Brown is too easy

[siserune]

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By your logic, Harvard, which is a leading feeder school for graduate and professional programs is “easier” because it is supposedly less taxing than MIT to get a high GPA.

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<p>Harvard is indeed perceived to be easier than MIT, which improves Harvard’s cross-admit performance against MIT, and worsens MIT’s performance against all schools but Caltech Even so, MIT is a clear #2 in cross-admit matriculation, as it beats all schools except Harvard and (according to Harvard officials’ statements) is Harvard’s strongest cross-admit competitor. It’s interesting that the Revealed Preferences method didn’t catch this, especially considering the self-selection effect which is stronger for MIT than for the Ivy League schools or Stanford.</p>

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Rigor is a part of this because graduate and professional schools keep a tally on how the graduates from particular programs do in their schools. If graduates from particular schools struggle with a particuluar graduate program enough, then top graduate programs would be far less likely to extend acceptances to other graduates from the same undergraduate programs.

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<p>Somebody posted the GPA renormalization scale applied in law school admissions, and as one might expect, a larger positive adjustment was made for MIT grades than for Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. I don’t believe the acceptance rates for different schools are published; the feeder rankings are based on enrollment, which is of course skewed by the different number and type of applicants. In any event, we were discussing your comments on the Revealed Preference study and whether it has anything to do with “academic rigor”. It doesn’t, except insofar as all rankings correlate with academics. Other than that, more rigor means lower RP ranking, less rigor improves the ranking. </p>

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Where do you get the notion that Brown came in below most peer schools as far as being in the 7th position vis a vis student cross-admits statistics?

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<p>What I said is that in a majority of the Revealed Preference simulations Brown came out below 7th place. You can read that clearly from the table of “confidence probabilities” (MCMC resampling results) giving the proportion of simulations in which Brown beat Columbia, Amherst etc. Due to the dominance of the top 6 schools, Brown “never” ends up in the top 6 or below number 14, and in 96 percent of the simulations it lands in the 7 to 11 range. Brown’s average rank over all simulations was 9.67, not 7th, and in a majority of the simulations (ie. the 65 percent visible in the table, adjusted downward for some very limited double-counting) it came out below 7th place. The only way the double-counting could work out so that Brown places at 7th more than 50 percent of the time is if the rest of the time it is more than one or two ranks lower, which would mean the Revealed Preference model can’t tell whether in their sample Brown is really 7th or 9-10th. Neither picture supports your claims that Brown is clearly distinguishable from Columbia in cross-admit performance. </p>

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In one little considered part of the first draft of the study, the price-considered piece, Brown was higher than 7th, in fact, it leapfrogged MIT.

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<p>That’s not true in either the first draft (NBER) or the second draft (SSRN) available on the web. There are several variants of the ranking table and in all of them Brown is 7th and Columbia 8th, with some shuffling above and below those ranks. This is further evidence that Brown and Columbia are not statistically distinguishable under any version of the Revealed Preference calculation applied to their sample.</p>

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The point is not that the study’s conclusions were methodologically irrefutable, it is that since the colleges closely guard cross-admit data, it is the only study, to my knowledge that attempted, through statistics and raw data, to give some idea as to which elite schools were preferred by a sample of talented high-school graduates.

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<p>I already pointed you to the admissions chances site (mychances) that, based on a similar sample size, had Columbia beating Brown 63 to 37 percent. Again, this indicates that Brown is indistinguishable from Columbia by this measure, and there are few other measures where it beats Columbia but is not outranked by other non-HYPS schools.</p>