<p>bovertine, let me apologize as I read your post all wrong!! For some odd reason, I thought you were talking about the stats of ADMITTED students to Pton. I just did not pick up on that those were the stats of those who APPLIED! So sorry! That changes it for sure, LOL. Ya know, it didn’t sound right to be about the mid 600’s! </p>
<p>So, yes, a student can be admitted who falls in the lower 25% range of admitted students but if one’s stats are quite below even that, the odds start becoming very very long. So, yes, agree that 1300 SAT for Pton would be extremely long shot odds and very few are admitted in that range and would have to have other very compelling things to override that score. </p>
<p>As I wrote before, on USNews, you can find out what percentage of students within each 100 point score range are admitted to a particular school. So, for example, at Pton, they admitted 21% of students with a CR score in the 600s and only 3% of those with a CR score in the 500s. For Math, they admitted 21% of students with a score in the 600’s and only 2% of those with scores in the 500s. I would say no way if you have a CR/M score of below 1200 at Princeton. If you have 1300, the chances are very very low, but not impossible (but you’d have to have very strong aspects in the app to override it). If between 1350-1400, still very low odds but worth a shot if everything else in the profile is strong. I had a student this year who had a 1360 CR/M, but everything else about her was strong, who got into Stanford and Brown. Very reachy, but not impossible odds. If she had 1230, I’d have said nearly impossible. </p>
<p>Again, sorry I had read your original post entirely wrong about applicants, and thought you meant accepted students. My bad!</p>
<p>“Has anyone played with the new “college search” option here on cc? Has it produced any schools that are good safeties that you hadn’t considered? Would love to hear people’s experience.”</p>
<p>Actually I played with it a few days ago and oh how I wish I had known about it a year ago!</p>
<p>It definitely came up with some great schools that never entered our radar. I said it before and I’ll say it again, I really really wish I had found CC sooner. I only found it AFTER the application process.</p>
<p>“There are a ton of schools for lower stat kids and I do have to get back to work, LOL. Read the threads on CC about this range and so many schools come up. But for example, …U of Hartford, Assumption, Endicott, Salve Regina, Le Moyne, Elmira, URI, Suffolk, Goucher, Merrimack, York College of PA, Manhattanville, Champlain College, St. Anselm, Colby Sawyer, Albright, DeSales, Alfred, Springfield, Wagner…and so many more.”</p>
<p>My older child attends one of those schools…he has a significant learning disability and it was a great choice for him. His VIQ is really high…his PIQ not so much. Basically he’s a very bright kid who can’t test to save his life, hence getting good grades is a struggle.</p>
<p>At any rate, it’s a shame that CC has a tendency to ignore most of the schools on this list. My son’s for instance, is not even on the alphabetical list of colleges here at CC. What that tells me is that CC is elitist and focused on the overachieving students looking at top colleges, which by the way, is not the majority.</p>
<p>Feel free to disagree, but that’s how I see it.</p>
<p>konabean - CC is what parents and other participants make of it. Let’s face it - most parents who are focused on the college process have strong students - not all of course, but most. And the threads and forums on CC reflect that. But if you look at the parents forum - there is a wonderful thread for 3.0 - 3.3 kids - you might have found a very supportive helpful community there. There are a lot of colleges not on the alphabetical listing - you can ask a moderator how to add one if you want to do so. You can start a new thread, as I have recently done, that focuses on the group/topic that interests you the most. Why not start a thread for parents of children with learning disabilities? I’m sure you have info to share about your experiences in this realm that will help others. CC is a wonderful resource - there are so many people who read this site and jump in to help someone when asked. I think people on here are very generous with both their time and knowledge, and no, I don’t think CC is elitist.</p>
<p>Yes, I’ve seen that thread and you’re right, the participants are wonderful and supportive…but honestly, I do think CC is geared to overachievers. I’m not passing judgment on that observation, it is what it is.</p>
<p>I agree that there is a large number of members on CC focused on very selective colleges. </p>
<p>However, there are many active threads about students with more average profiles. </p>
<p>As well, there is a learning disabilities forum on CC. </p>
<p>One has to explore the site and find the things that fit their interests and situations and ignore the rest. </p>
<p>As far as CC having a forum devoted to every school…it doesn’t. Typically a forum is set up for a school if there are enough existing thread discussions on that school to warrant organizing the threads in one place. Otherwise, a thread can be started on any school even if there is no distinct forum for that school. </p>
<p>CC can’t help which types of students or parents it attracts. But I think there is something on CC for most people. There may be more for those interested in elite college admissions but there is still plenty for the rest.</p>
<p>I also have read often on threads that discuss college counselors, a significant assumption and misconception that college counselors are just for those seeking very selective colleges. To the contrary, a college counselor can be beneficial for those seeking less selective colleges as that is a challenging process as well. In my own experience, I have some outstanding advisees, and some with very low profiles. Both kinds of students and families need help. I think that can be found on CC’s forums if you seek it out. It’s all here.</p>
No worries, konabean, you didn’t miss anything. It didnt exist a year ago! Its a relatively new feature here. </p>
<p>As others have said above, CC forum is a self selected group, and is probably skewed towards the stronger students and/or those doing a very thorough exploration of college options. That said, there are great discussions on schools for kids with LD, mood disorders, substance free dorms, you name it, as well as where to stay, how to get there, where to eat, what to see, etc that is independent of the school being considered. </p>
