@skieurope , will I be part of that 8.4% admitted? Also, what other Ivy schools do you know that does NOT recalculate the GPA?
AFAIK, if any do, they do not tell us that they do.
@prezbucky I’ve actually heard that Harvard EA has a more competitive applicant pool than RD, and it 's a waste to apply. Students who have no national level recognition will likely be deferred and it will have been pointless to have used an early application at H. It will probably be more beneficial for OP to apply to any other school but H or MIT, as those schools confer no advantage to early students.
@skieurope Have you heard anything like this?
@FreePariah , it’s SCEA, not EA. they are very different.
I am aware, I wasn’t typing it all the way out for the sake of brevity and my sanity @Acortez122
@FreePariah, we don’t really know if it’s more competitive because we don’t have a breakdown of stats (test scores and GPA…). What we do know is that the SCEA admit rate is about five to six times as high as the RD rate, and athletes alone cannot account for that, given the number of early apps Harvard receives. Maybe there is a larger percentage of hooked applicants overall applying early – that could push the admit rate up vs. RD, if fewer (as a percentage of applicants) are applying RD. But that’s still a huge difference to overcome to be able to say that applying early does not give one an advantage.
To my knowledge, there are only two highly selective schools that do not appear to confer any advantage to early applicants – based on early vs. RD admit rates – and you named one of them, MIT. The other is Georgetown. Both schools have nearly identical EA/REA and RD rates.
No. As @prezbucky says, none of us knows, since we don’t work in admissions. We’ve all heard the stories, but as I’ve said numerous times, the plural of anecdote is not data. There are users here who have created giant spreadsheets analyzing EA/ED vs. RD at various schools. Apparently they have more free time than I, but at the end of the day, there is still no “proof” of anything.
Again, still an anecdote, but I know many who have applied SCEA with no national level recognition, and were accepted. YMMV. My belief, and advice for future students, particularly for colleges where applying early is not binding, is If you have a definite first choice and want to maximize your chances of getting into that dream school, applying early can help; it certainly won’t hurt.
If people want data they are somewhat available on this site. All you have to do is going thru the results pages. For example, in this years Harvard REA thread: 18 are accepted, 15 are US citizens/PR. Out of the fifteen, eleven are hooked. I have been saying that unhooked admits in REA round is probably lower than 30% and CC results seem to bear that out. Out of the four unhooked admits all have national/int awards or notable national level accomplishments. Obviously, CC results are only small samples but they do give you a glimpse of bigger picture.
Not only is the sample size too small to be statistically meaningful, it are not a representative sample of the applicant pool.
You cannot prove that “they are not a representative sample of the applicant pool” either. So unfortunately, this is probably the best and most available data we have got.
It’s worth an application, but the stats are a little low for Harvard.
The conclusion I’ve gathered comes from former Harvard AOs who now work as private admissions consultants. If I remember correctly, I have also found a video by a former AO that bears this same conclusion.
That is what Harvard has said, but you have to figure that they may be saying that to prevent unmanageable numbers of early apps.