<p>The threads are filled with stories of kids with 4.9 GPAs and toll free Sat scores who got rejected from schools that should have been back-up safety schools.</p>
<p>I was wondering if anyone has real knowledge of any of these cases and how extraordinary these rejections really are.</p>
<p>We know a kid with a 3.85 (UW) and a 2210 SAT who got rejected from GWU, but doesn't seem as outrageous as one that I've heard about.</p>
<p>I was hoping to hear from people who have ACTUAL knowledge of GPAs and test scores of kids who got rejected from their safeties.</p>
<p>Many of the supposed “safeties” in question have the following characteristics:</p>
<ul>
<li>Use a lot of subjective criteria in admissions, so stats alone do not make them into safeties.</li>
<li>Have admissions buckets of different selectivity (e.g. by major or division), and the applicant is in a high selectivity bucket (e.g. picked a highly popular major with low capacity), so the overall stat ranges are misleading.</li>
<li>Use “level of applicant’s interest” and the applicant made it obvious that the school was a low choice “safety”.</li>
</ul>
<p>The 2400, high-performing kid on CC who wrote a lot of savvy, well-regarded advice here regarding testing, applications and admissions- and did not get into more than one of his most-elite choices. No, those weren’t safeties for anyone. But it shows how very much the actual application package can matter- not just gpa, rank and scores- what the app actually conveys that matters to those adcoms. Still, for many, it’s geo diversity that can squeeze them, when final decisions are made.</p>
GWU has a reputation for practicing Tufts Syndrome. Nearly half of Parchment members with 3.9+ GPA and 2300+ SATs report being rejected, yet 90+% percent of applicants in certain lower stat groups report being accepted.</p>
<p>These places all have a keen sense of who is likely to matriculate. Also, GWU is perhaps the most expensive place to attend school in the country. I wouldn’t be surprised if the overlap of Tufts syndrome and demonstrated need categories leads to some surprising rejections. </p>
<p>I was a 3.9 GPA, 2230 SAT applicant with great ECs and expressed interest at CWRU. I was deferred, then waitlisted. I asked to be taken off the waitlist. </p>
<p>I visited campus and emailed admissions people with questions about the school, so I don’t think my level of interest was what got me. I do think I was qualified, so i am not really sure why I was not accepted.</p>
<p>A friend’s kid, a national caliber math whiz, was accepted at Caltech (Early Action), MIT (Early Action), Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego. Rejected at UC Santa Cruz. </p>
<p>friend’s son- national math competition winner all 4 years, 2400 SATs, very top of his class at what was at that time the #1 HS in the nation- accepted at Princeton, Yale, Cal Tech, MIT and Stanford (where he went)- rejected by WUSTL.</p>
<p>This isn’t an outright rejection, but waitlist. Our S had 4.9 GPA, was valedictorian, NMF, 34 ACT, Math SAT2 800, Physics SAT2 780, decent ECs, was waitlisted to Colorado School of Mines. He had friends with lower scores and grades who were accepted. He didn’t show much interest, so I think it might have been yield protection. </p>
<p>From wiki: “Yield protection is an alleged admissions practice where a university or academic institution rejects or wait-lists highly qualified students on the grounds that such students are bound to be accepted by more prestigious universities or programs. This is also referred to as Tufts Syndrome. However, alternate theories regard the yield protection as a myth propagated by college students who failed to gain admission to elite universities. Yield rate refers to the proportion of students who matriculate (i.e. accept an admissions offer and attend the college) after acceptance to a college.”</p>
<p>It’s often cited at the same colleges that review holistically, forgetting that the whole app matters, not just stats and hs confidence.</p>
<p>@rebca912 - Tufts Syndrome refers to when schools allegedly do not admit over qualified students because they believe the students will go to more prestigious schools.</p>
<p>Yes ^^, and my understanding is that it’s called “Tufts Syndrome” because very qualified students who tell Tufts they are considering other schools in Boston (i.e., Harvard & MIT) were getting rejected by Tufts because the admissions department at Tufts believed these students were using Tufts as a safety and Tufts wanted to protect its yield.</p>
<p>Yield protection is a real issue. Yield is a criteria used in determining ranking and ranking has real consequences to a school, such as number of applications as well as its credit rating.</p>
<p>Know something, chick? Some kids do spill the beans.<br>
I don’t see yield protection as the issue some others do. Not some magic number for USNews. More that you don’t want to play games with the admits. It’s costly. What do you want school X to do when the kid tells them they’re more interested in another school, addresses his Why Us to another school’s strengths, doesn’t seem to know this one well (despite the hs gpa and scores) or goes generic? And you’ve got thousands of other qualified kids who can express their match (holistic, remember.) </p>
<p>If this is supposedly about rankings, either the entire “yield protection” issue is vastly overstated, or colleges are behaving irrationally. In the US News rankings, acceptance rates comprise a 10% subfactor in the category of student selectivity, which in turn bears a 12.5% weighting in their overall calculation. Thus, yield is one element affecting a variable that is only 1.25% of the overall ranking – and “yield protection” presumably could have adverse consequences on other elements of student selectivity that have much greater weight in the formula. </p>
<p>An equally or even more plausible explanation for “yield protection” is simply that admissions offices prefer to stock their entering classes with students who want to be there. Imagine how miserable a campus would be if 80% of the kids walking around all wished they were going to a different school. And, of course, over time, having a reputation for an engaged, happy student body is likely to improve the reputation of the school (which is weighted more heavily by US News than selectivity). </p>
<p>My sister’s step son. 34ACT. Don’t know his GPA, only that it was high. Very rigorous high school. Rejected by SUNY Binghamton - where both his parents attended (and I read on the Bing forum that legacy applicants are flagged and read separately.) Accepted ED to Vanderbilt. </p>
<p>I doubt it was Tufts Syndrome as acceptance rate is 43% and yield is only 21%. </p>
<p>I think that is mainly an urban legend in itself.
A student who has top grades, top scores and top ECs is not the type to make a basic mistake like addressing the wrong strengths of a school or goes generic.
Besides, how many of those top colleges even have the “why us” essay anymore? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yeah, but these “unlikely rejections” are the ones who get into a lot of the top schools (as shown in some of the examples above), so it isn’t about just being qualified, many of these are exceptionally qualified.</p>
<p>There is not going to be 80% of the kids wishing they were going to another school because of eliminating yield protection.
If they didn’t care about yield protection, then they may as well accept them since it doesn’t matter since many of those students would not go anyway
Or a small percentage of them may go if they get into no other school and those people may actually be grateful that they were accepted when all the other colleges said no.</p>