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At the same time, my understanding about five years ago was that Harvard in particular turned away enough perfect scores to fill the freshman class.
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<p>I thought from college board 2006 statistics there are only 238 with 2400 scores, so where does this come from?</p>
<p>@sishu -- wow, that must be very rare.</p>
<p>Here are the class of 2006 (single-sitting) figures. </p>
<p>The class of 2007 figures should be out in a few months.</p>
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Harvard "rejects 1 in 4" students with perfect SAT scores. That's another way of saying they accept 3 in 4. I don't know where New York got this information, but they are a pretty credible magazine, and that's <em>much, much</em> higher than I expected:
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<p>That contains some very valuable information (buried inside obvious information), if correct.</p>
<p>Now that perfect SAT means near-flawless performance on 3 exams, not 2 (2400 not 1600), the number of perfect scores is much lower so of course the admission rate will be higher. Formerly it was steadily around 37-40 percent based on the statistics published periodically in the Harvard Crimson and elsewhere. So of course the admissions rate of 2400 scorers has to be higher than that of 1600 scorers on the old scale. </p>
<p>The interesting thing is that the huge jump from 40 to 75 percent completely gives the lie to the notion that standardized tests don't make a difference once you are in the top range. Once sorted by the new SAT writing scores, and for 1600 M+V scorers these must almost all be 750 and above, there is a whopping difference in the admission rate of the 2400 scorers and the rest. Standardized tests are either prized by the admissions committees, or are extremely well correlated with what matters for admission, if going from 750 to 800 on the writing test (<em>already</em> having a verbal of 800) places you in a pool where the admissions rate is 1.6 times higher.</p>
<p>Taking the SAT again takes no work. I couldn't imagine scoring close to a 2400 and not going for it.</p>
<p>Oh and by the way I most am the one in four perfect scores being rejected. I have almost a straight-B average, and have never done anything worthwhile to write on a college application.</p>
<p>Hey TooRichForAid,</p>
<p>I graduated from Harvard in '02, and while I was there, I had a conversation about this with a friend of mine who had just interviewed the Dean of Admissions. According to my friend, the Dean said that Harvard turned away enough perfect SAT scores and enough valedictorians every year to fill a second class. The Dean of Admissions would be a great source if only I were sure of my memory. :) Take it with a grain of salt because it was years ago. But I don't think I'm super far off. </p>
<p>My friend's point in bringing all this up, by the way, was "So how on earth did I get in?" If nothing else the story underscores the importance of luck in Ivy League admissions.</p>
<p>I remembered this story because it confirms a general trend I had already observed. When I was a student at a public high school, several students in my class and the one right above me had several perfect scores on the SAT, and a number of them didn't get in to top Ivy League schools. Then again, when I was at Harvard, I got the definite feeling that most people didn't have perfect SAT scores, just very high ones. (I didn't do surveys, obviously, but occasionally the subject of Harvard admissions/grades/SATs would come up as part of another discussion, and I think I would have noticed if most people had perfect scores, because I definitely didn't.) So I always had the impression that a) while great SATs (700+s) were necessary, perfect SATs were not sufficient, because the correlation between perfect SAT Is and Ivy League acceptance was pretty loose.</p>
<p>I got in with 680 M/800 V, no flags of any kind, but with 3 perfect SAT IIs. This also corresponds to something I've read in the past: that SAT IIs are at least as important as SAT Is.</p>
<p>If I'm able to find actual facts instead of loose personal recollections, I'll post 'em. Maybe somebody else with first-hand info can help me fill out the picture a little.</p>
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According to my friend, the Dean said that Harvard turned away enough perfect SAT scores and enough valedictorians every year to fill a second class.
