<p>I agree completely. If an applicant is certain that he or she wants to apply SCEA to one of the schools but may have a better application during the RD period, Yale is probably the way to go because of the lesser chance of rejection.</p>
<p>I should emphasize, however, that acceptance at either school early is extremely competitive. I have done a rather in-depth quantitative analysis of the Yale SCEA results as posted here on CC. Conclusion: unhooked candidates must have stellar scores at a minimum to have a reasonable chance of acceptance; the mean SAT score of acceptees was over 2300. It was certainly no piece of cake for hooked applicants, but as one would expect with affirmative action in mind, the average test scores were lower but still very high.</p>
<p>Here’s the thread that contains some discussion of the findings, a link to the analysis of Yale SCEA, Princeton RD analysis, as well as a similarly formatted analysis of Stanford’s SCEA. (I didn’t conduct this Stanford analysis, but it was done in the same basic manner.)</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/yale-university/723173-helpful-thread-those-contemplating-scea.html?highlight=helpful+thread[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/yale-university/723173-helpful-thread-those-contemplating-scea.html?highlight=helpful+thread</a></p>