<p>Is ED more competitive?</p>
<p>anyone???????????? I see other posts where it says that people with 1350 on their SAT's will hurt them more since their applying ED? How is this true? I always thought that it would be easier to get accepted by applying ED.</p>
<p>It depends on the school and a lot of factors. If you are applying to HYP without a hook, then yes a 1350 might hurt because of the competitive nature of the applicant pool. However, the same is true for regular decision to those schools</p>
<p>HYP without a hook? What's that?</p>
<p>Colleges have always said the ED is more competitive to explain the larger acceptance percentages for ED students. They also say that they do give a "slight" advantage to ED student for that binding agreement. However, a study was done a few years ago where the researchers were given access to the admissions stats to a number of colleges and this turned out not to be the case. The researchers wrote "The Early Game" based on their findings, one of which was that applying early is like adding 100 points to your SAT1 scores. When they checked out who was applying and getting accepted early, they found that the colleges were wrong. The early pool had lower stats overall than the regular pool. Now of course this is all past experience--who knows what is happening now. </p>
<p>Some schools do not have much of an early advantage. Georgetown is a good example of this. They deliberately keep the acceptances down in the EA pool, and your chances there are statistically the same. No way of knowing if the quality of the EA pool is higher or lower in this case as no such data has been released. As for CMU, their numbers are not startlingly higher for ED either. Again without the stats for the two pools it is impossible to come to any kind of conclusion about the benefit of ED at this school. I would GUESS that there is an advantage because of the binding agreement ANd the psychological advantage of being assessed while the class is empty rather than trying to get a seat as it is being filled.</p>
<p>HYP is Harvard, Yale, Princeton. The "hook" is slang for something that makes you look unigue and desirable to a college, e.g., a top athlete, a top musician, a chess grandmaster, a year in the Amazon searching for a lost tribe. Obviously, most are not going to have anything like that but you are looking for something to show talent or dedication to an activity.</p>
<p>Most colleges that have ED, including Princeton, have higher admission rates for ED than regular, but that does not necessarily mean you get in with lesser stats than the regulars. BTY, neither Harvard nor Yale have ED, they only have non-binding early action. For early action programs the admission rate may not be higher and could even be lower than regular because those are sometimes used by a college mainly to admit those in their upper echelon of usual admits.</p>
<p>I would say, not necessarily. I know MANY people at my school with lower stats (1300-ish SAT, only one or two ECs, 3.0 GPA, etc.) who are applying early somewhere just because they think they'll have a better shot at getting in. I'd think that this would only serve to help the 1400+ crowd in their ED, because they're stacked up against candidates who might be less attractive than themselves. I would guess that ED is beneficial to you mostly if you're a top-but-not-too-top applicant, in that the ED pool might contain people who wouldn't do RD or wouldn't get in otherwise.</p>
<p>thanx for all the responses. Does anyone know what CMU really focuses on? Like your EC's, leadership, awards, etc. Because I don't have any leadership but still want to apply ED and want to know what could help me get in besides an excellent essay.</p>
<p>anyone..........................</p>