Asian with a 1700 got into Stanford

[Data10]

And, the Common Data Set for Stanford shows that depending on the SAT section, between 69% and 78% of Stanford admits score 700 or above per section. Just mathematically, a large majority of admits are going to be at 2100 and above.

If Stanford rejects most with 2400 SATs it wouldn’t be a big surprise as it rejects 95% of applicants, but I’m willing to bet that a lot more than 5% of the students with high academics are admitted.

Depending on section, 45-59% of applicants are at 700 or above, so Stanford is going to have a large portion of 2100+ SAT students in the entering class even if they don’t consider test scores in their application process. However, the fact that the entering class has a greater portion of 700+ test scores than the applicants doesn’t mean one needs to have a 2100+ SAT to be admitted or tell us much about how Stanford weights SAT scores since you also need to consider that among the regular applicant pool (CC posters are an exception), test scores are positively correlated with other components of the application that Stanford values.

For example, if you compare applicants with a ~2400 SAT to applicants with a ~2000 SAT, I’d expect the top scoring applicants are more likely to have a high GPA/rank, high course rigor, excellent LORs, major awards, and good various other criteria that Stanford values. So if the ~2400 SAT applicants have a higher admit rate than the ~2000 SAT applicants that might primarily be due to the 2400 applicants excelling in a combination of criteria completely unrelated to test scores, rather than anything about the score itself. Looking at test score percentages of the entering students gives us little information about how Stanford weights scores. MIT’s website explains this more eloquently, in response to an applicant asking why the 750-800 scoring applicants had a higher admit rate than the 700-740 applicants.

@MIT's Website

Now, I and others are on the record as saying that we admit people, not test scores, and that in any case there is really not a difference in our process between someone who scores, say, a 740 on the SAT math, and someone who scores an 800 on the SAT math. So why, as the commentor asks, is there such a difference in the admit rate? Aha! Clearly we DO prefer higher SAT scores!

Well no, we don’t. What we prefer are things which may coincide with higher SAT scores. For example, a student who receives a gold medal at the IMO is probably more likely to score an 800 on the math SAT than a 740. But if we take an IMO medalist (with an 800) over random applicant X (with a 740), does that mean we preferred an 800 to a 740? No. It means we preferred the IMO medalist, who also happened to get an 800!

So in short, I am saying that while a lot of Stanford students have high test scores, we don’t know how much their higher test scores influenced the admission decision. Clearly Stanford assigns some weight to test scores, but they also admit unhooked applicants with lower test scores than the Stanford 25th percentile. As such, I wouldn’t assume applicants need median test scores, 75th percentile test scores, or similar. I would assume applicants need to show that they would be academically successful at Stanford, which requires much more than scores; and also need to have more than just excellent stats/transcript, including “intellectual vitality”… something that is impressive on more than just a high school level.

There are fewer than 600 people a year with a 2400 by the way.

Note that Stanford Superscores. The <600 total is for single sitting. They also have a good portion of applicants who take only the ACT.