Especially for the smaller hooks (e.g. legacy, as compared to bigger hooks like athlete or donor related). The smaller hooked admits may have the stats visible on Naviance / Scoir, but perhaps not the less quantifiable stuff like EC achievements, essays, and recommendations to be ordinarily admitted, but the hook made up for that.
You have the student (or prior to enrollment, the parent) ask the counselor how many of those students were not legacy, athletes, and URM. They should be able to give you the numbers.
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The odd thing is anecdotally, Yale is a popular place to apply, and all the others are way above the normal cutoff for SCOIR reporting. So I would be quite surprised if there were not enough Yale applicants specifically, but I have never bothered to investigate.
As someone that is pretty new to all of this, can some of you help me understand how rare this profile is? I know 760 is max on math and college board lists it as 99+ percentile for 11th graders. For a 9th grader is this 99.9% or 99.99% or something less impressive. I would imagine that he is projected for something like a 1550-1600 SAT with 800 on math. Does that seem right? Maybe 800 EBRW is a reach from this score? Thanks so much.
For context, he only found out his school was offering the PSAT for ninth graders the night prior so there was no prep work involved. Please do not see this as an attempt to brag. Iām just looking to get a handle on whether this is truly exceptional or more of a ānice job, but weāve seen this beforeā. Thanks.
CO_Dad
I canāt answer that question but I did want to mention that what distinguishes unusually talented math students (meaning students who gain entry into the likes of Princeton based on their math abilities) is achievement in national math competitions; high schools, even very strong ones, generally do not have the needed resources. This is not my childrenāsā specialty, but I believe online resources like Art of Problem Solving and Russian Math are intended to help develop such kids.
My kids are more in the humanities. While their private schools had good quality instruction, I believe it was the national recognition they received that made the difference.
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He is unusually gifted for math.
SAT math is no measure past 9th grade for him. Heās off the scale and needs to be supported in ways that nurture him (his math but all of him, which doesnāt need to be gifted in everything.)
Art of problem solving for fun, math competitions if he likes them (some kids donāt like the pressure and environment and thatās fine). Opportunity to explore math in all its facets without goals other than learning something cool ie., mind blowing 
because it changes how you think.
And support for anything else.
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Your child is clearly very talented in math. Very likely top 0.1%.
As to determining just how talented beyond that, the ceilings on the PSAT and SAT are way too low to be useful, particularly if taken in the teenage years. Think of it this way. In basketball, a player on the high school state championship team can be in the top 1% of all players, but that gives no indication of whether they are potential NBA material.
The way to determine competition math talent is through the AMC exams, as the entire purpose of that exam series is to eventually find the top 6 math students in the USA. Note that there are other types of math talent, such as research math, but thatās not as easily determined because the opportunities for them are rare (but possible, PM me for details).
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Great point. We have been living abroad for the last three years so I do not have any AMC10 results. The UK uses the UKMT. On the intermediate challenge (Grades 8-10), I do not have his score on hand but remember it being 110-120 (out of 125). Award boundaries for 8-10th grade were:
Gold - 71+ points - 8% of entrants
Silver - 55-70 points - 17% of entrants
Bronze - 42-54 points - 25% of entrants
That implies a mean of ~42 points. I canāt work out the standard deviation since the distribution does not look normal.
Additionally, the cut-off for 8th graders to qualify for the next round was 95 points (Top 1500 nationally of ~100,000 test takers per year).
This test is optional for students so Iād assume the sample is already on the higher end of math aptitude.
CO_Dad
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I think often if you want to dive deep into just one subject like math or music or physics in high school, you need a bigger school (2000-3000 students) so they can offer many levels of math, or a specialty school (school of the arts, a school like TJ in Virginia). There are exceptions, of course, but harder to find.
Usually if you are the only one in the school at that level, you have to take more advanced classes at a university. Not every high school can offer math classes beyond Calc (and many canāt offer that), not every school can have a full orchestra or AP physicals (or at that level). My friendās son was about 3 grades ahead in math and while it was easy enough for a 2nd grader to walk down the hall to take 5th grade math, it became harder for a 7th grader to get to the high school for calc. By high school, he was at the college for math, but his parents felt it was important for him to stay in hs for the social life and for classes where he wasnāt as advanced. Not perfect, but they were lucky to live in a university town so could make it work. Now with things online, it could be easier to keep moving in math.