<p>If you go to the very main page of CC (not the CC forum, but main CC) you will see the comment as you just described… “wish I’d found this last year”.</p>
<p>*** as an aside as was mentuined, schools may not have their own forum simply because there is not enough activity /discussion about that school. There is a section where you can request that a school be added. The bigger the CC forum gets, though, the more bandwith it takes, which may get expensive to maintain, or may slow down how quickly it loads (guessing on that )</p>
<p>Konabean, several moms I know were shocked at having their Ds deferred at a number of EA schools that they really thought were going to be back ups. These are kids for whom ivies are not considered out of reach. It was a humbling and sobering experience. I really think that the EA and rolling admissions school are good test cases. BC, by the way was one of those schools that did defer a number of such students. </p>
<p>For those kids, it was back to the drawing board, and a much more balanced list. Some of those kids were accepted to highly selective schools in April, but they sure felt a lot better having some schools where they were reasonably certain of acceptance on their lists. Also gave them more of a genuine tone when interviewing and dealing with those colleges. They learned from the EA deferrals that this was not going to be an easy shot, and that they had better show some love to those safeties and put some real work in researching them.</p>
<p>In reading posts, if the member doesn’t provide a profile of the student, a reader might be wary if what the member calls their reach or match or safety school really fits those distinctions. Just because someone calls certain schools their reaches, matches or safeties, doesn’t make it so. I have read posts on CC and know people off CC who have very unrealistic visions of which schools are reaches, matches, or safeties for them.</p>
<p>I am sure that all colleges, particularly those with the greatest name-recognition, get a significant fraction of applications from students who are patently unqualified to attend. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if those numbers were something like 20% of all applicants to the top Ivies – enough to pretty much skew those median scores for applicants down to the numbers shown in your chart.</p>
<p>That being said, however, I think you need to keep in mind that colleges look at SAT scores “in context” - and that the CC idea of “low” may not be “low” when applied to a student coming from an inner city public high school, or a rural school, or the child of non-English speaking immigrant parents. I mean… perhaps a kid’s family immigrated when he was 12 and his mastery of the English language dates from middle school - for that particular kid, 620 on CR might be a terrific score. So it is not always unrealistic for a kid to target a school even if their stats are below the typical range for accepted students. (After all… if my daughter hadn’t targeted schools that way, where would she be?)</p>
<p>Of course – for purposes of determining safety/match/reach – obviously lower-than-typical test scores are a pretty sure sign that the targeted school is reachy. I’m just saying that it’s not necessarily unrealistic.</p>
<p>I did something interesting this week. I went to the College Pworler (site name scrambled on purpose) web site and found a tool where you enter stats and get a reach vs. target analysis, and give you a percentage for chances (If they have “safety” as result I didn’t find it). I entered my d’s stats for the colleges she applied to. For the most part the colleges that we considered reaches at the time - and where my daughter was accepted came back as reaches – but I also noted something interesting from the percentage scores. For example, the college my daughter attends was shown as a “reach” with something like a 40%+ chance of admission. (Reach because that means that it is more probably than not that she would be rejected). Of course we know in hindsight that she was in fact accepted – but that college generally has roughly a 25% acceptance rate. Obviously a 40% chance of admission is a lot better than a 25% chance. The same held true for other colleges we saw as reaches – the “chances” number still put the college in “reach” range, but came out better than raw percentages for each possible college.</p>
<p>Now I have no idea of the algorithm used on the CC-competitor web site and whether it has any bearing to reality – but it certainly does reflect our thought process at the time my daughter applied to that college. My daughter had a combination of strengths and weaknesses and we hoped to identify colleges that appreciated the strengths, and we hoped that the strengths would outweigh the reaches. In the case of the web site algorithm, I know that the countervailing number was my d’s high GPA and class rank. In real life, there were subjective factors that came into play as well. (That other web site also provides a quick & dirty personality test and spits out a percentage “fit” number as well — the same college with the 40%+ chance of admission was a 70%+ match for all the things I entered about my d’s personality preferencess). </p>
<p>So I think that while we can all agree that many people misjudge their chances when applying to colleges, I think it can also be fairly said that the interesting stuff in college admissions happens around the margins – the students whose profiles might provoke some discussion among an ad com, who may present a mix of intriguing abilities and accomplishments along with some obvious weaknesses. I don’t think those students should be faulted for applying.</p>
Sure, but judging by the difference in scores between the applicants and the accepts I think there are probably not a huge number of students like this, or the admitted lower 25% would be closer to the applicant lower 25%. They are pretty far apart.</p>
<p>I guess more than anything else I was thinking that this should give a little hope to the kids whose scores fall within or above the typical accepted ranges (and yes I know scores aren’t everything). The microscopically low acceptance rates may also include a significant (like you said, 20%) number of applicants who really have almost no chance at all.
