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Unfortunately, even these admitted ranges give a rather incomplete picture of a particular student's chances for admission, since we don't know the depth of a particular school's applicant pool in any given score range. Penn is one of the few school's I've seen that actually provides a bit of a window into this parameter, and is therefore instructive. Per Penn's web site, the middle-50% range for SAT-M scores for students admitted to the Class of 2010 was 680-780, perhaps leading one to believe that a student with a score of 780 (being in the 75th percentile of admitted students) had a better than even chance of being admitted. Unlike most other schools, however, Penn also reveals the percentage of students with math scores in the 750-800 range who were admitted, which was only 22% (i.e., only about 1 out of 5 students with a SAT-M score in the 750-800 range was admitted):</p>
<p>If other schools revealed this type of data, it would be much more helpful to potential applicants attempting to guage their chances based on SAT scores.</p>