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<p>Oh, okay, now I get where you got the impression you had in your earlier message. The valedictorians alone would provide the numbers. There are at least 26,000 different high schools in the United States, and some of those have more than one valedictorian. MANY valedictorians around the country hear some trusted adult say, "You ought to apply to Harvard," and try doing that. So the statement could be correct (as I think it is) that Harvard could fill an entire class with rejected valedictorians, without implying that Harvard could also fill an entire class with rejected perfect scorers on the SAT. Harvard can't even fill a class with ADMITTED perfect scorers on the SAT--they are too rare. Caltech is just about the only highly selective college with a small enough entering class to fill it entirely with perfect scorers on the SAT, and indeed Caltech comes close to doing that. </p>
<p><a href="http://finance.caltech.edu/budget/cds2005.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://finance.caltech.edu/budget/cds2005.pdf</a> </p>
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So I always had the impression that a) while great SATs (700+s) were necessary, perfect SATs were not sufficient, because the correlation between perfect SAT Is and Ivy League acceptance was pretty loose.
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<p>That is also the impression I get. When I listened to the Harvard admission office who came to my town about a month ago speak to parents about Harvard, as part of the Exploring College Options recruiting tour, </p>
<p><a href="http://exploringcollegeoptions.org/%5B/url%5D">http://exploringcollegeoptions.org/</a> </p>
<p>she made clear that academic qualifications are very important for getting into Harvard, but so are "roommate" qualifications--the kind of personal qualities that help a person fit in as part of residential community. Threshold test scores plus winsome personality plus outstanding achievements outside the classroom seems to be the total package, among young people I know from my area who are in Harvard classes of 2009, 2010, or 2011.</p>
<p>Hi tokenadult,</p>
<p>I agree with you about the valedictorians, and I'm grateful for your stats. But the conversation was about how a) enough valedictorians to fill a class and b) ALSO enough perfect SATs to fill a class were being turned away. </p>
<p>I don't remember for certain exactly how many perfect SAT scores the Dean said were rejected--it might not have been as many as a whole class. I just remember that my friend mentioned perfect SAT scorers as a separate category from valedictorians, and said that a surprisingly large number of perfect SAT scorers were turned away.</p>
<p>I'm working on fact-checking that 3 in 4 figure, to whatever degree I can. Another post in a sec.</p>
<p>Siserune, tokenadult,</p>
<p>Just to follow up a little bit on a) the New York mag article with the 3 in 4 figure and b) the blog posts/earlier thread about the article that tokenadult mentioned:</p>
<p>The 3 in 4 fact is in the opening paragraph of the article (<a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/24398/%5B/url%5D">http://nymag.com/news/features/24398/</a>) which, again, does not cite the source. But the rest of the article is based on the input of Katherine Cohen, who owns a college admissions consulting company. (It seems plausible that the stat comes from her although it's impossible to know.)</p>
<p>Katherine Cohen is a problematic figure. Tokenadult linked to some criticism of the article on a particular blog ("Coming Full Circle," <a href="http://www.jackpo.org/2006/11/23/new-york-magazine-the-bastion-of-journalism-idiocy/)%5B/url%5D">http://www.jackpo.org/2006/11/23/new-york-magazine-the-bastion-of-journalism-idiocy/)</a>. Here's what that blog has to say:</p>
<p>"Wow, as it turns out, Katherine Cohen is apparently still a leading authority on college admissions! As you guys might remember, Katherine Cohen is the lying, conniving low-life Admissions Counselor from the Kaavya scandal!"</p>
<p>In the original blog post, this claim is not really cited or linked. So I went back to the Kaavya coverage to see what I could find out about that assertion. It's true that it's the same Katherine Cohen. However, none of the press coverage I could find linked Ms. Cohen to the plagiarism directly, except in a sort of confused, nebulous, "so many people touched this manuscript along the way that we don't know who actually plagiarized the material" way. The only direct involvement Ms. Cohen seems to have had (as far as the New York Times and Slate version of events goes, anyway) is making the initial connection between Kaavya and her agency. </p>
