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<p>People who make decisions based off “what I’m familiar with, and if I’m not familiar with it, it can’t be any good” – unencumbered by data or knowledge – aren’t worth the time of day. Their opinions are of no consequence. Whatsoever.</p>
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<p>If they are making hiring decisions, obviously their opinions are consequential.</p>
<p>Moreover, there’s a difference between saying “This can’t be any good” versus “It’s not that it’s not good, it’s just that I need to concentrate my hiring in certain colleges because I can’t send my recruiters everywhere.”</p>
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<p>You and Pizzagirl are both right here. However, there’s also a difference between favoritism and ignorance. It’s one thing to like BYU graduates because you are Mormon, and quite another thing to prefer BYU because you’ve never heard of Harvey Mudd or Caltech. </p>
<p>I think those hiring for worthy jobs will at least have the sense to give schools they are unfamiliar with the benefit of the doubt.</p>
<p>Recruiters don’t favor BYU because they are Mormon, they favor BYU because if they have a number of entry level roles to fill which require being geographically flexible, interested in relocating overseas and already fluent in one or more languages besides English, and don’t need (or think they need) to be in DC or NY or Boston or Seattle for a great social life- than you recruit at BYU.</p>
<p>We don’t give unfamiliar schools the benefit of the doubt- we do research, we meet with Deans and Admissions folks and career services folks and network with professors in areas we are interested in. This is not speed dating folks- hiring is an expensive and time consuming proposition.</p>
<p>Several years ago I needed to add a few schools to my recruiting calendar when a previously productive school started falling off our radar (we made a few offers but nobody ever accepted. Conclusion- waste of time and money trekking out there.) It took months of work to vet replacement schools. It’s not like you throw a dart at the map and say, “oh wow, U Kansas has an Engineering school, great, let’s send a team of engineering managers out there in September to do presentations and then another team out in January to do in-person interviews and while we’re at it, let’s launch an internship program at U Kansas so let’s send a bunch more busy people out in February.”</p>
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I believe the percentiles published by CollegeBoard are based on single sitting, where the stats published by colleges often include Score Choice, SuperScore, students choosing to submit ACT score over SAT score, and similar policies that boost averages. This makes it misleading to compare percentiles reporting by CollegeBoard to 25/75 percentiles reported by colleges.</p>
<p>Even if the stats were equivalent, trying to guess the number of interested or qualified students in the United States by only looking at stats published by SAT/ACT is extremely inaccurate. Many on this site believe a 99th percentile score is not enough. Instead you need 99.4th percentile or 99.7 or some other near perfect score. Nevertheless, many get accepted with far lower scores. As mentioned earlier in the thread, I was accepted without even being in the 90th percentile. A few days ago, a parent on the Stanford forum mentioned her daughter was accepted with a 87th percentile score and no hooks. When you draw an arbitrary test score line, you miss many persons who are interested and will be accepted to highly selective colleges. Similarly a large portion of persons with top test scores do not apply to ivy schools, and many persons with top test scores who do apply will not be accepted for various other reasons besides test scores. Not long ago, a student started a thread on CC who claimed he was rejected by all ivies (he actually did not apply to all 8) with perfect stats – perfect SAT, GPA, and class rank.</p>
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<p>That’s actually what I meant, although I don’t know what we specifically refers to. I meant to say that if a good employer isn’t familiar with the school, they would give the applicant the benefit of the doubt - not reject them out of hand for a familiar school - and research the unknown school. </p>
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<p>Although I wouldn’t say that flexibility is unique to BYU, thanks for expanding.</p>
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Several numbers are way off, most notably Stanford and Cornell, which are 39,000 and 40,000 respectively.</p>
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<p>Yes, but you won’t see more than a handful of reports of students being accepted with a sub-2000 score at the schools we are talking about, HYPSM. It’s hard to consider a 2100/3.8 student competitive in a pool of 30,000 when that pool could potentially be populated by students with 2200+ scores, even though the median is probably lower than that. </p>
<p>Inflated or not, what score point do you consider to be competitive for HYPSM? I am skeptical that an unhooked applicant with a 95th percentile score (2060) is going to stand out enough to out-luck a 7% acceptance rate. </p>
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<p>This I don’t dispute. I’m sure you were a deserving applicant, and I’m sure that some students with perfect stats are not, but that doesn’t invalidate the difficult situation of the average HYP applicant.</p>
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I work in an engineering/CS field. At the companies I’ve seen in my field, experience trumps where you went to school. It wouldn’t be a matter of whether Harvard, Berkeley, or UMich produces better engineers. Instead the more important criteria would be what you’ve done since graduating and how well you’ve functioned in a work environment instead of an academic one. One might choose a University of Phoenix grad over candidates at any of the listed schools, if he had the experience you wanted.</p>
