There is some interesting information in stanford statistics.
Out of 42,000 applicants, 57% or 24000 had a 4.0 or above GPA and 80% or 33,000 were in the top 10% of their class.
I wonder if either has any meaning when so many applicants start at that level except if 95% of the admitted class is in top 10%, it makes that a mimimum standard and 3.7 or above almost a minimum standard based on admitted students.
^^ I am afraid that I must have not hit the nail you looked at for you to reach such a conclusion. That conclusion is not supported by anything I wrote. Intentionally or unintentionally!
If the elite colleges are satisfied with the pool of applicants they currently have, why should they bother doing this? I’ve always wondered how many truly no-hope applicants there are, anyway. If there really aren’t that many, there’s no reason for the schools to do what you ask.
And there’s a good reason for them not to do it. They may not want to encourage the idea that stats are what matters the most, which also gives rise to endless complaints about kids with lower stats getting in over higher stats kids. Why should they want to give any more ammunition for that kind of complaint?
Exactly. If you see that the 4.0/2400 is at 14% and the 3.9/2350 is at 8%, how does that change the fact when Sally 4.0/2400 gets rejected and her neighbor down the block Suzy 3.9/2350 gets in? Is she going to complain it’s “unfair” because she was in a pool that had a higher rate?
“They may not want to encourage the idea that stats are what matters the most, which also gives rise to endless complaints about kids with lower stats getting in over higher stats kids. Why should they want to give any more ammunition for that kind of complaint?”
VOR, just out of curiosity. Out of 100 points, what % do you think stats (SAT/ACT and GPA) should count for? If you ran the world.
Can you see any circumstance in which a lower stat person is more “worthy” than a higher stat person?
How do you know and what is an example of such a circumstance?
“xiggi Why does a kid ask you “What are my chances to get to 2300 in three weeks from 1950”? Because the student believes a higher score will result in greater chance of getting admitted to their colleges.”
But he could be wrong in that assumption, if the time he took to from 1950 took away from something that was really compelling / interesting.
Georgetown publishes a matrix. It’s even broken down by college. I’ll see if I can find it…
https://beta.m.box.com/shared_item/https%3A%2F%2Fgeorgetown.box.com%2Fs%2Fxani81o0z2iq0anudhge
The last two pages.
I think we could all make this kind of matrix: put whatever the higher end of admissions is (10%?) for those colleges in the upper right. Put zero in the lower left. Put numbers in the middle gradually shifting. Note that all numbers are too small to plan on a given event…
I understand the frustration that colleges seemingly nourish this “you might as well apply” thing to help yield, but really it’s only the kid/parent/gc who is to blame if anyone thinks they have a non-lottery chance w/o a major hook.
Also, it would be best if we could somehow do separate ones for legacies, athletes, etc. That I would be interested in seeing (matrices for e.g. athletes). I don’t think colleges think that information would be flattering, and that makes me want to see it more. 
However, I am just idly curious; I don’t think it would be useful per se.
Nice find. And all that matrix tells you is what you already know - it’s better to do better than not-do-better.
We KNOW she’s going to complain, because we’ve seen it a thousand times–and she will often point to something like the respective race of the applicants to explain why she thinks this injustice happened. And it’s possible, of course, that race had something to do with it, especially if Suzy is a URM. But it’s also possible that Suzy had better recommendations, better essays, better ECs, more awards (including some outside the school that Sally doesn’t know about at all), and an overall better application package.
All that being said, I have to admit that I’m curious about the admissions results of people with 2400 on the SAT–colleges often only tell us the results by individual section. But that’s just my own idle curiosity.
That question about the SAT is irrelevant to the discussion about admission. The analogy makes no sense, even with the added twist.
In terms of getting “more information,” I am afraid you must have missed most of my posts on colleges sharing data and being transparent. I believe that it would be a futile effort given its audience, which I also believe to be extremely narrow. Again, I do not think that applicants apply (pun intended) that level of scrutiny to the data shared by the schools. I hope you realize that a decade ago, the term Common Data Set was entirely foreign to the overwhelming majority of the CC readers – and that is probably generous. Imagine what the world of a lot lesser educated and interested parties is out there. Most students tend to listen to the adults around them with a sprinkling of attention to teachers and GCs. The result is that the most basic information of the USNews rankings dominate the “determination” of the college applications.
It is not about having MORE data. The problem is that the interpretation of more data might be just as erroneous and misguided as it is today.
