<p>This is a gigantic topic, with lots of little sub-topics to it. I can’t possible address all of them, but let me hit a few points:</p>
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<li><p>No one is admitted to any elite college on the basis of stats alone. No one. The best stats imaginable cannot overcome a mediocre essay and lukewarm recommendations if the student does not have other highly desirable qualities. Although everyone’s application gets read, lots of applicants probably are rejected on the basis of stats alone, although they may account for only 10-20% of the applicant pool.</p></li>
<li><p>Standardized test scores and GPA really have different status and function. With test scores, the best line I have heard is part of the standard Yale admissions stump speech: “SATs – they are a lot less important than you think, but a little more important than we admit.” Officially, everyone says that they are only used to determine basic ability to do the work and to help validate GPAs and compare the GPAs of students who go to very different schools. Also, officially, the admissions people don’t care about small differences (like 40 points) – a 760 and an 800 are pretty much the same (but not a 720 and an 800 or 780).</p></li>
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<p>There’s no question that higher test scores correlate with higher admissions chances, but that doesn’t mean the test scores are actually critical to the admissions decisions. It means that applicants who have the qualities the colleges want also tend to have higher test scores.</p>
<p>I think it’s clear that low test scores can be enough, or almost enough, to exclude an applicant from serious consideration. It’s also pretty clear that high test scores can help an applicant get to the final round, and that a student with medium test scores had better have a lot of other really strong factors to make it to that point. But I have never read, or heard, a description of actual admissions decisionmaking in which test scores were a meaningful factor in making the final decisions between who gets accepted and who gets waitlisted.</p>
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<li> GPA on the other hand – everyone says that it’s critically important. That’s true, but quality matters, a lot. Someone with a 3.7 from Exeter may be a great candidate for Penn, but at your local high school anything much below 3.9 may doom you (depending, of course, on other factors). A 4.0 with a play-it-safe curriculum is a terrible candidate, while someone who really challenged himself and got a 3.8 may be seen as a star.</li>
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<p>In general, none of these colleges cares what your weighted GPA is. They will calculate their own GPA based on what courses they care about, and they will take account of honors/AP weighting issues by essentially excluding anyone who hasn’t taken the most challenging courses available at his school, or at least close, no matter how good their GPA. They care about class rank, too – not necessarily how your school calculates it, but where you stand among the subset of students who academically ambitious.</p>
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<li><p>Quality matters for test scores, too. If two kids have the same test score, but one comes from an upper-income family with highly educated parents, and a community that values education, and the other has parents who don’t speak English and didn’t finish high school, and comes from a culture where educational achievement is not rewarded . . . well, those are not identical test scores. The first student may be just part of the pack, while the second will be a star. Also, all colleges “superscore,” because of course that helps their published stats, but many of them – definitely including Penn – discount high test scores if they are the result of multiple testings and appear coached.</p></li>
<li><p>Some things to think about when you look at a college’s reported stats:</p></li>
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<p>-- The stats that get reported are for the class that enrolls, not the class that was admitted. Because the higher a students stats are, the more choices he likely had, higher stat admitted students are less likely to enroll than lower stat admitted students. So the average stats for the enrolled class may only be about the 33% level for the admitted class.</p>
<p>-- And at the same time, there are a lot more applicants with average stats than ultra-high stats. A college may accept the same number of students with 2400s and 2200s, but it probably got eight to ten times the number of applications from students with 2200s as from those with 2400s.</p>
<p>-- At all of these colleges, a fairly high number of students get admitted mainly on the basis of some non-academic factor. The obvious example is recruited athletes, or fabulous musicians. At some colleges, that may be 20-25% of the class. While some of them will have high (or high-ish) stats, in general their stats don’t matter as long as they are above the minimum acceptable level. So those students make up a big chunk of the bottom 25% in every category. The point is that, unless you are one of those applicants, your chances of getting accepted with stats below the 25% level are even worse than it looks when you see the enrolled class distributions. (This is somewhat less true at Penn than, say, Dartmouth. Penn has a bigger class, and accepts more students who will not be playing varsity sports.)</p>