<p>In fact, Ms. Cohen has a pretty big company and has been in the news a lot: she has a page (<a href="http://www.ivywise.com/News_Newspapers.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.ivywise.com/News_Newspapers.htm</a>) on her website linking to all the articles in the national press that have quoted her, if you are curious. She is not just "that Kaavya counselor." I am not at all convinced that she is "lying and conniving" on the basis of the coverage I've read, although I'm sure her business has been hurt badly by the Kaavya scandal.</p>
<p>All this by way of saying: I am still not one hundred percent sure of that number, but even if Katherine Cohen was the primary source for the New York mag article, I'm less nervous about her than I was before I re-read the Kaavya coverage.</p>
<p>I am going to try e-mailing the reporter if I can and see where he got his information.</p>
<p>According to the book <em>1600 Perfect Score: The Seven Secrets of Acing the SAT</em> (a pretty good book, actually), there were only 541 perfect SAT scores in 2000, 587 in 2001, and 615 in 2002. So my memory must be exaggerated somehow, because you're right, tokenadult; there are not (and never were) enough perfect SATs to fill a Harvard class. I don't know if I combined the categories in my mind or what. </p>
<p>I have still known a number of perfect scorers get turned down. But the more facts I look up, the more convinced I seem to be that--contrary to what I have long believed--SAT I scores do matter even in the higher reaches, just as you said, siserune. In other words the difference between a 2270 and a 2400 may be quite significant.</p>
<p>I am going to keep researching, confirming, etc.</p>
<p>One more correction of myself: I posted earlier here that 25% of all applicants to Yale had perfect scores. Given what I know now, that seems wild, so I went back to double check: it's 25% of "freshmen it had just admitted." Whoops. (That 25% figure still seems a little high, although it's in the NYT, a respected source: 25% of the entering class would be about 325, and 25% of all admits would be closer to 475, and both of these numbers seem unlikely.) The article is called "REVISITING S.A.T. ESSAY; The Writing Section? Relax," from November 5, 2006, Sunday. It's at <a href="http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20914F8395B0C768CDDA80994DE404482&showabstract=1%5B/url%5D">http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20914F8395B0C768CDDA80994DE404482&showabstract=1</a>, but it's not free; you have to sign up and buy it ($4.95).</p>
<p>In any case, if you take the 25% figure from that article as even approximately correct, it suggests that Yale is also accepting an extremely high percentage of all perfect scores. If 25% of its entering frosh/total admits have 2400s, then Yale must also be letting in a few hundred perfect scorers, however you do the math. Given how few applicants can have gotten perfect scores, the large majority of them must be getting in.</p>
<p>"What to do with 2300+ sophomore score ?"</p>
<p>go hide in a cave. you should be to ashamed to show your face in public.</p>
<p>^ as the guy from taco bell said, you're good to go</p>
<p>whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, lotf629 your statistics I horribly wrong. Yale, Harvard, and Princeton have 25-75 percentile ranges with 74 hitting 800 in at least one section (maybe not Yale this year but i know with the others). That is only one section. In the entire year of 2006, only a few less than 240 people got 2400s with only 4,600 or so getting 2300 or above IN THE ENTIRE NATION. Harvard accepts roughly 50% of its 2400s and for good reason, they are the 99.984 percentile roughly!</p>
<p>oh i didn't read your revision post, sorry lotf629</p>
<p>but that statistic is off considering i just posted what the collegeboard said was the amount of 2400s in 2006 roughly after the addition of the writing section. your figure might be more correct if 25% of freshman admitted have perfect scores in at least one section or both the reading and the math (the more likely scenario)</p>
<p>it sufficeth to say that a 2400 can very well bridge the gap when you have somewhat mediocre Ec's but still very good everything else</p>
<p>re: Yale's percentage of applicants with perfect SAT,</p>
<p>On each component of the SAT, the 75th percentile for the entering students at Yale has been steadily at 780-790 for the past several years. This is reported in the Common Data Sets available at their web site. So at most (and possibly significantly less) than 25 percent are scoring 800 on each individual subtest. Getting a perfect score of 1600, and especially of 2400, occurs an order of magnitude less frequently than 800 on one subtest, so there would be many fewer achieving that.</p>
