<p>^ Indeed. Gotta love faint praise.</p>
<p>Furthermore, EMMA WATSON GOES HERE!!! You have the audacity to challenge the reputation of Brown when it has the most brilliant witch in Hogwarts history? Fool! Such accomplishments are not contested by Harvard, even!</p>
<p>I don’t even go to Brown, but Dad2’s comments are too ridiculous to pass over without critique. Brown is significantly more selective - in EVERY sense, and certainly not contingent merely upon the size of its applicant pool - than many of the schools ranked equal or higher (Cornell, WashU, Hopkins, Northwestern, UChicago, Duke, and equivalent to Dartmouth, Penn, Columbia).</p>
<p>As for faculty and resources: Brown does not compete on the level of world-class research university, nor does it contend to. But the level of research and education that it does offer are more than sufficient to class it among one of the finest undergraduate schools in the world. 'Nuff said. If you’re looking for a PhD, go to Columbia, Harvard, Penn, MIT… but you can still get your BA at Brown.</p>
<p>Dartmouth “suffers” from the same malady of undergraduate focus (and yet for some reason, does better in the rankings - Tuck School of Business? More $/capita?).</p>
<p>Whatever. The point is, Dad2, stop ■■■■■■■■ on the forums of schools from which your daughter demurred or was rejected.</p>
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<p>Considering that the avg combined SAT score of enrolled freshman at Duke, UChicago, WashU, and Northwestern are all higher than those enrolled at Brown, this stat alone would preclude Brown from being considered significantly more selective in EVERY sense.</p>
<p>Addditionally the relevance of selectivity escapes me and should probably not be relied upon so heavily as validation.</p>
<p>Finally, in agreement with truzzi182, it is criminal that USNWR has overlooked the Emma Watson factor, which clearly should rocket Brown into the top 10 in any just universe. IMO</p>
<p>“Considering that the avg combined SAT score of enrolled freshman at Duke, UChicago, WashU, and Northwestern are all higher than those enrolled at Brown, this stat alone would preclude Brown from being considered significantly more selective in EVERY sense.”</p>
<p>Give me a break, Duke, UChicago, WashU, and Northwestern have higher SAT score than Brown, where is the proof. People could not get in “Ivy league” so they choose Duke, WashU, and Northwestern for safety. I wouldn’t comment UChicago though.</p>
<p>“Considering that the avg combined SAT score of enrolled freshman at Duke, UChicago, WashU, and Northwestern are all higher than those enrolled at Brown, this stat alone would preclude Brown from being considered significantly more selective in EVERY sense.”</p>
<p>Brown could admit more people based on that one criteria and thereby raise its average, but that’s not what makes Brown what it is. They are fortunate enough to not have the necessity to use that tactic more than they do. They admit a class of people, many with stellar scores and some with lower scores, but they do not all have the same talents. +1 for Brown. But perhaps not everyone is totally aware of diversity of initiatives. If you think a school with 10 points higher of an average SAT is better you just don’t get it. There are many talented people out there who may not have stellar scores, but are stellar elsewhere for whatever reason. I have met these people. Brown has the ability to admit a certain number of them and still maintain a high average SAT.</p>
<p>Yo,Here’s the OP. I’m a Brown lover, but I have to say BigFire’s statement is way too biased. The avg combined SAT score of enrolled frosh @ schools like duke, northwestern are actually all higher than those enrolled @ Brown. It’s because brown rejected a lot of high-stats kids and admitted some other kids with lower score but greater achievement in other fields. Admitting more “nerdy” kids is one of the things brown could do to improve the selectivity score.( look at how many high-stats applicants got reject or deferred at this year’s ED thread. Remember, the university don’t have to worry about those ED 15ers turning down brown and going to harvard instead )</p>
<p>Taken in context (notice the quote from Ivyleaguer11 directly above my reply) it would seem fairly straightforward that the avg SAT stats that I provided were simply as a counterpoint to Ivyleaguer11’s hyperbole that Brown was “significantly more selective than (all these schools)… in EVERY sense.” (his emphasis not mine and his point escapes me)</p>
<p>… and to any thoughtful observer would not have been interpreted to suggest superiority of any of these schools or of Brown. </p>
<p>My point may have been further deduced by reading my statement directly below where I question the relevance of selectivity in assessing quality in the first place and the healthiness of using the survival of an often random selectivity gauntlet as validation.</p>
<p>Interpreting my comments as fodder to spawn a Neanderthal pis*sing contest over stats and what Brown ‘could do if it wanted’ or how Browns admits are clearly superior to others, demonstrates, at the very least, a lack of critical thinking and interpretative skills and spotlights some insecurities that would seem unwarranted. </p>
<p>While I am excited to be attending Northwestern in the fall (interest of full disclosure), I have had nothing but admiration for Brown and am sure that these responses were not representative of the well adjusted Brown student body. I am actually jealous of Brown students, at least of their proximity to Emma :)</p>
<p>"Interpreting my comments as fodder to spawn a Neanderthal pis*sing contest over stats and what Brown ‘could do if it wanted’ or how Browns admits are clearly superior to others, demonstrates, at the very least, a lack of critical thinking and interpretative skills and spotlights some insecurities that would seem unwarranted. "</p>
<p>Disagree.</p>
<p>^lol… I would guess you might disagree, as it was partially directed towards you :)</p>
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<p>If you are convinced that Brown admits are special and uniquely talented, then great! But, a quick query of one of your own admission committee members will likely confirm for you that schools like Duke or Northwestern (and other peers) are in a similar position of being overrun with spectacularly qualified applicants. These admissions committees also enjoy the same privilege of using holistic methods to find unique students, and are not simply by-the-numbers efforts to admit the highest SAT scores to improve their stats. Brown is not unique in this way.</p>
