<p>What percent of applicants do you think really should have never applied in the first place? You know the ones, no interest in MIT but parents wanted them to apply or one of those people that apply to like 25 schools that they don't really care about, or the kid that hasn't met the prerequisites (I wonder if there are applicants that have only made it to like algebra II and not because they were busy discovering a whole other branch of mathematics). Anyway what percent of the applicants do you think fall in this category?</p>
<p>So what I want to know is--what percent of the applicants do admissions lose no sleep over putting in the reject pile? Could there be another admit rate--one based on serious applicants who are well qualified?</p>
<p>The admissions officers usually say about 70-80% of applicants are qualified, and this is supported by the EA rejection rate, which is about 15-20% each year. Those students who apply and are rejected EA are considered not to be competitive for RD selection, while the ~70% who are deferred are considered to be highly competitive for admission RD.</p>
<p>^ May I ask what MIT considers straight out “completely unqualified”? Because from what I’ve seen, I got used to the response “you have 0% chance if you don’t apply” any kid, with all kinds of stats, would get.</p>
<p>^ You see that a lot because we can’t judge an entire applicant based on scores and one-liners about activities. If we on CC saw the entire applicant pool regularly, read all their essays and recommendations, etc, we might be able to give a better approximation. In reality, however, the process is so holistic that even then, it would be very hard to be accurate for the next year’s pool.</p>
<p>But basically, unqualified people don’t meet the Match. If you’re a 1.0 student whose interests include sleeping and detention, I’d call you completely unqualified But I’m not going to suggest that people don’t apply if they seem like they could be a border case.</p>
<p>But I doubt any person (in his right mind) with 1.0 GPA and a full page of Dean’s records would apply to MIT. So some kind of other characteristics should explain the ~1000 who get rejected EA. </p>
<p>Also, this might be a bit unrelated, but can we still send in additional updates to the admission office (if we believe it would help the decision), or is it too late?</p>
But I’m not going to suggest that people don’t apply if they seem like they could be a border case.</p>