<p>If you get/got rejected, 99.99% odds says that it wasn’t because you were “over-qualified”. I’m guessing that you heard those rumors only from people who got rejected (and who are trying to justify it to themselves) or from people who heard it from those rejected people.</p>
<p>Cornell, perhaps of all the Ivies, is the most interested in “fit”. If you have a 2400 SAT and a 4.0, but your ECs scream that you only did them for college, Cornell probably isn’t sending you a fat letter.</p>
<p>Anothermom2 - I have known a couple of people rejected from Cornell who got into Penn. Schools look at the whole picture, including the intended major, and look for a “fit”. That’s more than just the numbers</p>
<p>I doubt they’d reject you simply because your numbers were too high. Maybe if they could see that an essay was tailored to a diff. school and that even though they changed “Stanford” to “Cornell” that they were writing to Stanford… I’m not sure they could determine that kind of thing for sure though…</p>
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I doubt it. We aren’t WUSTL; the source of our prestige isn’t founded on gaming yield rates.</p>
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<p>This is highly suspicious, because notice that it’s quite possible that neither H, P, nor Y takes this applicant. What then? Cornell could easily end up snatching a perfectly wonderful student that another school just didn’t have room for. By this logic, it should practically be impossible for a 4.0 student with amazing scores to get into the UCs other than LA and Berkeley, 'cept for say UCSD bioengineering or something. That’s not how it works though, especially for Cornell, because such an Ivy League is in a great position to snatch rejects from other schools who’re really just as amazing as accepted ones, but didn’t make the cut.</p>
<p>I’m no admissions officer, and I agree there MAY be some funny business going around, but honestly it wouldn’t seem in a school like Cornell’s interests to reject anyone on the basis of being “overqualified.”</p>
<p>theres someone in my school with ~98 gpa and close to 2400 SAT and was rejected to A/S. I remember she was really mad lol. i think she ended up going to MIT though. with grades like hers it could count as “over qualified” since 100+/700 kids get accepted from the hs and 99% of them have grades lower than hers</p>
<p>I wouldn’t be surprised if people picked Cornell over Harvard for specific programs like engineering or architecture, hotel, etc. I have met people in my class who got acceptances from Harvard and chose to go to CALS, which gives a big tuition break for NYS residents.</p>
<p>" this logic, it should practically be impossible for a 4.0 student with amazing scores to get into the UCs other than LA and Berkeley, 'cept for say UCSD bioengineering or something."</p>
<p>Not to defend one side or the other, but state schools operate under a completely different admissions system. One could often predict who will gain admissions based on quantitative data.</p>
<p>I doubt that Cornell would reject an applicant based on superior stats. My SAT/GPA would’ve made me “overqualified” when I was a high school senior, but I was still admitted. It turns out that I’m just a good test taker and that my high school wasn’t as challenging as I’d thought it was; I’m quite average here, actually.</p>
<p>i don’t think we can give an absolutely conclusive comment on this…</p>
<p>the reason i asked is because I know someone who had 2400 sat1 3x800 sat 2 4.0 gpa all 5’s in AP, got into princeton but rejected from cornell
also I seen some ppl here on CC who got accepted to MIT but rejected from cornell
so I was just seeing if there is an know case of cornell practicing strategic admissions but i guess its inconclusive</p>
<p>when you come to these top colleges, it boils down to completely to what the ad com wants in their class…perhaps your friend was on a long list of 2400ers 4.0s and they did not find anything in him which would add to their class whereas perhaps Princeton did…</p>
<p>Ad coms always say they are responsible for building classes, not admitting individuals. All these schools could pack themselves with people who were by-the-books smart, but that would not be a very enriching environment and students would not learn very much from one another. </p>
<p>As said above, Cornell and all its specialty programs are huge on fit.</p>
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<p>I’m well aware of this. The point, though, is that lots of “overall less selective schools” may admit applicants who could get into more selective schools, because selective schools are kind of a gamble to get into, and amazing students end up at various different schools.</p>
<p>Further, for instance if someone were to want to study in Cornell’s engineering department, it’s a good chance this person may pick Cornell over another supposedly more selective Ivy League school, especially if he/she were bent on going to an Ivy.</p>
<p>doesn’t this make Likely Letters Ironic?!?</p>
<p>We all know likely letters are sent to over qualified applicants because the school wants to persuade them. So what would be the point? Cornell doesn’t reject over qualified applicants, it accepts them and then tries to persuade them.</p>
<p>are likely letters traditionally sent to “over qualified”/ the strongest applicants?</p>
<p>i thought they were more of a random sampling… the better for messing with everyone’s already-taut nerves…</p>
<p>no, they aren’t a random sampling.</p>
<p>Likely letters (and diversity visitation programs) are probably the most strategic thing that Cornell uses for admissions.</p>
<p>By showing “over-qualified” (or extremely competitive) students how much Cornell likes them, and getting them their decisions early, it gives students more time/more incentive to want to come to Cornell.</p>
<p>An assistant admissions counselor/director from Princeton visited my daughter’s high school and told all of us point blank that Princeton every year rejects a ton of high school valedictorians, and they reject a few people with 800s on their SATs. He said, the easiest thing in the world would be to fill up a Princeton freshman class with students with basically the same numbers: 4.0s and 780-800s. He told us that would be boring as hell. They take a lot of factors into account. </p>
<p>Imagine a kid from Nowhere, Alaska who is the fourth generation of a family many of whom didn’t even finish high school and his family lives on a smelly fishing boat on some bay, barely scrapping by. But the kid is bright. He has a 3.8 GPA with 1 honors course and 1 AP, the only ones offered by Nowhere Public High School. He manages a 680-650-660 on his SAT I. His family couldn’t afford an SAT prep class and he’d have to travel 800 miles to Anchorage to even take such a course. He writes a terrific essay. THAT kid might be admitted to Princeton before big man on campus, captain of the lacrosse team, St. Albans/Andover, Daddy’s a chief financial officer at Fortune 50 corporation, 4.0, 800s on SAT I, 10 APs with 5s. That’s what the admissions guy told us. It’s kind of an extreme example, he said, but it happens, and more often than you think, not only at Princeton but at Harvard too.</p>
<p>i got a 2400 and a 4.0 and was accepted</p>
<p>I think I’m disadvantaged because all of my attempts to stand out are a little in vain. I live in the wash dc metropolitan area so the competition is insane, so i applied for and went to the IB Program at a diff HS. but as a result my gpa is 3.86 and not a 4.0.
my sat score of 2320 is about average for the IB graduating class… okay i’m exaggerating slightly. It’s true though that its hard to stand out academically because everyone cares just as much about producing impressive apps. On the flip side, there is not much time for impressive extracurriculars on the side because the workload is much more than it would be at my home HS in the honors/ap program.
not a rant. i mean, i got likelied for cornell, it worked out for me with the college admissions at least to a certain extent. but i dont really like the argument for admitting “promising” students who havent proven that they can handle as much as the ib kids who slave away for four years… but I see the point that you can’t rob someone of further opportunities because they didnt have them in HS to begin with.
I’m just annoyed that living where I do, I can’t just be a bright kid, I almost have to be a sleep-deprived neurotic kid if I want to stand a chance at top schools.
being on an admissions committee must be difficult…</p>