This discussion was created from comments split from: Ask anything about Penn here.
<p>I’m a prospective student and was wondering how big of an effect being in the top 15% versus top 10% will be in ED for CAS. I go to an extremely competitive high school and still have a 3.83 gpa with 11 APs and 34/2230 along with outstanding EC’s. how big of an effect will the rank have? </p>
<p>@Claxcowboys “How big of an effect being in the top 15% versus top 10% will be in ED for CAS?”</p>
<p>This is not a big deal by itself. Remember that they are looking at your application holistically. Every applicant has strengths and weaknesses. I think most Adcom’s are more interested in an applicants strengths, and what the applicant could contribute to the admitted class than they are about minor weaknesses.</p>
<p>^^ I guess that means that everyone who’s in the top 15% or even 20% of their class should apply? That one way to really increase the number of apps and boost selectivity.</p>
<p>@falcon1"^ I guess that means that everyone who’s in the top 15% or even 20% of their class should apply? That one way to really increase the number of apps and boost selectivity."</p>
<p>I am quite certain that there are students at Penn today that were not in the top 10% of their class. Class Rank is not the be all and end all of decision criteria. If it were, the process would be much more clear cut.</p>
<p>I do not see any reason to suggest that a student with a top 15% CR would not apply based on that reason. Colleges can not weight CR heavily, even if they want to, because 1/2 of applicants do not even have one. This student has a good GPA, above average test scores, above average APs, and claims outstanding EC’s.</p>
<p>Additionally, we do not know the poster’s experiences, reference letter contents, specifics of the outstanding ECs, essays, race, sex, summer activities, specific college they are applying to, work experience, first generation etc.</p>
<p>If Dean Furda wanted to select candidates with top 2% GPAs and 2300+ SAT scores, I am sure that he could do that, but that is not how it is done.</p>
<p>If you disagree with me, that is fine, but please be specific in your comments/criticism instead of making a generic suggestion that I am implying something that I did not say at all, and then adding the further suggestion that I have a dishonest motive.</p>
<p>I wasn’t saying that you were suggesting this so that Penn could boost their apps. I was saying that if were true that being a 15%er was just a “minor weakness” then many more applicants should apply and that would boost Penn’s selectivity and hence rankings. </p>
<p>Top schools like Penn look at an applicant’s transcripts first and foremost. This means that grades and rigor of class schedule are the first thing that is evaluated and everything else is considered within this context. For unhooked candidates, they RARELY go down to the 15% region unless there is something extremely compelling in the rest of the app. Put it another way, in a normal HS class of 500, how many times have you seen them take the 75th ranked candidate? Look at the results threads for the past five years and see if you can find any unhooked candidate who was so far from the top. </p>
<p>Yes, many HS don’t formally rank these days. However, they do provide a school profile which generally have distribution bands so AO’s have a rough idea of where the candidate stands, absent that, many AO’s know the HS and they can eyeball the GPA and know approximately where it falls. At one of the most selective schools in the country, why would they not be looking to take the top couple of students in a class first? If 14% of the class is ahead of the applicant, there had been some awfully compelling reason to give them the golden ticket. </p>
<p>So yes, I do disagree with you because, even though you are well-intentioned, I fear you will give false hope to future applicants who would be much better off using their valuable early card at schools where they are better matched. </p>
<p>@ Falconer1 " I was saying that if were true that being a 15%er was just a “minor weakness” then many more applicants should apply and that would boost Penn’s selectivity and hence rankings."</p>
<p>Perhaps, but I did not stop with that. I also said that “I think most Adcom’s are more interested in an applicants strengths, and what the applicant could contribute to the admitted class than they are about minor weaknesses.”</p>
