<p>if harvard is full of pricks like bylerly, im glad im not going there...
PEACE OUSIDE DUDE!</p>
<p>Take a look at Princeton Review's ranking criteria page. I was mistaken that they get the stats from the CDS, but in any case, they get the stats from the schools, and obviously the stats were both reported by P an H, because neither school has a score of 60 (which, as it says, would indicate a school that didn't report on time). I don't think either school would "make up" the stats that they reported. You can't really fudge with things like avg. SAT, etc. By giving the example of "school a" and "school b", i was referring to the type of case that they talk about with Uchicago, which has a remarkably strong applicant pool, but not-so-low admission percentages. </p>
<p>"Admissions Selectivity Rating
This rating measures how competitive admissions are at the school. This rating is determined by several institutionally-reported factors, including: the class rank, average standardized test scores, and average high school GPA of entering freshmen; the percentage of students who hail from out-of-state; and the percentage of applicants accepted. By incorporating all these factors, our Admissions Selectivity Rating adjusts for "self-selecting" applicant pools. University of Chicago, for example, has a very high rating, even though it admits a surprisingly large proportion of its applicants. Chicago's applicant pool is self-selecting; that is, nearly all the school's applicants are exceptional students. This rating is given on a scale of 60-99. Please note that if a school has an Admissions Selectivity Rating of 60*, it means that the school did not report to us all of the statistics that go into the rating by our deadline."</p>
<p>Oh, and just so you can make sure i'm not "making that up", check out the source at <a href="http://www.princetonreview.com/college/research/articles/find/ratings.asp#selectivity%5B/url%5D">http://www.princetonreview.com/college/research/articles/find/ratings.asp#selectivity</a></p>
<p>By the way, I'm not saying that PR's formula is the definitive answer on which school is the most selective. There are so many ways of looking at it. For instance, Princeton accepts a very large percent of students based on athletics (over half of princeton students are involved with intercollegiate athletics), so for a non-athlete, it is extremely difficult to get into princeton. That's also one reason why i've heard Pton's avg. SATs suffer--in order to get enough athletes to fill their sports teams, they must recruit a disproportionately large percentage of athletes in relation to their class size. Also, harvard may have a higher SAT average, but princeton has more students in the top 10% of their class. Based on PR's way of calculating things, though, it seems that they take into consideration the quality of the applicant pool, and with those statistics considered, p comes out above h. Honestly, though, it's just one ranking that i thought i'd mention initially, and felt obligated to support when you thought I "made up" the criteria. There are all sorts of other ones out there, including the USNews Selectivity Ranking (which also happens to put P (2) above H (4)). None of these rankings truly matter, though. If you pick a school solely based on its ranking, you'll be tremendously disappointed when the next year's USNews comes out and suddenly you're going to a... gasp.. #3 school. Maybe you should take a little bit of emphasis off of rankings and take a look at the qualities of each school that you like. In my original statement about p v h, i certainly think that i emphasized tangible, real-world differences between the schools, and only used rankings as support.</p>
<p>So what, exactly, does that say? I don't see anything saying that it has statistically compared the strength of applicant pools by looking at their median SAT score - as you claimed earlier. To reiterate, I do not believe this stat is widely available anyway.</p>
<p>That "Percentage in the top 10% of their class" stat is becoming useless. Are you aware of exactly what fraction of Princeton matriculants come from schools even REPORTING this stat? Check it out.</p>
<p>I fully agree that all rankings are not created equal. But the PR rankings are sillier than most. To the extent that rankings are useful, they give top applicants some notion of where others similarly situtated in prior years have decided to go. </p>
<p>For this purpose, I think the "Revealed Preference" rankings are the most useful. Granted, no two people are identically situated, or make their decision on exactly the same basis, but any talented student with a choice of schools should consider carefully the choices made by other top students who themselves, presumably, made an informed decision about where to enroll.</p>
<p>please take your ranking-obsessed filth out of the up-to-now-before-you-came stainless Princeton site. Oh wait, i forgot about calculusboy...</p>
<p>like clinton jokes, calculusboy jokes never go out of style.</p>
<p>Game: Your mama.
Game: Calculus.
Game: Guess who.
Game: e-dueling.</p>
<p>The top schools for each are the same.</p>
<p>Atlantic Monthly top 10 & PR Selectivity top 10</p>
<ol>
<li>MIT </li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>California Institute of Technology</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
</ol>