Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, and Cornell EA

Amadeuic
Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:34:08 +0000

Two things:


You’re assuming everyone is telling the truth.
You are acting like being a minority doesn’t help your chances of admission.


There has to be some score padding. Dartmouth seems to reflect that, although I do think the Columbia people were pretty honest. So don’t believe all that you see.

And the SAT’s do count for a lot. They just don’t count for what you think they count for. Verbal, Writing, Math, etc… They show little about what you know in those areas. What they do show is that you have the ability to think logically, and that is what colleges need, otherwise students wouldn’t survive, even if they did repress a minor revolution in Bolivia.

The essay can sometimes make up for these things, though. Despite what you think, you do not need a 2400 to survive at a top university. Once you’re into the sevens, you can pretty much handle it. However, many many people get into the sevens, so colleges keep having to raise the bar, which is why Yale’s SAT middle 50 goes up to 1590. So colleges aren’t taking people because they have what they have; they just need to know you can handle the workload and still bring something valuable to the community.