<p>Interesting thread. According to parchment, my son has two 99%+ schools, both of which have average math and CR SAT 200 below his scores. They both have decent not stellar reputations.</p>
<p>So far, I recommend Parchment.com over Naviance and Cappex to look at colleges.</p>
<p>Parchment is not predictive when it comes to schools with admission rate below 30% and only partially for others: the more holistic and selective the process, the less likely it is to “work”.</p>
<p>Note also that many schools have several admission buckets, so that overall stats and admission rates may not reflect the actual selectivity faced by the student. Some examples of different admission buckets:</p>
<ul>
<li>Automatic admission versus non-automatic admission (Texas publics being well known examples).</li>
<li>Admission by division or major, where popular divisions or majors have higher selectivity.</li>
<li>In-state versus out-of-state for state universities.</li>
<li>Early versus regular decision admissions.</li>
<li>Special categories like recruited athletes (at smaller schools, athletes may be a substantial percentage of students).</li>
</ul>
<p>@thumper1 You don’t have to be MIT or Caltech to be a top school. There are many liberal arts colleges that weigh heavily how active a student is in their community. So it is “simply true”. It depends on what school. Which is why I said “tons of top schools” not THE top school. </p>
<p>Regarding “top schools”, extracurriculars’ importance may seem magnified when comparing among a pool of applicants with 4.0 or near-4.0 GPAs and top-end test scores (so that the GPAs and test scores are basically indistinguishable) – but applicants with significantly lower GPAs and/or test scores tend to be out of the running, no matter how good their extracurriculars are.</p>
It’s a powerful tool, but you need to consider its limitations. The estimate is based on an average acceptance rate over a large number of applicants. That average acceptance rate may be quite accurate, even if the estimate for certain individuals is not. For example, applicants who have test scores like the original poster probably usually have great LORs and essays. If the OP has much worse LORs and essays than typical for his stats, then he may have much worse odds than predicted by Parchment at colleges than emphasize LORs and essays. One can get some clues about which colleges focuses on such qualities by looking at how closely the acceptance decisions at Parchment members follow stats and other criteria on Parchment. For example, acceptances decisions closely follow stats at Vanderbilt, but they do not at Cornell. Instead test scores appear to not have a great impat on chance of admission at Cornell once reaching a threshold that is far below what most on CC would consider to be competitive for an ivy. This suggests that even though Cornell and Vanderbilt have similar overall acceptance rates, different applicants will have very different odds of admission at the two schools. The weak LOR/essay candidate described earlier would probably have a much better odds at Vanderbilt, and someone whose weakest portion of the application was test scores would probably have much better odds at Cornell.</p>
<p>Unless I missed something, the OP only posted his test scores and number of AP classes – no grades, no out of classroom activities, no financial information, etc. This makes it impractical to suggest safeties.</p>
True, but there are many CDSs that mark ECs at the same importance level as grades including Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Duke, Caltech, etc. There are also a few colleges that mark certain other non-academic criteria as more important than grades. For example, MIT marks character/personal qualities as more important than grades or stats in their CDS. MIT gives a more detailed explanation of how character/personal qualities can be more important than grades and test scores on their website at <a href=“What we look for | MIT Admissions”>http://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/match</a> .</p>