I am curious what people think of this acceptance scattergram (Maia Learning) for my daughter’s high school.
The high school and the college in question shall remain nameless although the college is a T20. But I find these results to be interesting to say the least.
FYI, the lowest left acceptance is an athlete. But even with that…wow.
Presumably, the college applies significant weight to some factor that has little correlation to grades and test scores. For example, religion, level of applicant’s interest, major, etc.
Schools will sometimes dip very low indeed for athletes they really want. I knew an Ivy athlete who was a B+ student and struggled to crack 1000 on the SAT. And then, of course, we know schools may have a “Z-list” for the kids of major donors. The college you are showing apparently rejects plenty of students who have both high test scores and high grades. Schools in this category have their, um, institutional priorities.
Perhaps. Our school is pretty diverse along many dimensions. Just odd how the highest test scores and GPAs were lopped off.
I should have said…the college in question is a T20 private.
If the college practices holistic admissions, then some of the highest GPA students may not have shown depth in their ECs. Alternatively, if the college practices yield protection, the top students may not have shown sufficient interest. Also it seems like test scores may not be weighted very highly.
And, in Maia Learning, I cannot see who is Test Optional.
We know the kid in question. She is a superstar athlete. Many schools would die to have her. I just wanted to explain the outlier.
Unusual that the athlete didn’t apply ED. Usually that’s a requirement for coach support, especially at very selective schools.
You would know more about this than me. But the athlete in question may be at the Olympic level. She likely had the coach’s support no matter what and her offer was rock solid.
Is this showing just a one year time frame? Our HS shows 5 or 6 years combined on the scattergrams…things have changed in that timeframe at many schools, not to mention some weird happenings during Covid. Plenty of highly rejective schools’ scattergrams at my kids’ school and others I’ve seen look like this one.
Also if this is a TO school, it doesn’t look like you can tell who applied with and without scores.
It is a bit odd. Our HS switched from Scoir to Maia Learning last year and they have ALL of the data for last year (2024). But they imported SOME of the 2023 Scoir data to Maia. So it is 2024 plus about half of 2023. All of the 2023/2024 acceptances are captured but some rejections are not. I know this because I can cross reference on Scoir (we still have access).
I have no idea why it was done this way. Maybe the person entering 2023 just stopped before he/she was done.
It is a TO school. In Scoir, we knew which students were TO. In Maia, we cant see this.
I liked Scoir much better…
This scattergram does not look unusual at all. Any school, public or private, that practices holistic admissions and rejects a large number of applicants, will look like this.
Another T20 at my daughter’s high school with a different admissions philosophy.
The far right deferral is actually an acceptance.
The far left acceptance is another athlete.
Looks very reasonable actually, although I’m wondering why the 900 SAT / 3.3 GPA kid applied, lol
So many kids think that if a school has a 4% acceptance rate…that that 4% acceptance rate applies equally to everyone and they can apply to 35 schools with a 4% acceptance rate and get into one.
Sad, but very true. We know kids who have done this and gotten in NOWHERE.
Funny that they deferred the highest test score/max GPA kid. Must be “Essay not exciting enough”
No–that deferral is actually an acceptance. I can see it in Scoir as well. Our school is transitioning between Scoir and Maia. It wasn’t updated in Maia.
The obvious conclusion is that academic strength is not the sole criteria for getting accepted to highly ranked universities in the US. To me this seems like something that we already knew.
I have said for a while that we used to hire a lot of students from MIT and Stanford, and now we (the company I used to work for and now consult to) hire a lot of students from in-state public universities. I have never figured out how much of this is because the strongest students do not get accepted to the highest ranked schools, versus how much of this is because the strongest students are coming from “doughnut hole” families and in-state public schools is what they can afford.
I suppose that as long as the strongest students get an acceptance to a very good university, and we get to hire them 4 years later, I am not all that concerned.
By the way, one daughter also knew a student who was accepted to a very highly ranked and prestigious university that produced a green dot in the middle of a sea of red on the scatterplots. It was even more obvious than the first scatterplot in this thread. He was both a very nice person and a very, very, very good athlete (at a minimum state records – he had broken his own record a few times – I do not recall whether he had national or worldwide records but it would not surprise me). In his case he had certainly excelled at a very high level at something, and had done it with grace and humility.
Another thought comes to mind. One daughter four years ago was applying to DVM programs. Based on the results, it looked like academic strength was sort of like a “get past this high bar” issue, where the student had to be strong enough to survive in the program. Then other issues seemed to be more important. This included the personality to stick with it, to get along with the animals, and to not be grossed out and run away screaming when you deal with guts, or poop, or blood, or a beloved animal dying, or you get bitten. She had lots of experience with all of these which appeared to help a lot. To me at least in the somewhat extreme case of DVM admissions these non-academic criteria seem to make a lot of sense.
Perhaps the point is just that all of this seems to be working, even if for most students it is not working at Harvard or Princeton or MIT or Caltech.
I see your point but why do you think “all of this seems to be working”? I don’t see enough reasons to conclude that 
Could it be that so many students from MIT and Stanford now go into financial fields?