<p>I agree with you that being between 10 and 15 percent is not ideal. However, successful admissions is a lot more about being impressive at something as opposed to being eliminated for having a weakness. Is there something about this person’s application that makes an Adcom member want to argue for this individual to be admitted. If this candidate has that, then I do not think that a weaker than optimal gpa would keep them out. If they do not have that, then they may well have not gotten in with a perfect gpa. You have to impress them in some way. That is what matters. It may be one particular thing or with the overall application, but you have to impress them. </p>
<p>I would also agree with you if in addition to the 10-15%ile CR, they went to an average high school, had a 30 ACT score and modest ECs. However, at a very competitive school, with a 34 ACT and Outstanding ECs, I think that the candidate has a legitimate chance. </p>
<p>15 graduating seniors from our high school are freshmen at Ivies this fall, but the student with the highest gpa is not one of them. He did not have a strong overall application in addition to his gpa and was rejected. In contrast, one student who was only in the top 25%ile was accepted and was not a URM or athlete. When they say holistic, they mean it. The rest of that students application must have been very persuasive.</p>
<p>@ Falconer1 " why would they not be looking to take the top couple of students in a class first?"</p>
<p>Well, that is a great question, but I can tell you that they do not do it that way. The top students are more likely to get in, but it is not the be all and end all. </p>
<p>@Falconer1 " I fear you will give false hope to future applicants who would be much better off using their valuable early card at schools where they are better matched."</p>
<p>There are no unhooked students who do not have a better chance to get into an easier school. They all know how low the admission rate is at all of the Ivies. If their top priority is to only ED where they will definitely be accepted, they should not apply to any top 25 school. There is always a lot of uncertainty around any individual application at that level. I also strongly recommend that even if any student applies ED to an Ivy, that they also EA at other schools.</p>
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<p>If you’re going to present anecdotal evidence, you should also present all of the facts (i.e what type of school is the HS?, How many kids are in the class? etc.) I can just as easily say that our kids’ top public HS in an extremely competitive state sends a fraction as many kids to the Ivy’s and has been virtually shut out of Penn other than athletic recruits the last few years (2/40). Unless your HS is a top private or magnet school, I have an extremely hard time believing that someone ranked in the 25%ile got in without some special hook. You mean to tell me that someone who is ranked say 125th in a class of 500 randomly decides to apply to Penn and gets accepted? Then I would go back to my original point that EVERYONE ranked 25% or or better should apply because EC’s can somehow trump low relative grades. </p>
<p>In the most recent Common Data Set, Penn reports that 94% of those accepted who report rank were in the top 10% of their class. Since Penn also denotes that in the very same CDS that gpa is “very important” , i.e the highest category for consideration, one can infer that that the ranked and unranked students are all roughly in the top 10% of their class because they are considering gpa and not rank when selecting students. EC’s are ranked “important” and thinks like race, first generation, alumni, geographic are all “considered”.</p>
<p>Since only 6% of the admitted class had a rank higher than 10% and I assume that many of them were athletes, URM’s, development or VIP’s, low-income, first generation and so forth. The fact that you encourage kids with ranks of 15% to apply mystifies me. Even if you come from a competitive HS, if your only top 15%, it still means that you can’t compete with huge pool tier of competitive kids. I’m afraid “The Ivies” are a huge pool of ultra-completive kids that you will be on the bottom rung of.</p>
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<p>So, to repeat, gpa (and by default class rank) IS the most important consideration. Straight from the horse’s mouth and consistent with everything I know from the Ivy I taught at, the one I attended for undergrad, the one I attended for grad and for the one my daughter is currently at. They start there and go down the line. Do they take kids who are in the 15%ile or even 25%ile? yes, of course, but the acceptance rate for these kids is probably under 1% and there is almost always a backstory that we don’t know about.</p>
<p>Typed on phone on the fly so apologies for typos and grammatical errors.</p>