And people should apply wherever they want, if they can afford the time and money. You never know.</p>
<p>Do keep in mind that Princeton also rejects thousands of applicants with SAT scores on the high end of their median score range as well. On a statistical basis, you can pull out one set of criteria and draw a set of conclusions. But on an individual basis you cannot. </p>
<p>For example – suppose you had some sort of objective score to measure the number and quality of EC’s each applicant had – so that you could assign an “EC” score much like a SAT score, and then produce a report of midrange scores for applicants vs. admitted students and compare admission stats. I’m pretty sure you would end up with charts that showed that the students with better EC scores were more likely to get admitted. I’m also pretty sure that there must be many nerdy, introverted kids with really high SAT scores who don’t get out a lot, and probably would have low EC scores. (My son would have been one in high school – one reason he didn’t bother applying to Ivies despite very strong test scores and high school GPA, well within range for accepted students. Fortunately he has since blossomed and by the time he graduated from college, his EC score was even better than his GPA ).</p>
<p>My point is that you might look at the chart you would have created and shake your head, wondering what was going on in the heads of all of those students with the below-range EC scores who bothered to apply. Meanwhile the kids with high-end EC scores might look like sure bets for admission… when, of course, in reality their GPA’s and test scores might be unremarkable.</p>
True. But I am talking about identifying schools where you have a reasonable chance of admission. I think you need to take these score ranges into account. There is a level of score below which you do not really have a reasonable chance of admissions, unless you have some other factor which is demonstrably off the chart. In these cases, if your time or financial resources are limited it may not be worth your while to apply.</p>
<p>I do not believe that for these selective schools there is such a thing as a range of scores that are too high to consider applying.</p>
<p>If there were such an EC chart as the one you postulate, there may be a level under which one should not consider applying. However, I do not believe the EC idea is completely analogous because I read stories here of kids who have virtually no ECs and still get admitted to some pretty prestigious schools. Not the very top schools, but certainly some high level public schools. I doubt there are many kids with 350 SAT scores admitted to these schools.</p>
<p>soozievt, this is not what those numbers represent. rather, they refer to the percentage of each schools incoming class that scored within each 100 point bracket. that is, princeton did not admit 21% of students with verbal scores in the 600s. instead, 21% of princetons enrolled class scored in the 600s. as such, they provide relatively little information beyond what can be gleaned from a schools math and verbal 25th/75th percentiles.</p>
<p>bovertine…I’m with you on the idea that at elite colleges, there is a percentage of students who apply who have NO chance of getting in (I’m not talking about kids who merely fall in the lowest 25%tile of admitted students (they have a small chance and it is worth applying). I also see this with audition based programs that have worse acceptance rates than the Ivy League. There is a certain percentage of applicants and auditionees who are truly not contenders. It is a small consolation but if you are truly a contender for an elite college (truly in the ballpark solidly or even over it) or for an audition based program, and you seen an admit rate of 8%, there are SOME applicants who are pretty much out of the running before they begin. Unfortunately, that leaves a huge number still in the running. But I do see kids applying to colleges with extremely unrealistic views of their chances and where the schools are not remotely in reach for them.</p>
Yes, but there are also students who have SAT’s in the low 600’s who get admitted to Princeton. Very few, but we know they exist from the common data set. </p>
<p>Now I do believe that there is some lower, bottom end, cut off figure for which no one is ever admitted. The problem is that the median score range figures don’t tell us what that is. 590? 550? 520? (We know it is in the 500’s somewhere because we can look at CDS data for the Ivies and see that they have roughly 1-2% enrollment from students with at least one score in the 500 range, but 0 enrollment for students in the 400-490 range – but my guess would be that the number falls pretty high on the 500-590 range.)</p>
<p>ericatbucknell…sorry for misstating that. I should have been more careful in the wording. I do think it gives additional information, however, beyond the mid 50% range of test scores. For instance, at Pton, the mid range for the CR SAT is 690-790. 73% of those admitted scored over 700. 24% scored in the 600s. 3% scored in the 500s. That would at least let you know that if you scored in the 600s, you had a small chance. But if you scored in the 500s (which is still the below the 25%tile of admitted students), you have close to a nil chance without same major hook to compensate. (particularly if you are in the low 500s)</p>
<p>I’ve attempted to show students this kind of thing in the past. When only 1% of admitted students has in the 100 point spread that they have, it means the school truly is out of reach (well, I don’t go by just ONE factor of course…this is when the kid’s rank in class and GPA and rigor of courseload ALSO are not in range). Believe it or not, I have families who still wish to apply when their odds are close to 0%. Some are very unrealistic even when black and white facts are presented.</p>
<p>(cross posted with calmom who is saying something similar!)</p>
).</p>
But I do see kids applying to colleges with extremely unrealistic views of their chances and where the schools are not remotely in reach for them.</p>