiences at their school, from the GC’s, or from relatives elsewhere–all decidedly fallible sources.
With regard to PG’s #105–I put the odds of admission of a strong candidate to a school (that has a 10% overall admissions rate) at 35%, rather than 10%. I agree that one would need quite a few applications to be able to differentiate 15% odds from 10% odds, in practice.
However with the number of applications that a reasonable applicant aiming for a “top” school is likely to submit these days (say 5 or 6 to “top” schools), I think that 35% odds do work out differently from 10% odds. One could see this by scanning the decision threads for students with multiple “top” admits, and taking a look at the information they provide. (I am not worked up enough about this issue to do that; but if someone disagrees with my analysis, he/she is welcome to look at the anecdotal evidence on CC–there is a lot!)
@quantmech That is what I did after I printed off all of the Naviance information for each school. Then I built a spreadsheet of all of the results for key schools over the last several years, and sorted it out by college within the University, sex, race, then grades and testscores and also separated out candidates with a hard hook. It was pretty clear which groups were more likely to be admitted compared to others.
It is not a perfect process, but much better than pretending it is all random.
@QuantMech, there are indeed a bunch of no-hopers applying to those super-selective schools, but there are also a decent number of candidates with a big hook (or several) as well that those who are otherworldly in talent/character/achievement.
Which means that if you’re a good non-hooked candidate with stats above the median of accepted kids with good ECs but nothing amazing, your odds of getting in are indeed somewhere close to the admit rate (in RD). And your essays/recs/soft qualitative stuff/interests/overall package must REALLY stand out.
For those kids, even with various hooked kids applying early, (assuming that they’re not trying to get merit money) making the right decisions on where to apply during the early round is VERY important.
With regard to PurpleTitan’s #114, Harvard all by itself admits about 2000 students per year. What is the number of students that you would classify as “otherworldly” in talent/character/achievement? Among the entire cohort of 17- to 18-year-olds, I would put the number of “otherworldly” students at no more than 50-100. That leaves a whole lot of room for the promising, strong applicants who are 3 or 4 notches above the average applicant. There is nothing special about Harvard, for this analysis. Any of a number of other schools would work as well–except that I think that the number of “otherworldly” applicants remains at the same 50-100, and they have to be distributed among all of the schools in which they are interested.
I’d say over half the admits at H would have some major hook or another (some several).
Note also that H now fills about 40% of its class through the early round. Say that there are slightly less hooked candidates (but more of the otherworldly) in the RD round, so about half of the 1200 or 600 spots would be available to nonhooked applicants. Roughly 31K applicants in the RD round. Say 3K of them are hooked and half the rest are no-hopers (at some other elites, the percentage of no-hopers would actually be smaller, but I don’t think Harvard has to go very far down in to the pile). That means 600 slots for 14K high-stats unhooked kids in the RD round.
Well, my son has joined the ranks of kids extremely upset that they were shut out of the ivies. I thought he was fine, but apparently not. So hard to see.
@chris17mom – was he excited about his other options until he went to school the next day? Is it possible others in his school got into an ivy or two and they aren’t THAT much better than him – in his and his classmates’ estimation – so now he/classmates who didn’t get in are a bit upset or thinking “why him – why not me”?
Quant Mech- a kid coming from a school where the GC has little experience with competitive admit rates IS going to have unrealistic expectations of the probabilities. But- so what? Are you going to lose sleep over a kid with sky high stats who ends up at CMU instead of MIT? Or a kid at Chicago instead of Columbia? Or the kid at Rice and not Brown? Or Vanderbilt and not Princeton?
