<p>I consider myself a decent student with chances of getting in to good schools. (i.e. Berkeley, etc) with some luck of the admissions game of course. Lets say I tried my hardest, in school and tests and extra curriculars and sports-do you think there is a chance that if I applied to all of the Ivy Leagues, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UChicago I would get in to at least one of them? Because there cannot be a great chance that 11 universities would reject a good student with good extracurriculars, and great tests/essays, right? Just statistically/hypothetically speaking.</p>
<p>Mathematically speaking, you would have about a 70% chance of getting accepted to at least one. Truthfully speaking, most of these colleges are looking for the same thing and it’s not like entering a lottery.</p>
<p>If you are unhooked and your academic stats are in the ballpark (top 5% class rank, top 1% SAT/ACT) then your ECs and community service will make the difference. If you have leadership in both these areas, then adding more top-20 schools will strongly increase your chances, because different adcoms will be either impressed or bored with different ECs.</p>
<p>However, if your application looks like 10,000 others and there is nothing about you that particularly stands out, you may well get rejected by all the elites. The key to your strategy is to do at least one thing well enough that it makes you interesting.</p>