The College Confidential Applicant Delusion

Applying to College
41

<p>Folks, I'd like to get back to what one of the Harvard students eluded to earlier in the thread: That there are enough qualified applicants to fill multiple classes at schools like HYPMS.</p>

<p>What we now believe is a typical CC Ivy League Profile includes 2300+ SAT, 4.0 GPA, 3 750+ SAT II Scores, great EC's and essays, etc is justly portrayed when it comes to getting into one of these schools.</p>

<p>Someone mentioned that the 75th percentile had 800M and 790CR.</p>

<p>Here in lays the rub. Not everyone with a 800M had a 790CR, but you must imagine that it has to be pretty damn close.</p>

<p>The best way to look at it score-wise would be to find out how many 800M scores there were in the class, the how many 800CR scores there were. Then figure out how many had BOTH. The numbers would probably turn out a little less staggering than you think. The 1590 notion tends to scare people off.</p>

<p>The only delusion that could be created is figuring out exactly what "qualified" means. If you are an athlete, are you still "qualified" even if your academic standards do not measure up to the non-athletes at the school? I say hell yes! You are qualified BECAUSE you are an athlete, picked from a pool of other athletes. You were probably more talented or had more promise than your "competitors".</p>

<p>Now, my school has many students who applied to top Ivies and got rejected. The first thing we did at the Naval Academy was compare acceptances/rejections to the top schools. I found that nearly an equal number of people who got rejections from Ivies rejected Ivy offers themselves like I did. This shows that even "qualified" and accepted applicants do get away from these schools in favor of the Military Academies and other smaller, lesser-known schools.</p>

<p>By comparison to the other "Top" schools, the Naval Academy ONLY had 87 800M and 62 800CR scores out of the 1212 entering midshipmen in the class of 2010. Consider the Naval Academy's mission. The Academy rejected more than 75 people with 800M and even more than that with 800CR due to the engineering nature of the institution. We also look for the desire to serve and to meet the physical standards. To me, a huge delusion is how criminally unheralded the Service Academies are on CC because they tend to reject as many "academic" type people as accept. People wonder why the acceptance rate of 14% at USNA is equal to that of Brown, and better than Dartmouth, Penn, and Cornell (the lower Ivies).</p>

<p>The "crapshoot" theory is for people with "typical" SAT scores for the Ivies. I'd say typical means the 1590 that has been mentioned so many times on this thread. I had nowhere near a 1590. The hook I guess for me was being a foster kid and being interested in ROTC. I got accepted by Princeton and Dartmouth. Does this make me less qualified just because I had something someone else didn't? To me, getting into an Ivy can portrayed as impossible by CC if you don't sell yourself and get caught into the same hype as the roughly 88% of those who were rejected from Ivies last year.</p>

42

<p>WELL SAID
that is why the ADCOMs have to look at application after application of:
(I'm generalizing) High Scores, various laundry-list of school ECs, list of frivolous awards, accomplished musicians, high gpas, students doing research, and the like. Applicants truly are quite homogeneous.</p>

43

<p>GoNavyXC,
In answer to your question about the distribution of high scorers, collegeboard.com does provide statistics. 1.46mm kids took the SAT last year. Here are the numbers for those who scored at the 1400 level or higher:</p>

<p>Score Level, # of students who scored at that level, cumulative number of students who scored at that level or higher, Percentile</p>

<p>1600 , 984 , 984 , 99.93%
1590 , 726 , 1710 , 99.88%
1580 , 458 , 2168 , 99.85%
1570 , 512 , 2680 , 99.82%
1560 , 1433 , 4113 , 99.72%
1550 , 968 , 5081 , 99.65%
1540 , 1595 , 6676 , 99.54%
1530 , 1780 , 8456 , 99.42%
1520 , 1791 , 10247 , 99.30%
1510 , 2469 , 12716 , 99.13%
1500 , 2466 , 15182 , 98.96%
1490 , 2596 , 17778 , 98.79%
1480 , 3380 , 21158 , 98.56%
1470 , 3365 , 24523 , 98.33%
1460 , 3705 , 28228 , 98.07%
1450 , 4220 , 32448 , 97.79%
1440 , 4723 , 37171 , 97.46%
1430 , 4900 , 42071 , 97.13%
1420 , 5361 , 47432 , 96.76%
1410 , 5896 , 53328 , 96.36%
1400 , 6329 , 59657 , 95.93%</p>

44

<p>harvard can't even fill their class with 1590s</p>

45

<p>You can't just add the top 25th percentile. The scores are counted by section, so 790 + 800 doesn't mean Harvard's top 25% of kids have 1590. Some kids will get 800M and 740CR, 800CR and 720M, etc.</p>

46

<p>Here is the detail by Critical Reading and Math for scorers over 700.</p>

<p>Score Level, # of students who scored at that level, cumulative number of students who scored at that level or higher, Percentile</p>

<p>CR<br>
800 , 8862 , 8862 , 99.40%
790 , 1594 , 10456 , 99.29%
780 , 520 , 10976 , 99.25%
770 , 4064 , 15040 , 98.97%
760 , 5087 , 20127 , 98.63%
750 , 5817 , 25944 , 98.23%
740 , 8972 , 34916 , 97.62%
730 , 10124 , 45040 , 96.93%
720 , 6502 , 51542 , 96.48%
710 , 5557 , 57099 , 96.10%
700 , 11894 , 68993 , 95.29%</p>