<p>I just checked some stats: Harvard’s class of 2017 consisted of nearly 96% of kids who were in the top 10% of their class according to their CDS filing. Dartmouth number was 93% and moreover, they reported 30% of the kids were valedictorians and 10% were salutatorians (down from 48% and 12% a year earlier!). The message is pretty clear the closer to the top you are AND the better your EC’s the better your chances of being accepted. That being said, it has been reported that Dartmouth rejects a lot more valedictorians than they accept.</p>
<p>Here is data for UPenn which is for the class of 2012, but I would argue things have only gotten more competitive since then because the overall admit rate has plummeted from 16.9% to 9.90%.</p>
<p>Source: <a href=“http://www.docstoc.com/docs/83843391/wenty-five-years-ago-this-fall_--I-entered-the-University-of”>http://www.docstoc.com/docs/83843391/wenty-five-years-ago-this-fall_--I-entered-the-University-of</a></p>
<p>CATEGORY - ADMITTED %
All Apps - 16.95%
Valedictorian - 45.1% (2.7x all-apps admit rate)
Salutatorian - 34.0% (2.0x all-apps admit rate)
Other top 5% - 17.7%
2nd 5% - 8.3%
Total top decile - 21.6%</p>
<p>(more in linked doc)</p>
<p>This CLEARLY shows that as you get to the ranking of 5-10% the admit rate was 8.3% or less than half the overall app admit rate of 16.95%. In today’s world that would translate into an acceptance rate of about 4.4% for rankings in the 5 - 10% range. This supports my argument that a ranking of 15% would probably have associated admittance rates of less than 1%. It would certainly be that for unhooked candidates who are at the 15th percentile of their class.</p>
<p>@Much2learn I have been specific in my comments as you requested. I have even found data to support my arguments. I welcome you to support your statement below with similar data. Otherwise, it is just unsupported conjecture and the kind of stuff that is regularly thrown around on CC about “holistic” admissions to the detriment of unknowing applicants.</p>
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<p>@Falcon1 “Since only 6% of the admitted class had a rank higher than 10% and I assume that many of them were athletes, URM’s, development or VIP’s, low-income, first generation and so forth. The fact that you encourage kids with ranks of 15% to apply mystifies me. Even if you come from a competitive HS, if your only top 15%, it still means that you can’t compete with huge pool tier of competitive kids. I’m afraid “The Ivies” are a huge pool of ultra-completive kids that you will be on the bottom rung of.”</p>
<p>What mystifies me is how you could conclude that any student outside the top 10% of their high school class would be on the bottom rung at Penn. Albert Einstein was a high school dropout and so was Ben Franklin. Would they be on the bottom rung at Penn?</p>
<p>@Falcon1 “So, to repeat, gpa (and by default class rank) IS the most important consideration”</p>
<p>I will admit that, in looking through the common data set today, I was a bit surprised at the 94% number so it may be true that being out of the top 10% does seem to be a bigger issue than I thought; however, only 29% of the applicants have a Class Rank and Penn does not include Class Rank as one of Penn’s Very Important factors. However, you must know that, if you read it as you claim, CR is a separate line item from GPA and is listed as “Important” but is not one of the several items listed as “Very Important.” Why are you trying to make a claim contrary to what admissions publishes?</p>
<p>@falcon1 “Then I would go back to my original point that EVERYONE ranked 25% or or better should apply because EC’s can somehow trump low relative grades.”</p>
<p>Okay, whatever. You can have any thought you want. If you want to continue to create a specious straw man argument to knock down, then far be it from me to stop you. I would not think that any student in the 11th percentile has a decent chance, but with a solid gpa, 11 APs, an excellent ACT score, and outstanding ECs, I see no reason to think that the applicant does not have a reasonable chance. </p>
<p>You are right that it is unlikely that this applicant, or almost any other individual applicant will be accepted, and yet about 3,600 of them will get acceptance letters for next fall. They are going to take someone. I had been told by several people that my unhooked, white, female daughter with no special status had virtually no chance at any Ivy League acceptance letter, let alone Penn, because she had not hook or special status. An admissions consultant reviewed her credentials and told her that completing any ivy league applications was a waste of her time and money to fill out the forms. I convinced her to that it was worth the effort to try and that if she was rejected there was no shame in it. The shame was in being afraid to try. She was accepted to 3, waitlisted at a 4th and only rejected by 1. The point is that it was worth trying. If she listened to the experts and didn’t, try she would have definitely not been accepted to any of them. </p>