<p>School name can have more of an influence for new grads with less experience, particularly if persons involved in the hiring decisions went to the same college. This is especially true for getting a shot to go to the company and interview, both due to connections/networking/recruiting and standing out among a pile of resumes. In my field of engineering, these interviews usually emphasize a series of technical questions given by several team members. Once you get to the interview stage, how well you answer the questions, get along with the team, and your perceived fit becomes more important than where you went to school.</p>
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<p>Data10,</p>
<p>I was talking about fresh college graduates with little/no working experience, not experienced candidates or even those with outstanding self-taught engineering/cs tech skills.</p>
<p>I don’t think the statement “Cornell is not top tier” deserves much consideration. What do you consider top tier? </p>
<p>Top 1% (35 schools), top 2% (70 schools) or top 5% (175) schools based on an estimate of 3500 4 year colleges in the US?</p>
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Would you consider than 2100 student competitive if the submitted his 34 ACT instead of his SAT? What if he took the SAT many times, and his SuperScore was 2250, then does the 2100 student become competitive? </p>
<p>Unfortunately colleges publish little data on composite SAT score sums. Instead they publish data on scores of individual SAT sub-tests. However, many schools do publish data on how admit rate varies with ACT composite scores. The Stanford admissions profile page mentions that applicants who had an ACT composite in the 74th to 93rd percentile (24 to 29) had a 3% admit rate. 3% is significantly lower than the overall 5.7% admit rate, but it’s not such a small fraction that we can ignore this group. This is especially true when considering that the persons the with ACTs in 70s and low 80s percentiles are pulling down the average, and the rate among persons with ACTs in the 27-29 range would be well above 3%. The Brown admissions facts page offers more detailed ranges, including the desired 26 to 28 ACT score group, corresponding to ACT scores between the 83 and 91st percentile. The admit rate for this group was 7%, which is only slightly lower than their overall admit rate of 9%. </p>
<p>Both schools show that as test scores decrease, chance of acceptance decreases, as we’d expect. But they don’t show a negligible chance of admission at less than top scores, which is consistent with the anecdotal evidence we see on the forums. Most of these schools don’t have a hard cut-off score. Instead, they consider the applicant as a whole. The Stanford admissions page writes the following:
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<p>Yes, but both of these things - superscoring, lopsided testing - weaken the application.</p>
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<p>I fear that we are not focusing on the same distinction. The admit rate for applicants at Stanford and Brown scoring in the 24-28 range are deceptively high because those admits are hooked. Would you dream of submitting a 24 to Stanford if you weren’t? </p>
<p>Of course I can’t prove that this segment of the admitees are composed of URMs, Recruited Athletes, faculty relatives, developments, First Gens, and Xiggi’s left-handed, Oboe-playing Polo players, but to put it bluntly, if the student really is unhooked Stanford material, they likely would have scored higher than a 24 ACT. Holistic review aside, there are enough applicants that the Stanford adcoms don’t have to compromise that much.</p>
<p>I would never be so disillusioning to suggest that someone’s chances are negligible, and I wouldn’t go so far as to say that an applicant must obtain some hallowed and time-worn stats threshold, but there are far too many applicants in this game to ignore one’s weaknesses.</p>
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<p>Well yes, because that 2100/34 student is now 2250/34. But in reality, adcoms only care about the highest score because it is in their best interest to do so.</p>
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<p>Wrong. Superscoring does not weaken an application. Again, it is in the adcom’s own interest to accept the superscore. (But yes, lopsided testing is a problem.)</p>
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<p>Huh? I have been here a long time, and never seen such anecdotal evidence.</p>
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<p>I would and I do, at least for unhooked applicants.</p>
<p>Some striking things about that Brown data, from the standpoint of this discussion:</p>
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<li> The admission rate for 26-28 ACT, and for 600-640 SAT scores, is virtually the same as those for 29-32 ACT or 650-690 SAT scores – in each case, the difference is less than 1%, and they are basically all in the 6.5%-7.5% range, compared to an overall 10% admission rate. There are too many acceptances in these ranges to blame them all on athletic recruits or development candidates (although those groups could explain the apparent equivalence in the admission rates for the higher-score applicants and lower-score applicants). Almost 1/5th of the class has an ACT score below 29 and/or one or more SAT scores below 650, and more than 1/3 of the class has SAT score(s) below 700 and/or ACT below 32. I think one can conclude that (a) Brown does not distinguish much among scores in that huge middle range, and (b) scores below 700/33 are clearly not disqualifying for applicants who have something to offer.</li>
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<p>(2) The applicants themselves strongly self-select in those ranges. There are more people in the world with 26-28 ACT scores (~170,000/year) than there are 29-36 scorers (~150,000/year), but in the Brown application pool the latter outnumber the former 5-1. The 29-32 scorers (~130,000) outnumber the 26-28 scorers 3-1, despite their very similar acceptance rates. I suspect that if more people in the lower scoring group applied, the acceptance rates would not stay the same. </p>
