My Parents want me to Apply Early at an Ivy

[Data10]

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Weak ECs do not necessarily drop the acceptance rate. Perhaps Princeton could be looking for intellectuals in a given year - those who spend their time excelling at school and, in their time outside of school, do something that isn’t really considered an EC, like read a lot.

I’m not going to waste the time to do an analysis to show something as obvious that having weaker ECs than most apps decreases average chance of admissions at selective colleges. Instead I’ll just point to the Princeton CDS in which they rate ECs as “important.” In recent years, they’ve always rated ECs as either “important” or “very important”.</p>

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Forgive me if I’m skeptical about your ability to so accurately predict an applicant’s chances of being admitted

Out of curiosity I entered the following info into a spreadsheet for each poster – GPA, test scores, course rigor (1-5 scale), ECs/Awards (1-5 scale), and race. I then tried to make up a set of rules/weightings to predict the decisions. My results are not difficult to replicate. With just the following 3 rules, one can predict the vast majority of posters accurately.</p>

<ol>
<li> Posters who have a less than a 3.8 GPA (ignoring freshman year) or less than a 2000 SAT(or ACT equivalent) get rejected. </li>
<li> Among the remaining, posters whose EC/Awards rate 0-2 (below regional level) get rejected.</li>
<li> All remaining posters get accepted.</li>
</ol>

<p>Obviously these rules would not apply well to all apps since the posters on CC are a unique subgroup that tends to be high-stat, well-informed students who attended quality high schools and took rigorous courses. There is also likely a bias towards posting accepted results and not posting rejected results. For example, most posters in the thread were accepted, while Stanford’s overall acceptance rate was under 6%. Nevertheless, the point remains that the admissions decisions did not appear anything close to random. Instead they appeared to be highly predictable among the unique CC poster subgroup.</p>

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The fact that the professors teach at Harvard and Stanford does not make their analysis right or applicable. That’s just like saying Karl Marx says socialism is the right form of economy and so we should orchestrate a government takeover of all large businesses because Marx is in any way authoritative. I am challenging the very basis of the study. It was conducted even before Harvard and Princeton reinstated their early action processes.

It doesn’t make them correct, but I’d consider the opinion of a joint effort between Harvard and Stanford professors that is published in a peer reviewed journal, which is read and criticized by other college professors, to be more reliable than the opinion of a random, new poster on CC with the beliefs described earlier about ECs.</p>

<p>You mentioned the data was before Princeton’s recent SCEA program. The 2012-13 Princeton CDS indicates that Princeton considers “level of applicant’s interest”. Applying SCEA indicates strong interest since SCEA is a single choice program where the student can only apply early to one school, which is usually his top pick. Princeton’s website specifically mentions SCEA being for students whose first choice is Princeton.</p>