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<p>But wouldn’t a lot of colleges have a lot of students who applied to them as non-first choices? After all, plenty of students’ first choices are reaches, and a reach school is one where admission is possible, but unlikely.</p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.binghamton.edu/oira/cds/CDS_2013-2014%20FINAL%20-%20TC.pdf”>http://www.binghamton.edu/oira/cds/CDS_2013-2014%20FINAL%20-%20TC.pdf</a> indicates that SUNY Binghamton does consider level of applicant’s interest. It also considers other subjectively determined criteria. (But it also considers alumni relation, so the double legacy should have had an effect.)</p>
<p>Also, if SUNY Binghamton admits by major or division, the student may have applied to one with a low capacity relative to the number of applicants, resulting in a higher than expected admission threshold.</p>
<p>But if he got ED admission to Vanderbilt, perhaps he withdrew the SUNY Binghamton application (or forgot about it and left it incomplete somehow), and they sent him a rejection letter as confirmation.</p>
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While they consider interest, it’s quite rare for top stat applicants to be rejected. The high school I attended has well over 100 students who apply to Binghamton each year. Their Naviance shows a 100% acceptance rate among the applicants who had a SAT of 2100+, regardless of GPA. The scattergram at Cappex shows the same pattern, with a 100% acceptance rate among applicants with a 2100+ SAT. The poster mentioned ACT scores, rather than the SAT, which could indicate being out-of-state. However, Parchment suggests less stringent admissions for out-of-state residents than in-state, which I expect relates to increased tuition for out-of-state. For example, applicants with a 3.5-3.7 and 1800-2000 had a 68% acceptance rate for in-state vs 100% acceptance rate for out-of-state. </p>
<p>Of all the unlikely admissions decisions mentioned in the thread, this one strikes me as the most unlikely. Perhaps there was a problem with the application, such as a section being incomplete or inappropriate. </p>
<p>Knew a HS classmate with a 95 average and high 1400s on pre-1995 SATs who was accepted to a few elite colleges including some HYPSMCCs and yet, rejected by LIU. </p>
<p>We all surmised it was due to “Tufts Syndrome” as the adcoms there likely figured no one with his stats from our HS is likely to enroll at LIU. And they would be quite correct in his case as it was a free application he tossed to fulfill the GC’s requirement he applied to a couple of safeties. </p>
<p>Ended up attending one of the HYPSMCCs on a near full-ride FA. This was in a period before many such schools offered very generous need-based FA packages we know of nowadays. </p>
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<p>I agree. Only way someone with a 34 ACT or SAT equivalent would have gotten rejected by SUNY Binghamton is:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>GPA fell below their minimum cutoff. In the mid-'90s, the minimum GPA cutoff was 90/100. Even a perfect 1600 SAT scorer back then would have been rejected if his/her GPA fell below 90 or its equivalent unless there was an exception provided through special SUNY programs targeting underrepresented regions. </p></li>
<li><p>Not completely filling out critical portions of the application. </p></li>
<li><p>Application was filled out so illegibly it was unreadable(Not likely nowadays with electronic applications). </p></li>
</ol>
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<p>They didn’t admit by major when I was in HS and still didn’t when I asked some acquaintances/neighbors who were applying to college less than 4 years ago. </p>
<p>Me–38 years ago. :)<br>
1490 (pre-1995, lol.) 5/900 students–don’t know exact GPA; it was high enough for that rank.