<p>(3) The Brown data suggest there is far less overlap between SAT and ACT than we have been assuming. Roughly 2/3 of applicants submitted SAT scores, and 1/3 submitted ACT scores. Only about 2,200 out of 31,000 applicants in 2012 submitted both. Obviously, more may have taken both and only submitted one, but that behavior pattern suggests that relatively few kids do the same on both tests, and therefore that if you are using the test scores to assess the number of qualified (or super-qualified) candidates, you really have to add the two test groups, with a little discount, rather than assuming that the top score groups have a lot of overlap.</p>
<p>In other words, there are probably over 30,000 top 1% scorers every year (ACT 33+/SAT 2200+), and ~150,000 top 5% scorers (ACT 30+, SAT 2000+).</p>
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Note that my earlier post emphasized that the listed admit rate is expected to vary significantly within the 24 to 29 range. I did not say that someone who scores a 24 ACT has good shot. Instead my point was the 24 to 29 range has roughly half the admit rate as the admit rate for all scores. If we assume the lower half of this range has a very low admit rate, then it follows that the admit rate for the upper half is well above the average for the range, likely not far below the overall admit rate.</p>
<p>While it’s true that a significant portion of lower test score applicants are hooks, we know from posts on this site that some are not, including myself. I haven’t seen any stats that provide enough information to even guess at the ratio between hooks and non-hooks for different test score ranges. As I’ve said previously in this thread, I agree that someone on the lower end of test scores needs to really stand out, but there are many ways to do this besides just being a hook.</p>
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By anecdotal evidence, I mean posts on CC from un-hooked, low test score (by CC standards) applicants who are accepted to highly selective schools. I’ve given some examples in this thread including a few days ago on the Stanford forum, a parent mentioned her unhooked daughter was accepted with a 1890 SAT. More detail about her stats is in the post at <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/16184021-post15.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/16184021-post15.html</a> . Her daughter did not appear to have an incredibly unique background or national talents/awards, but she brought a unique background with her farming experiences. When I looked through the Princeton RD thread earlier, 3 out of 5 sub-2100 posters were accepted. 1 of the 3 did not appear to be a URM or hook. Instead he brought a unique background as a former commander in the Israeli army. I was accepted to ivies, Stanford, and MIT with a 500 verbal SAT, 3.4/3.5 HS GPA, and not in top 10% class rank; without being a hook. I mentioned why I believe I was accepted in the post at <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/16177283-post161.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/16177283-post161.html</a> . This is just the tip of the iceberg. One can find many more examples on CC, not enough to even roughly estimate chance of it occurring, but enough anecdotal examples to know that it happens .</p>
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<p>You are correct and I’ll defer. For institutional purposes, the college and adcoms should intuitively prefer superscoring. In the context that we are discussing, an applicant with a compelling narrative will not be weakened by superscoring. I only meant to guess that for average applicants, it would be hard not to differentiate between a single-sitting applicant with a 2250 and a five-time retaker whose best unique score was a 2100. If, of course, you had to only pick one and (impossibly), the rest of their applications were comparable. For admissions purposes, at a certain point, excessive retaking looks a tad obsessive. </p>
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<p>Intriguing points. Thank you for the commentary. :)</p>
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<p>I apologize for not noticing that detail. A 29 is not a poor score, and in some cases, it is close to the student body mean. </p>
<p>Looking at this chart, [SAT</a> Comparison, 1966 vs. 2006](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/SATcomparison.html]SAT”>SAT Comparison, 1966 versus 2006), we could surmise that Stanford and Brown have embraced holistic admissions and focus less on scores than some of their competitors, as JHS pointed out. Stanford’s average SAT, for instance, has gone down 63 points. </p>
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<p>Indeed. It is possible, and you are a testament to that fact. My original comment was simply to point out that not all of the ~150,000 top 5% scorers (ACT 30+, SAT 2000+) have a realistic chance at HYP, which is almost a “duh!” thing to note. Obviously some of them do, but with a 7% acceptance rate, I would not fancy my chances.</p>
<p>Stanford has certainly embraced holistic admissions, but no more so than any of its competitiors. I think there’s probably something wrong with that chart. It seems completely unlikely to me that Stanford’s 1966 average (more likely, median) SAT was way above Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, all of which were meaningfully more selective than Stanford then. (And don’t suggest that Stanford was less social than Princeton or Dartmouth. Not even close.)</p>
<p>Re the post about assuming that the 24 ACT has a much lower admit rate than the 29 ACT: Yes, that’s almost certainly true. But the Brown data suggest that there’s no meaningful difference between, say, 28 and 31, or 27 and 30. Or 630 vs. 680 on the SAT tests. That’s really surprising, but the numbers don’t work otherwise.</p>