<p>So, of course, Brown could admit applicants with higher SAT scores, but so could any of the top schools. So once again, we digress to a completely irrelevant point. I dont care about the SAT numbers, nor do I believe that these indicate the superiority of any of these schools. Remember, I only brought up the SAT’s as a counterpoint to ivyleague11’s hyperbole. Be assured I have no hard feelings and would not be disappointed if this less than fruitful exchange were to end.</p>
<p>In the hope of preventing this thread from being completely derailed, I will attempt to return to USNWR:</p>
<p>With Brown’s admission rate already down to a dauntingly low 9% and it’s avg SAT scores within a few deviations of the top, one might not be out-of-line to surmise that the highest possible boost that the ‘selectivity factor’ gives to the USNWR ranking is likely already fully recognized.</p>
<p>Is it not more likey that raising Brown in the USNWR rankings will need to come from addressing factors other than selectivity?</p>
<p>I think what he’s saying is, while all these schools are holistic, and put weight on many factors besides test scores, Brown puts particulalrly relatively less weight on SAT scores than many of them, and relatively more weight on the other less quantifiable stuff.</p>
<p>From what I’ve observed over the years I find this to be plausible. It’s seemed to me that its SAT ranges never match up ordinally with its admit % selectivity ranking, with more discrepancy in this regard than many in its broader peer group.</p>
<p>^ Not sure why the topic gets diverted so easily.</p>
<p>But to your point, I will concede that it is plausible that Brown has an even ‘more’ holistic approach than anybody else and values SAT’s scores less. I, of course, have no idea (nor do I really understand the relevance as stated previously)</p>
<p>Validating a theory that Brown applies “particularly relatively less weight on SAT scores” using the admission rates and avg SAT scores would seem a more difficult proposition. I am unable find any correlation, deviance, pattern or “match up ordinally” of the admission rates and avg SAT scores of these schools that would confirm this theory. But the avg SAT scores of all the top schools are relatively close to begin with, so this is not unexpected.</p>
<p>If it is true that SAT scores are less weighted at Brown, it may be useful to let the word out more effectively – this may reduce the stress level (at least somewhat) of many prospective applicants. IMO</p>
<p>In the cause of defending my simple points, I find myself drawn onto the opposite side of an argument with a school that I admire greatly and on a topic of SAT scores for which I have very little interest.</p>
<p>“I am unable find any correlation, deviance, pattern or “match up ordinally” of the admission rates and avg SAT scores of these schools that would confirm this theory.”</p>
<p>No need to find it, do the analysis yourself.
Rank schools by avg. of SAT medians. Then rank by acceptance rates. Compare Brown’s placement by these two parameters, find that the SATs are lower than the acceptance % would indicate, by comparison with others.</p>
<p>Do this for several different years. Get the same result each time.</p>
<p>conclusion is either:
a) For some reason Brown applicants have lower test scores than applicants to all its peer schools;
or
b) it puts less weight on SAT scores.</p>
<p>I have no idea how you are defining peers - by admission rate (US naval academy)? by avg SAT (Notre Dame)?</p>
<p>The 25% - 75% range data points from which the midpoint combined SAT is calculated are rounded to the nearest multiple of 5 or 10 I believe, making it a challenge to make very fine distinctions. </p>
<p>For example; Dartmouth, Stanford, Brown have avg SAT scores within 1% of each other and that amount is not even close to being statistically significant. Does this mean that Stanford weights the SAT even less? or more? The whole correlation is nonsensical to me (but I am probably dense). If you are able to draw such conclusions from this data, then more power to you.</p>
<p>Anyway, the whole topic is not particularly interesting for me, so you will hopefully not be offended if I opt to move on to more stimulating subjects.</p>
<p>The 25th percentile SAT score at any particular college is exactly equal to that score which was scored by the person who scored equal to or higher than the lowest 25% of applicants. For example, if the admitted class consists of 100 students, and the bottom 24 students scored 2180 or less, and the 25th-35th students scored 2190, then the 25th percentile score is 2190. Similarly, if the bottom 20 students scored 2170 or less, and the 21st-27th students scored 2180, then the 25th percentile score is 2180.</p>
<p>Midpoints between the 25th and 75th percentiles do not represent a mean, median or average.</p>
<p>True, but unfortunately the means aren’t always reported by institutions these days, but the mid-50% ranges are. Hence most such exercises I’ve seen use this approach as sort of a proxy for, or in lieu of, the mean. I didn’t make it up, you will see it all over CC where people are comparing SATs across schools.</p>
<p>Even use of the real mean and standard deviation is probably misleading, because the distributions likely are skewed, variously, and/or have different sized tails. But at least they would be mathematically correct would be your point, which I agree. This approach is no doubt imperfect, but comparing using nonexistent data can be a problem.</p>
<p>But whatever, if you prefer to compare using some other method go ahead. Or, if you feel there is not sufficient data to make appropriate conclusions about SATs, then don’t compare SATs across schools, that’s fine with me too.</p>
<p>re: “correlation”, etc:</p>
<p>If it would make you feel better, you could easily run a regression analysis of SATs vs. admit %,for a sensible subset of roughly similar colleges, look at the regression line, and look at whether Brown is below the line. I didn’t do that, it just popped out at me via eyeball approach when I was looking at #s in the past. All I said was “It’s seemed to me…” . If any such correlation is in fact nonsense, then the regression summary statistics would bear that out. Eyeball applied to the relevant #s from a page of US News suggests that actually the correlation you find will be reasonably high, and support statistical significance. But I haven’t done it.</p>
<p>I don’t care to expend this effort, but maybe one of you Browniacs might want to do it, to lend some support to #26 & 27. Or not.</p>