Rejected by Middlebury, my only reach app (because i knew nothing about applying.)</p>
<p>“But if he got ED admission to Vanderbilt, perhaps he withdrew the SUNY Binghamton application (or forgot about it and left it incomplete somehow), and they sent him a rejection letter as confirmation.”</p>
<p>No. He applied EA to Bing. He did not withdraw his app. </p>
<p>“The poster mentioned ACT scores, rather than the SAT, which could indicate being out-of-state.”</p>
<p>Not an OOS applicant. From Westchester County. Lots of kids tin NY take the ACT now so one cannot assume, based on which test they submit, where a student is from. </p>
<p>I am sure there was nothing wrong with his application as he had a private college counselor. </p>
<p>“GPA fell below their minimum cutoff. In the mid-'90s, the minimum GPA cutoff was 90/100.”</p>
<p>No. His GPA was definitely high enough. His school doesn’t rank or weigh but his HS is not unknown at Bing. </p>
<p>He toured so did show some interest. </p>
<p>The only explanation my sister and her H thought was somewhat plausible was he applied the year of the economic crash (2009) and perhaps that one year BING got a so many very high applicants from downstate who, in not so scary times, wouldn’t have even applied to a state school. </p>
<p>Bing does try to balance somewhat the distribution of downstate and upstate kids. It’s a pretty well know fact it is easier to get into Bing from upstate… My kid got in two years later (I live in upstate) with a 30. He didn’t even show any interest at all. He visited but informally (stayed with a friend and just hung out, didn’t tour at all.) </p>
<p>After he got into Vandy he obviously he didn’t care that he got rejected from Bing and wouldn’t have gone if he got in anyway, but it still left everyone baffled. </p>
<p>lookingforward is right to remind people that the entire application and the picture that it paints of the applicant do matter. Of course, this is true. At the same time, to suggest that the entire application explains unexpected rejections is not true in all cases. Perhaps it explains 99% of unexpected rejections, so lookingforward is satisfied that it’s the story. Her experience of applications is substantially broader than mine. However, with an N = 1 (QMP’s friend), I can say that 100% of the inexplicable rejections I know of were not only inexplicable, but pretty much stupid, to be blunt.</p>
<p>There was a story a few years ago about the valedictorian of a local Seattle HS being denied at UW. He had not applied to any other schools.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.uwimpact.org/2011/04/seattle-times-why-straight-as-may-not-get-you-into-uw-this-year/”>http://www.uwimpact.org/2011/04/seattle-times-why-straight-as-may-not-get-you-into-uw-this-year/</a></p>
<p>My nephew graduated #2 from his HS class, 2270 SAT, great ECs and recs, denied at UCB. </p>
<p>Not quite as striking, especially when you consider the caliber of schools he applied to:</p>
<p>This was someone I first met when he casually hacked a website I’d worked on- as part of a joke (nothing impressive as it was just DOS). He’s an Apple developer (his app is really impressive; I can’t specify what it is, but it’s really, really clever and has quite a few downloads), one of the best at computer science in the state (the second most-populous state in the country), and so skilled that his school district trusted him with making their online gradebook software. Got rejected from Stanford EA (I was expecting him to be accepted or deferred), then MIT. But he’s got Berkeley EECS, so that’s solid.</p>
<p>Uh, yes. Anyone being rejected by Stanford or MIT is not “unlikely”.</p>
<p>@"Erin’s Dad" (looks like the tagging system is broken?) True. It’s obviously not that surprising, but it just came to mind because, if I had to place a bet on who would get in, it would’ve been him.</p>
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<p>One of my best buddies in HS was a non-URM/legacy and got admitted to Middlebury with high 1300s (pre-1995) and an exceedingly low GPA for the place(Probably placed him just out of the top quarter of his graduating class if we ranked). He attributed his acceptance there to a stellar interview and essays. </p>
<p>His GPA was low enough that he wouldn’t have been admitted to Binghamton due to that GPA cutoff. </p>
<p>@SomeOldGuy - I agree with your post in its general point, but just to be technically correct, “yield” and “acceptance rate” are not the same thing. Acceptance rate = 100<em>(# of students accepted from all applications/# of applications) while Yield = 100</em>(# of students matriculating/# of students accepted). USNWR uses the former, they have not used the latter in some time. The number of schools students apply to these days makes yield a much less useful indicator of anything.</p>
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<p>Actually, you would be amazed. I have heard from numerous admissions officers that this is a surprisingly frequent occurrence. Not just in essays such as “Why Us” (which do still exist at a decent number of schools) but also in emails and other missives directed to the school. They actually forget to change the name of the school itself in many cases, in others they talk about something specific that makes it obvious they made the same kind of error. Smart kids can often do careless things, especially when they are working on so much at once.</p>
<p>
For sure, every school except those at the very top have kids that are a bit (or even a lot) bitter about not being at a school that is in the next tier up, or even a single “dream school”. I do think this is probably a pretty small percentage though. Given how many schools, including my alma mater, deny a lot of kids (well, usually wait list but usually ends up being the same thing) with top scores and grades and other strong points, if that same person gets shut out at the HYP type schools, they are in bad shape. But again, I rather doubt this constitutes a very large group.</p>