<p>@falcon1 “Do they take kids who are in the 15%ile or even 25%ile? yes, of course, but the acceptance rate for these kids is probably under 1% and there is almost always a backstory that we don’t know about.”</p>
<p>Okay, so 6% of applicants were not in the top 10% of CR. that is ~150 students. If that represents 1% of applicants, then that would imply that Penn had 15,000 applicants were not in the top 10%. Do you have data to support that number?</p>
<p>You have made some good points, but that you have also made some with assertions that are not consistent with what I have been told by admissions. I admit that CR I does seem to matter more than I had anticipated, but still believe that it does not matter as much as you seem to think it does.</p>
<p>This thread is going downhill.</p>
<p>To assume that kids not in the top 10% are all your disadvantaged or athletically gifted is a pretty crude presumption.</p>
<p>^^ No, the assumption is that the kids who were accepted to Penn that were not in the 10% of their class are mostly disadvantaged, athletically gifted or otherwise hooked. That is a completely different statement than what you said. it speaks to the fact that Penn and other top schools will lessen their stringent academic requirements in order to bring disadvantaged students on board. Same thing with gifted student athletes. That is a good thing.</p>
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<p>I absolutely did read it! How else would I know the figures? I’m afraid it is you who didn’t read carefully. Read my post over again. I said that gpa was “Very Important”, I never made any statement about class rank being “Very Important” or tried to imply it was. Just the opposite, I said that since the data was only for ranked students, the fact that they look at gpa’s as “very important” means that you can infer that about 94% of both ranked and unranked students fall in the top 10% of their class (whether they rank or not). Again, since gpa is what is being used, then data that was calculated about ranked students was just a residual of the process and should be the same for the unranked students. IF ranking was “very important”, as you stated I was saying, then we would have a problem because the majority of kids are unranked and we would have no way to know how to treat them. Do you see the difference?</p>
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<p>No, I don’t because again there is a major flaw in your argument. I’ll let you figure it out.</p>
<p>Finally, OP did not say they were 11%ile but rather 15%ile. Read the post! It doesn’t sound like much of a difference but the whole point I am making is that IT IS!. </p>
<p>I agree with @Madaboutx this thread is going downhill. Let’s end it. Everyone can ignore the facts and believe what they will about the magic of holistic admissions.</p>
<p>@Falcon1 “Do they take kids who are in the 15%ile or even 25%ile? yes, of course, but the acceptance rate for these kids is probably under 1% and there is almost always a backstory that we don’t know about.”</p>
<p>I am still confused. 6% of an incoming class is about 150 students, and you assert that students outside the top 10% are probably admitted at under a 1% rate. So to get to 150 with a 1% rate would imply 15,000 applicants to me. </p>
<p>I do not see what mistake I am making here other than not adjusting for the yield, but that would imply that the number of applicants at that level would have to grow even more.</p>
<p>My assertion was that AT THE 15%ile or the 25%ile the acceptance rate is probably under 1%. You are asking about ALL accepted students over the 10%ile, which is NOT the same thing. We have no idea where they fall Suppose that 149 were at the 11%ile where the acceptance rate is closer to the 4.4% I postulated for the 5-10% group. Say it is 4%. Then I would just have to produce 149/.04= 3,725 and if only 1 person were at the 15%ile then I would have to produce roughly 1/.01=100 for a total of 3,825. That wouldn’t be so hard would it? Granted, the true number is probably somewhere between 3,825 and 15,000. I don’t have any hard and fast numbers, I was just guesstimating from the data. The point remains that as you move farther away from being the top person in the class, your chance of acceptance falls pretty sharply. By the time you reach 15%ile, your chances of acceptance have diminished to 1, or I’ll be generous, 2%. Remember, only 6% of the class have a rank greater than 10% and most of those spots are claimed by kids with hooks. Time to go to bed and put this to rest, I hope you agree.</p>