“I think we could all make this kind of matrix: put whatever the higher end of admissions is (10%?) for those colleges in the upper right. Put zero in the lower left. Put numbers in the middle gradually shifting. Note that all numbers are too small to plan on a given event…”
Of course. That’s the piece that is missing. You might hope against hope that if you could get to the magical 4.0/2400 the number would be high. But it still ain’t gonna be!
I don’t see what the remotest possible difference it would make to know, when applying to a school that has an overall acceptance rate of, say, 5%, whether my kids’ chances were 2% or 10%. It seems only common sense to me that the way you think about that is – 98% chance of rejection, 90% chance of rejection, either way, I’m holding off on buying the sweatshirt for grandma and putting the non-removable decal on the car. The odds are just so overwhelmingly against you that your time is better spent doing the things that actually make you appealing, than poring over matrixes.
And, of course, finding safeties.
Maybe this is what it’s all about – the idea of having to go to “safeties” or something that isn’t in the precious USNWR top 20 is so very appalling that you have to be able to find SOME way of being assured you’ll get in.
“Georgetown publishes a matrix. It’s even broken down by college. I’ll see if I can find it…”
Pshaw, Georgetown, that’s like what, #22 or so? Not one of the big boys 
(I’m totally kidding. I adore Georgetown, applied there myself / got in, and would have loved for my son to have gone there.)
I suspect that the top colleges may actually be trying to hide the fact that they accept a very high percentage of 4.0/2400 applicants. Publicizing that wouldn’t really do anybody any good.
As a college administrator, I’d be wary about providing a matrix lest someone read it as a contract or an implied contract. (I.E. If over eighty percent of people with my stats were accepted with merit money, then I rightfully assumed that I would be also, etc.)
I think that’s probably why schools are hesitant to provide such a thing (says the person who is spending their day wrestling with the legalize in the average syllabus . . .)
“I suspect that the top colleges may actually be trying to hide the fact that they accept a very high percentage of 4.0/2400 applicants. Publicizing that wouldn’t really do anybody any good.”
Good point - because the conclusion from “we accept a very high percentage of 4.0/2400” is not “and therefore, we want even more people to shape themselves into 4.0/2400 applicants because ultimately we value them more highly than anyone else.”
These schools accept a (relatively) high percent of newspaper editors too, but that doesn’t mean they want to be inundated with apps from people who forced themselves to edit the newspaper when they really would have been better served and enjoyed themselves more playing the trumpet.
Yes colleges know how to adjust GPA’s for different high schools, but it is unreasonable to expect them to put out a matrix of every high school in the country. Furthermore, there is so much more than just stellar grades/standardized test scores. Could you imagine if employers had to do this?
You have to have balance in life and know how to have a life outside of studying. Is the kid who grinded their way through high school more prepared for college or the kid who got great grades although not perfect because they didn’t need to spend every waking hour studying? Who is the better fit? Who is the intellectual? Who thinks outside the box? Grades don’t tell the whole story. Teachers have a pretty good idea of who sits at home studying all night to get those top grades and they also know the students who study but just naturally get it.
"Yes colleges know how to adjust GPA’s for different high schools, but it is unreasonable to expect them to put out a matrix of every high school in the country. "
VOR wasn’t asking for a matrix of every high school in the country; moreover, of the 30,000 high schools in the country, let’s not kid ourselves than more than half have ever had a single acceptance to Ivies / elite schools. A pet peeve of mine is that on CC, people don’t really seem to understand that when they say “our school routinely sends x students to the Ivies” that they are probably already in the 1%, high-school-wise.
Hey, maybe that helps frame it a certain way, VOR. Let’s say you had something showing the acceptance rates from every single high school in the country, from Andover and Exeter through New Trier all the way down to the one-room schoolhouse in Montana that graduates 5 kids a year, none of whom will ever leave the state.
Do you think that therefore that should be very “predictive”? Do you not get that elite school adcoms will jump at that kid from the schoolhouse in Montana, and take it “out of the hide” of an Exeter or New Trier kid? Do you think a Evanston Township HS kid should be so arrogant as to say - hey, our hit rate at Northwestern is 25%, so it should always be 25% - or should they have the brains to think - hey, maybe NU doesn’t always want people from its backyard, so I shouldn’t count on 25% this year just because it was last year? Of course, feel free to substitute any other college / school in its backyard if you like.
VOR, did you notice that the “bands” that they provide for GPA, SAT, etc. are fairly wide - 4.0, 3.7-3.99, and so forth? There’s a reason for that. Because there just isn’t the finiteness in decision-making to make comparing 3.7’s to 3.8’s worthwhile.