<p>
Not really. The vast majority of Stanford’s athletes are in the bottom 25%, whereas in the Ivy Leagues, many athletes fall within the 25-75%. Suppose, then, that you take solely non-athletic admits and compare their 25-75 ranges; I would bet that S is essentially on par with HYP here. BUT, when you factor in the athletes, they will basically anchor down the distribution of SAT scores, shifting the whole bracket of 25-75 down several notches. For HYP, however, since lots of athletes will fall within the non-athlete 25-75, the 25-75 bracket will drop only slightly. Whenever a group takes up part of a range, even if it’s not directly within the 25-75 range, it is still changing the overall percentage calculations and will move where the 25-75 scores reside.</p>
<p>I will use a hypothetical example to emphasize:
Suppose you sample 12 random non-athlete acceptance scores at H and S. Let’s say that the scores are identical, and they are (M+CR):
1350 1380 1400 | 1440 1450 1470 1500 1520 1530 | 1550 1570 1600
The bolded horizontal lines represent the 25-75 brackets.
In this case, the 25-75 at each school would be 1420-1540.</p>
<p>Now, let’s add the scores of 4 random H athletes (athlete scores bolded):
1310 1350 1380 1400 | 1400 1430 1440 1450 1460 1470 1500 1520 | 1530 1550 1570 1600
Recalculating the 25-75 ranges reveals the new range as 1400-1525, a small drop.</p>
<p>Now, suppose you factored in 4 S athletes to the pool:
1170 1210 1250 1300 | 1350 1380 1400 1430 1450 1470 1500 1520 | 1530 1550 1570 1600
A recalculation shows the new S range as 1325-1525, a much more substantial score drop.</p>
<p>Now, interestingly enough, the 75th percentile remained the same, but that is due largely to the small sample size of this example (the 75% bracket takes longer to drag down since for every 3 athletes only 1 shift will occur). Extend the sample size to the thousands, though, and you will start to see Stanford’s 75th percentile bracket shift to the left significantly more than Harvard’s 75th percentile. The point is the numbers illustrate that despite S’s athletes not falling within the 25-75 range, they will still shift the brackets and pull the range down. </p>
<p>By the way, the numbers I used were hypothetical, but given what I know about H and S athletics, they probably are reasonably accurate.</p>