Reality Check on chances: h.s. makes the difference?

<p>I'm from a small private high school. There is a wide range of college choices at our school (types, size, level, region), so we probably get no greater percentage of seniors applying to top-tier colleges than at most other schools -- in fact there are probably fewer Ivy apps, percentage-wise, than at many schools. We also have almost no URMs. Yet over the last several years, between 1/5 and 1/3 of the Ivy applicants have been accepted -- with the exception of Harvard, which is under 10%. (And Stanford has an esp. low acceptance rate from our school.)</p>

<p>Just picking out 4 -- Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Penn -- no accepted student scored even near 1600 on combined SATs. And the highest GPA to any of these was a little over 3.9. (School does not weight & does not adjust for Honors or APs.)</p>

<p>I'm not making any predictions about my own applications. (However, my SATs are slightly higher than the highest scorer so far from my school accepted to an Ivy.) But I just think that evaluation of a student would have to include the reputation of a school for this history to make sense.</p>

<p>I see so many people reply to posters that they won't get in to Ivies when their scores are not stratospheric, so I just thought it might be important to offer a different perspective.</p>