<p>MATH<br>
800 , 8057 , 8057 , 99.45%
790 , 5495 , 13552 , 99.08%
780 , 4383 , 17935 , 98.78%
770 , 2998 , 20933 , 98.57%
760 , 8651 , 29584 , 97.98%
750 , 3216 , 32800 , 97.76%
740 , 11682 , 44482 , 96.97%
730 , 3965 , 48447 , 96.69%
720 , 13876 , 62323 , 95.75%
710 , 16009 , 78332 , 94.66%
700 , 17427 , 95759 , 93.47%</p>

47

<p>You can't just add the top 25th percentile. The scores are counted by section, so 790 + 800 doesn't mean Harvard's top 25% of kids have 1590. Some kids will get 800M and 740CR, 800CR and 720M, etc.
[Quote]
</p>

<p>How many times is this going to be brought up? Taking a look at MIT's statistics, they could fill the class with everyone having an 750-800 on the math section, but clearly chose not to do so. If you look closely, they did reach down and take people who had between 550-600 on the math section, showing that perhaps not everyone has to fit the typical CC powerhouse profile to get in.</p>

48

<p>One guy from my school had a 100 average (okay so it was 99.66); 800 on 5 subject tests; and 2400 on his SAT, and so many awards and EC's its immeasurable :eek:</p>

<p>HE got rejected from Harvard and Princeton, but got into Yale... when these kinds of candidates get rejected, I feel like I won't even get into community college :eek::(</p>

49

<p>
[quote]
The northeast (and to some extent California too) - well it's very status conscious and it's probably where most of the alumni live too. So you will find an enormous number of HYP applicants from this part of the country (although not my city ! lol).

[/quote]
I would guess another big driver of kids decisions in the east is the proximity of elite schools. Here are elite schools within 250 miles of </p>

<p>SF = Stanford, Berkeley</p>

<p>Boston = MIT, Harvard, Tufts, Wellesley, Brown, Wesleyan, Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia, NYU, Williams, Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, USCGA, Smith</p>

<p>I'm sure I missed a few on both lists but the point is the same ... there are a ton of schools in the east ... so a kid has many more options "close" to home than in other parts of the country.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
harvard can't even fill their class with 1590s

[/quote]
yes they can. if 984 people got a 1600 and got a 726 1590 then that is 1710 people Harvard's classes are generally around 1600 people.</p>

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<p>But not all 1710 of that number is going to apply to Harvard.</p>

<p>I consider Harvard and MIT to be on the same selectivity level. MIT did reach down to people with less than 600 on the math section for admission.</p>

<p>I suspect Harvard does take some people who are well below the curve on SAT scores due to some other huge exception (athlete, etc). </p>

<p>Consider what Harvard and the other schools are doing by taking people who are not all what we call the typical CC Ivy profile.</p>

<p>Harvard creates more interest and optimism by reaching down to "sub-par" scores. Thus, when someone sees that there were people admitted with less than a 600 on math or verbal, it boosts the number of applications they receive each year.</p>

<p>Harvard is never going to fill the class with the highest SAT scorers that they can. That small percentage of people they take in with sub-par scores are probably extremely hard workers. Sometimes, your chances of getting in are better if you are a questionable applicant. It is fair to say that Harvard is sure to take in a small amount of lower scorers each year. If my EC's, etc. are tops among the "lower scoring applicants" it may be better off than the scorer who fits in the same bracket as most of the other applicants.</p>

<p>Anyone catching my drift here?</p>

52

<p>
[quote]
Harvard is never going to fill the class with the highest SAT scorers that they can. That small percentage of people they take in with sub-par scores are probably extremely hard workers. Sometimes, your chances of getting in are better if you are a questionable applicant. It is fair to say that Harvard is sure to take in a small amount of lower scorers each year. If my EC's, etc. are tops among the "lower scoring applicants" it may be better off than the scorer who fits in the same bracket as most of the other applicants.

[/quote]
I think that this is understood on CC. If you look at many chance threads, you hear people say that it's not always about the grades and test scores. So, you haven't really made a ground-breaking realization. But it's still a great point to reiterate.</p>

53

<p>@ lobgent's list:</p>

<p>I suspect that the population of shoo-ins is very underrepresented on CC. These people are not nervous about getting in because they don't have to be. What's the point of posting a chances thread if you're a TASPer with a 2400 and great EC's? Ego-boosting?</p>

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<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/413821-sat-score-frequencies-freshman-class-sizes.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/413821-sat-score-frequencies-freshman-class-sizes.html&lt;/a> </p>

<p>Simply put, most College Confidential participants overestimate how good one's stats must be to get into a top-twenty college.</p>

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<p>yeah i think most of the kids who apply are (1) ignorant about their chances, thinking that having a 1800 SAT score albeit the highest on record in their school would get them in, or (2) people who have good scores but no ECs or anything but still think grades are everything and (3) people whose parents get them to apply or they apply for fun despite the almost impossibility of getting in.</p>

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<p>For Harvard specifically, see </p>

<p><a href="http://www.college.harvard.edu/deans_office/NCAASelfStudy.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.college.harvard.edu/deans_office/NCAASelfStudy.pdf&lt;/a> </p>

<p>(Thanks to CC participant PapaChicken for sharing the link.)</p>