<p>4th floor,</p>
<p>I emphasized that as much as the top half of HYPs class is usually selected on "best student" criteria, hence the brilliance. It is the fat tail that bothers me. According to Karabel's The Chosen (I am checking many of the references now) athletes in the most prominent sports often had avg SAT scores between 150 to 180 points below that of the rest of the class.</p>
<p>Consider this, even a weaker state school will have some students who possibly should be at HYP and would be near the top. Would it make HYP better schools to have perhaps a 100 more of those students if they also admitted another 1500 of the weaker students who were good athletes or community leaders? I submit, it would not. Even though total numbers of good students would increase, average quality would fall. While Caltech and Chicago look beyond scores and grades, they do so with the goal of finding other indicators of academic ability, not social respectability. Moreover, the curricula at tough grading schools make it likely that those accepted for social reasons will not graduate at all.</p>
<p>I repeat: Neither the faculty nor the top grad programs use social criteria for themselves. If they did, the schools' reputations would plummet. Getting tenure at HYP is a difficult, meritocratic, and usually bruising process. Hence, such rules for undergrads are at worst cynical, at best self-serving means of buying social support and improved donations. I don't support any regulation of this, but I do believe that a good ranking system needs to be created on purely academic criteria that shame schools that play games with their tails. It would also reward schools like Olin or Cooper which are less known but very selective.</p>
<p>If my work shows promise and I can obtain the data, I may create and publish such a ranking myself.</p>