<p>I forgot to mention that of the 150 kids, my belief is many, if not most, of them are hooked. The acceptance rate for hooked kids may be 33%, 40%, 70% who knows? If 100 kids were hooked then I would only have to produce 300 other hooked kids at the lower acceptance number. The remaining 50 could be 1/3 of the 3,825 above. See how, this all plays out? Fortunately, kids are smart. They see the numbers on Naviance, they speak to their GC’s, they read about what percentage are accepted from the top 10% and they decide accordingly if they should apply. You don’t get a lot of students making the leap of faith that their being in the top 15% is good enough. It’s the top few students in any HS class that get the best recs from teachers and GC’s. That’s another one of the reasons they’re accepted at much higher rates than others.</p>
<p>The bottom line is top schools want academic superstars. Just like they would like to have athletic superstars if they can.</p>
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<p>I am not going to look up the actual figures but lets assume that 35% of the class are athletes, URMs, and/or other economically disadvantaged or first generation students. To say that a good portion of the 6% of the class that are not in the top 10% come from these groups is not some sort of sweeping indictment of them. Lets say 4% of the kids over 10% are from these groups, you still have the remaining 31% of the class who ARE in the top 10% and in these groups. Quite a powerful statement about what they are able to accomplish academically while many of them are spending countless hours on the practice field or having to overcome untold obstacles and hardship.</p>
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<p>First of all, I said someone at the 15%ile not “outside the top10%…” so once again you’ve bent my words to suit your points, but anyway, If Penn or other Ivies are skimming off the top 10% of kids from their HS’s (really more like top 5% but let’s say 10%) to build their class, and a student is in the FIFTEENTH percentile of a HS class, they come into the IVY already performing below the rest of the class. That this is likely to persist is all I’m saying. Can the student do better? Of course, but history is not on their side.</p>
<p>The rest of your post, I won’t even bother to address because it’s not relevant to the argument except to say that all along Einstein had good grades in math and he GRADUATED the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (which today, like then, is one of the premiere science and technology universities behind schools like MIT, Caltech, Stanford, and Oxford) with fantastic grades.</p>
<p>Nassim Taleb writes about something called “silent evidence”, you bring up the case of two HS dropouts who were actually intellects. What about the other 99% of HS dropouts? Would they be on the bottom rung of Penn? Yes, very likely because they never completed HS and don’t have the right foundational knowledge. Not to mention, if they weren’t even able to finish HS…</p>
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<p>@Much2learn </p>
<p>After looking over some of your old posts, I now question the above and other points you have made. You reported that your daughter was #3 or #4 out of 700 in a top HS. She attended the Women in Technology program at MIT. She had high SAT and SAT subject test scores. She took Calc BC as a junior,received a 5 on the AP test, and took Multivariable and got an A as a senior. You also said she got a likely letter from Cornell (these are given to academic superstars) . Finally, as a girl who is interested in engineering (specifically CS), I’m sure you know that this is one of the biggest academic hooks out there, especially if you had an “admissions consultant” involved in the process. A person near the top of her huge class with 800’s and credentials in engineering and math was told she was wasting her time applying to Ivies and you had to convince her otherwise? I’m afraid you’ve lost all of your credibility with me. </p>
<p>@skieurope Please close this thread.</p>
<p>@ falcon1 </p>
<p>You know all we heard was that while her academics were strong, she would not be admitted without any science or math awards, no national awards, and good grades and test scores are a dime a dozen. That is what we were told. </p>
<p>I really do not see why you feel the need to be so insulting to other people. You seem to think people are lying about everything. What would be the point?</p>
<p>You assume a lot that you don’t know and then attack. Try being nice from time to time and ask about what happened instead of assuming that someone is lying. I would be happy to tell you. I was there.</p>
<p>Again, I agree that the top 10 percent seems to be a bigger deal than I realized; however, I still believe that Penn admissions is holistic and there is no reason to think that they are not honest about that.</p>