Hope For Mere Mortals

MrMom62
Wed, 06 Nov 2013 13:01:15 +0000

Someone recently reposted http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1364300-325-most-selective-schools-ranked-sat-75th-percentile.html. This data is from 2010-11, but it contained the kind of info I’ve been looking for for awhile now.

I’ve always been curious, do top schools overstate their test scores? After all, an SAT CR+M of 1600 or an ACT of 36 is a very rare thing and it seemed like too many schools were claiming that’s all they accepted, or at least urban myth (or CC) would have you believe that’s what you need to get into an Ivy or equivalent. So I did a bit of back of the envelope (okay, it was Excel) calculation and actually disproved my hypothesis - it is possible for all those schools to be claiming the 75% percentile that they claim, there are enough top scoring students. But it also pointed out some other rather interesting facts, enough to give students (and their parents) hope about getting into the elite schools.

First, the methodology. This was a quick study, and some data from adjacent years was undoubtedly mixed and matched, but it doesn’t change that much from year to year and it can still give us a pretty accurate picture of what it takes.

First off, there are 31 schools that claim a 75th percentile of 1500 or above. There is only one school at 1490, Haverford, and it’s only 1200 students, so it’s not going to throw things off much. Also, conveniently, the Top 1% of scores cuts off at 1490, so for shorthand purposes, we can say that schools with 75th percentiles at 1500 or above are pulling 25% of their students from the Top 1%.

How many students are there at 1500 or above? The answer for 2011 was 18,144.
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-Composite-CR-M_2011.pdf

And how many undergrads are at the Top 31 Scoring Schools? Pulling from Wikipedia, the total number of undergrads is about 160,000. Dividing by four, we get an approximate freshman class of 40,000 students per year.

Of these 40,000, how many took the SAT? The Top 325 list conveniently has this data, and from that, we can calculate that approximately 8,100 students at the Top 31 scored 1500 or above. That actually means that roughly 10,000 students who scored above 1500 went someplace else, so only 45% of top scoring SAT students actually go to the Top 31 schools.

Since we have 40,000 freshman to account for, the top quarter is going to be 10,000 students, which means that 1900 students did not take the SAT. They either only took the ACT or used some other method to gain admission. It’s probably safe to assume that ACT scores would be roughly the same standard, and the ACT score that’s equal to a 1500 CR+M is a 34.

So, for the mere mortals out there, this means there is hope. Three-quarters of the class at the Top 31 is below 1500 CR+M or 34. That’s 30,000 spots. Yes athletes and legacies are going to take up some of those, and you still have to be really, really good to get in, after all, a 31 or 1380 is still far beyond the reach of 95% of the people, but if you expand your horizon beyond HYPS (Michigan isn’t on the Top 31 list), there’s probably a spot for you at a really good school if you have a really good score.

Just thought some of you might find that interesting.