<p>@Keesh17: That argument concerns me. For example, what if a person was choosing between Emory, Rice and Vanderbilt, fit Emory better, but then someone comes on and says Vanderbilt and Rice have smarter kids? Even if it does, the caliber of the institutions are about the same and the student bodies make the same types of accomplishments (in fact, sometimes Emory outperforms when you look at things like Fulbrights and stuff like that). Be more concerned with what students are doing at each institution. Go look at their news reels and determine if one student body is doing something more than the other (like maybe you like entrepreneurship and that is something blowing up at Emory, so this wouldn’t be a bad place to go). Hell, what if someone said go to Vanderbilt or Washington University instead of Duke or Penn (I could name a dozen institutions that currently of higher caliber than the former two, though I would say Washington University is perhaps the higher of the two, not caring about name recognition) because Vanderbilt and Duke have higher SAT scores? </p>
<p>I guess the question is: What threshold do we set for saying the following:
“You can no longer use incoming classes to distinguish between the caliber of these schools”
Vanderbilt and Notre Dame have SAT’s about the same amount higher than Emory as Emory has on Pitzer. What range do you go and say, “it’s not as relevant”? I would argue once the average or median is 1350 or higher, but many would beg to differ and still claim that a student body of 1375 is completely inferior to the one with 1450 (it’s so stupid it hurts. You’re talking about a multiple choice test…which I hope top 20s or schools with those sorts of student bodies don’t overuse. In addition, we know that schools like Chicago have undergraduate academics far more rigorous than other institutions with similar stats. Let’s not get into caliber of doctoral programs. SAT scores are very misleading and make us ignore the actual academic differences between schools which should matter in my opinion. To say otherwise is just saying: “We’re not here to be challenged, we’re hoping to screw around and become motivated by our smart peers so that we can do awesome things outside of the classroom”. It’s almost a dichotomy of sorts ).Making the SAT argument gets pretty dicey. You would have to, for example, claim that UCLA is completely inferior to all top 20 privates (or even USC) because its 25% is in the 1100s. We know for a fact that this isn’t the case. </p>