In a world where there are still schools which will look at the high stats kid and say “We’d love to have you” (even absent a hook), and where the “vibe” at school A is replicable at school B (to a large extent), where’s the drama? And a notch below that- Connecticut College, Lawrence, Skidmore, Brandeis for the LAC’s, and the honors programs at Maryland et al for the universities- you’re not talking about a kid becoming a skid row bum because he/she had a clueless guidance counselor who didn’t know how to read the stats. And 9% is still 9%, even if you are a kid who thinks you walk on water. You should be smart enough to realize that a 91% rejection rate isn’t your friend…
CMU is totally fine, and if not #1 in computer science, then awfully close–probably bouncing in and out of that slot on a year-to-year basis. Personally, I’d prefer Chicago to Columbia. No one is saying that the students have bad outcomes if they don’t get in to their top choices.
I am just contesting the idea that there is hubris involved if a student doesn’t believe that his/her odds are identical to the overall admissions odds, or worse. That seems like an inaccurate insult in general–and even if accurate, it’s hardly necessary.
There have been a reasonable number of Harvard admits from the local schools lately, just to take one example. None with hooks–unless playing the tuba counts. None “otherworldly,” though 2 were unusually strong academically.
The right counter to unrealistic expectations of success in admissions is realistic expectations, rather than unrealistic expectations of rejection. While one could be pleasantly surprised by an admission if one set expectations low, on the whole I think people are better off being optimistic. I suppose there is more benefit in being optimistic about things one can control than about things one cannot control, so I concede that much.
Of course, students have to plan for the unexpected, which sometimes happens. But nothing is wrong with having realistic expectations (of 35% odds of success, for example).
Whether it’s 10% or 35%, you’re still likely not to get in. So you should have that mindset. I think your approach of trying to finely calibrate is just going to result in soneone thinking “hey I’m 3.5x as likely as average to get in!” and I think that’s misguided when the real insight is “I’m not likely to get in so let me not quite buy the t shirt and select my dorm quite yet.”
And yes, I think there can be hubris involved. Or naïveté.
Having lived in a pediatric hospital pretty much for two years, and recently going through some rough times and deaths of dear ones, I don’t get too upset or feel way sorry for those kids and their parents when they did not get into the schools they most wanted. But at the same time, I do sympathize. The smaller cuts in life can hurt terribly though they hardly ever inflict anything more than that short term searing pain. But, yes, when I like someone, care about someone, or just hear a tale where people are hurt, my emotions are such that I feel badly for them,and can understand. Even in times of great trouble, some of the smallest, silliest, non important things were ones that cause pangs of acute pain.
“But- so what? Are you going to lose sleep over a kid with sky high stats who ends up at CMU instead of MIT? Or a kid at Chicago instead of Columbia? Or the kid at Rice and not Brown? Or Vanderbilt and not Princeton?”
Have you met QM? This is the kind of thing she does lose sleep over!!
Exactly!!! Actually, his two best friends, who are NOT better students than him, and with lower test scores (one of them has significantly lower test scores and my son actually tutored him to help him) got into ivies. One young man was accepted to Cornell and the other fellow got in at Penn and Williams. Another good friend of his (the one he has been creating an app with) was accepted at Rice, a great school for the tech fields my son is interested in. I have ideas as to why they were accepted, but I don’t want to focus on comparisons, etc.
So my son is extremely disappointed and he is saying things like “what did I do wrong?” and “I have no future,” “my life is ruined,” etc. I did not expect this as I was really not surprised by the results at all. I had never realistically anticipated that he would get into an ivy, not because he isn’t a great student with great scores and grades (2250 SAT and 3.94 gpa) but simply because of doing so much reading on here and truly grasping what a 10% (or lower) acceptance rate means. It means that he was in range to apply, but would probably not get in. Period. He only applied to 3 ivies plus Stanford (his dream school) so he wasn’t really “shotgunning” the ivies. We put out a lot of other apps, looking for merit aid at “good enough” schools, and he got some great offers. But now he is looking at the reality of his choices (he must choose from five schools - U Richmond, U Miami, U of Alabama, Arizona State U, or U of Arizona) and he is feeling underwhelmed. He got affordable offers at all those schools, and they are not bad choices. I hope this passes because I want him to go into college proud of his accomplishments and excited about the future. Oh well, a parent can only do so much…these are the hard lessons of life.
