How competitive is Stanford?

sakky
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:55:07 +0000

Trust me, people I know got rejected by Cal and got into Stanford.



As do I.

Of course it should be said that almost all of them were OOS. Stanford obviously doesn’t care about OOS, but Berkeley clearly does. And quite a few of them were URM. UC doesn’t use AA anymore, but Stanford still does. I think it would surprise nobody that a URM OOS applicant might actually find it easier to get into Stanford than Berkeley.



It’s stupid to post that, and no way knocking Berkeley (I’d probably go to berkeley over stanford if accepted to both), being accepted to stanford with a 1700 is an extreme outlier, whereas getting into cal with a 1700 would just be seen as a little weird.



Indeed true. Consider the following Daily Cal article regarding ‘low-scoring’ students who nonetheless were admitted to Berkeley. Presumably this occurred back when the SAT was still scored out of 1600 points.

*"An analysis of UC admissions data published by the Los Angeles Times Monday revealed that UC admitted 51 percent of applicants with SAT scores below 1,000, compared to last year’s 65 percent admission rate. On the UC Berkeley campus, 216 students with low SAT scores were admitted…

The controversy over UC’s admission policies ignited in fall 2003, when then-UC Board of Regents Chair John Moores published a report revealing that UC Berkeley had admitted nearly 400 students with SAT scores lower than 1,000, while rejecting 641 students with virtually perfect scores. More than 90 percent of the low-scoring admits were underrepresented minority students." *

[The Daily Californian](http://www.dailycal.org/article/18235/uc_takes_fewer_applicants_with_low_sat_scores)