<p>I can say though (and this is not directed at anything you said but just about this whole “Tufts” thing in general) that I have observed so many high stat kids getting into these same schools that people accuse of Tufts that the premise seems to fall apart. My own D, for example, had 2330 SAT, 3.9 UW GPA with about 7 AP courses, and a decent resume regarding other factors. She got into Tulane and WUSTL, besides some of the highest prestige schools. Now admittedly she is a legacy at Tulane, but I know legacies that got turned away that had perfectly good scores and grades. At both schools she showed strong interest because they really were her top two choices. She actually wasn’t sold on the whole Ivy route. I think she made that clear to them. I see similar acceptances at both schools all the time. So I think it really is about fit, at least as much as the school can tell. Sure they have a self interest in not taking every student that presents high stats if they don’t really show that the school is more than a “safety” to them. But it is more about controlling the admissions numbers and the kind of student that ends up at the school than it is some ranking, especially since the ranking really won’t budge if the admissions rate changes a few percent, given that it is only 1.25% of the calculation.</p>
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Besides all the other proposed explanations, there is always the possibility of plain old human error. I know the odds are low, but it has to happen a few times every admission cycle. Maybe this is just one of them.</p>
<p>@fallenchemist The process overall is pretty imperfect. The guy in charge of Amherst admissions (who also sits on the committee) has admitted on video that he “sometimes doesn’t know” why he thinks someone should be admitted or rejected. These adcoms aren’t superhuman. Reminds me of an article on the Guardian where the author just comments on how everyone is just winging it, all the time. They’re bombarded with tens of thousands of applications and obviously aren’t going to make the right decisions all the time- the process is tiring and difficult.</p>
<p>(article I mentioned; doesn’t really have any real content: <a href=“http://gu.com/p/3pdm2/us”>http://gu.com/p/3pdm2/us</a>)</p>
<p>@dividerofzero - Absolutely. Besides the human error I mentioned, there is just the human factor. Applications can give off a “vibe” of sorts. One admissions person reads an app and says “I love this student!” Another reads the same app and thinks the student is pretentious and shallow. It isn’t a science unless the school uses nothing but stats for making the decision. I don’t know a school like that, at least at the more selective level. Some are certainly more stat driven than others, but they obviously look at other things. Of course they try and train the staff so that the arbitrariness of which person reads your app is reduced, but it is impossible to eliminate it.</p>
<p>Really, guys, don’t stress too much over these “unlikely” rejections. If you have a good variety of schools, do your best on the college application, and keep up your performance then you maximize your chances of getting in to a half-decent school at worst. Chances are, these “urban legend” students probably forgot something really, really important along the way. Nobody just gets “unlucky”.
For example several students that really outperformed me in terms of grades and standardized test scores ended up getting rejected by the University of Washington, UC Santa Barbara, University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Florida, and universities like these (I got into UC Davis). They still ended up somewhere good, at least, but they weren’t entirely happy with where they ended up. On the outside, it seemed like they got really unlucky. But then I learned how many of them either didn’t try their best on the application (as in they thought grades would carry them all the way) or were too biased towards the power elite in their college selections (too much Ivy League, not enough match and safety, and because they spent too much time on polishing up their 8 Ivy League applications they had no time to work on their match and safety applications). Maybe the most unlikely rejection I know of was this one kid with a 4.5 GPA and 2270 SAT getting rejected from UC Santa Cruz and Ohio State, but I can’t say he was an exception either (he ended up going to Virginia Tech).
Like I said, do your best on the application process, challenge yourself in high school, and polish yourself with something outside the classroom as well, and you most definitely won’t become an urban legend.</p>
<p>Assuming it’s true, this one:</p>
<p><a href=“Syracuse ED 2018 Thread - #594 by winterfell123 - Syracuse University - College Confidential Forums”>Syracuse ED 2018 Thread - #594 by winterfell123 - Syracuse University - College Confidential Forums;
<p>blows me away.</p>
<p>(kid with a 3.7 and a 2390 gets rejected ED by Syracuse)</p>
<p>No stats, but this makes very little sense:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/texas-m-university/1471983-help-accepted-at-cornell-rejected-at-tamu.html”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/texas-m-university/1471983-help-accepted-at-cornell-rejected-at-tamu.html</a></p>
<p>edit: stats are here ->
<a href=“Class of 2018 - Admissions Status - #336 by chouter21 - Texas A&M University - College Confidential Forums”>Class of 2018 - Admissions Status - #336 by chouter21 - Texas A&M University - College Confidential Forums;
<p>34 ACT, 3.4 GPA, top 28% rank rejected from TAMU and accepted into Cornell. </p>