<p>The admitted students at Yale should be slightly stronger than the enrolled, because the yield is lower for the top applicants. Yale has to compete especially for students who also can gain admission to Harvard and Princeton, but also for those who can get into MIT and Caltech, and not only are dual admits stronger than Yale-only admits, but the tech schools have higher SAT than Yale.</p>
<p>So it is almost impossible that the 25 percent figure referred to perfect SATs among the applicants, admitted, or matriculated students, but it could have referred to the fraction of those admitted who scored 800 on the math or 800 on the verbal. </p>
<p>re: admission rate of perfect scorers, I remember seeing a report for this or the previous admissions cycle at Harvard that less than half with perfect SATs were rejected (so over 50 percent admitted), but I could not find the source online and am not completely certain of that recollection, in particular whether it referred to 1600 M+V or a score of 2400. For HYP and MIT, graphs of the admissions rate by SAT score for a sample of several hundred students are published in the Revealed Preferences college ranking study, linked many times on CC. That was a very non-randomly chosen group of students, from 500 designated "top high schools in the country", which would tend to reduce admissions rate given the test scores. So those graphs give the correct qualitative picture, but for the whole applicant pool they underestimate both the SAT-to-admission correlation and the likely admission rate at any given score.</p>
<p>So ANYWAY, about that SOPHOMORE year SAT score...!!!</p>
<p>Haha, I like how this thread has totally digressed. OP, I sympathize with you. Unfortunately for you, instead of steering this ship back on course, I will be continuing the digression below.</p>
<p>To my understanding, about half of all perfect scorers on the SAT, which I interpret as "superscored" or from one sitting, were accepted at H and P last year. The fraction of perfect scoring applicants accepted at Yale, however, seems to have been much higher. An NYT article stated that only "several" perfect-scores were rejected from Yale last year. Of course, "several" could mean a number in the tens or a number in the hundreds, but Yale's higher rate of acceptance for perfect scorers would make sense in 1) the context of its US News ranking and 2) the Jian Li incident.</p>
<p>Now, the speculation below is ENTIRELY speculative and anecdotal, but I have a "gut" feeling that I am at least partially right:</p>
<p>First, Yale has been consistently ranked 3rd in the US News University rankings for several years now. One of the primary components determing the rankings is entering freshmen SAT scores. Yale might want to increase the number of perfect SAT scores in order to raise its median SAT score and 25-75th percentile range for its freshman class.</p>
<p>Second: The (infamous) Jian Li incident. Jian Li, a NJ high school student during the 2005-06 academic year, applied to H, P, Y, Caltech, UPenn, and an assortment of other elite and technical schools. He scored perfect on the SAT. It happens that he was rejected by H, P, UPenn, and two other elite schools, and was accepted "only" by Yale, Caltech, and two other schools which CCer's would not venture to regard as "elite." </p>
<p>To the best of my knowledge, Jian was not particularly accomplished EC- or award-wise. His most noteworthy accomplishment was a "high ranking in the New Jersey science league," a reputable, but not stellar distinction. That he was rejected by Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and UPenn was no surprise. But why did Yale take him? One could argue that he happened to get lucky with Yale, having written essays that just didn't resonate with all of H, P, M, and UPenn, but for some reason tugged at the heartstrings of those Y and Caltech adcoms. Or that Jian Li's "endearing" personality (by the way, the "incident" referred to was Jian's rather unwarranted suing of Princeton for rejecting him on the basis of anti-Asian counter-AA) won over the Bulldogs' heart. I personally think, though, that Yale happened to be seeking yet another perfect scorer to add to its freshman class, and Jian happened to fit the bill.</p>
<p>Again: all speculation. But if someone can provide any statistical information to support or debunk the above, I would be enthusiastic to discuss it.</p>