Well thatās top 0.1% right there. ACT and (P)SAT are too low ceiling to do much finer than top 1%, but as others have said, multi-level math contests will sort out the top 10^{-n} for several n.
ETA: Iām not familiar with UKMT, but a search found this Grey and Pink Kangaroo + Cayley, Hamilton and Maclaurin Olympiads (intermediate) ā Mathsaurus
but I donāt see how to deduce a percentile rank.
Agree with @hebegebe that math competitions are better indicators of high ability. I also reside in the UK and my D22 went through the UK system so I am familiar with the UKMT competitions. Your sonās score should have qualified him for the Olympiad round - how he did in the subsequent round will provide a finer indication of his talent (and, of course, he can skip ahead to the Senior Challenge if heās that far ahead of his peers).
Curious, what is the test used for gifted and talented?
Good point. He finished in the top half but outside the top one hundred. I dont think we saw a raw score.
I just found AoPS online and Iām really impressed with the content. Given where he is now and his access to AP calc courses in high school, is it best to focus courses like number theory, group theory, olympiad geometry? I do not doubt that there is some great material in the foundational courses, but I think it may be a lot of review.
Heās certainly very strong. How he does on this yearās Olympiad paper (i.e., consistency of performance) will also reveal where heās at and which curriculum and/or enrichment activities might suit him.
FYI, in my D22ās high school class, the strongest math student won ābook awardsā with some regularity and ended up with 1 HYPSM offer but decided to pursue STEM (but not math) at Oxbridge; what impressed me most was that she seemed to be achieving these results with relative ease.
Getting into one of the top STEM schools is, for everyone, definitely against the odds. From what I have seen the top schools prefer students from schools that they know their schoolās track record. They can judge a applicantās GPA if they have experience with a prior admit. They also want to see that the applicant took the hardest classes and did well in them.
That said, the top schools will admit applicants from most every high school.
I donāt envy the staff that has to make the admit / deny decisions. Must be so hard.
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Donāt assume Pre-Calc to Calc BC, even for strong students. We had one local HS that would not, under any circumstance, allow a student to skip Calc AB, but a second one had a standard track from Pre-calc to Calc BC - only kids who didnāt flourish in Pre-calc went into Calc AB first. I would definitely ask the schools directly.
Also, regarding like-minded students, it would be good to find out the range of math/STEM clubs offered and how active they are. Some strong math students have no interest in competition math, but for the ones who like it, the clubs often provide a way to socialize outside of the classroom and forge friendships, especially if the clubs are student-led and not faculty-led.
Not always that easy.
At my sonās public HS (rated #1 public the last time the WSJ rated HS) the three year cumulative Naviance reported admissions success rates at Harvard were 50% EA 20% RD vs Yale with 24% EA, 22% RD. The ovious thing based on the numbers would be to apply H EA and Yale RD, butā¦
Asked the Guidance Dept. chair for their take. Was told: maybe H just gives more weight to locking in the bright kids early. Specifically asked about legacy, was told that the school didnāt know.
Fast forward to a reception at the NYC Harvard Club for Early Admit students and family. 8 out of the 10 kids from his HS who were admitted EA were legacy or double legacy, or legacy + recruited athlete. (Seemed about the same for the overall group at the reception, not just my sonās HS contingent)
No way to find out from Naviance, or the HS admin.
Note: this was as of 2015
The documents revealed in the Students for Fair Admission vs. Harvard case confirm what you observed, which was the power of the āALDCā list in Harvardās process.
Not to get off topic, but itās interesting to see Dartmouth and Yale claim their new test-required policies are all about increasing socio-economic diversity while they have not renounced legacy admissions. (Though I would argue that a lot of top high schools attract ā or are located in demographic clusters of ā families with strong academic bona fides and connections. So is it the high school itself, or the composition of the families that school serves?)
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My suggestion would be School A only for the academic opportunities. Exposure is key - Your son doesnāt have to take all of the A/P classes but there are plenty to choose from and these advanced classes will help him decide the major he wants to get in.
Also - Iāve learned universities are looking at the rigorous of the curriculum and count on kids challenging themselves and always having an ascendant path.
Both of my kids went to a high school similar to Option A, took 11 A/Pās and got into engineering at Georgia Tech, Purdue, UVA, UIUC, UF and Carnegie.
If I would have to give any advise now I would say:
- rigorous of the curriculum - they need to take as many advanced classes as offered and get an A in these classes. AP exams matters less for admission
- GPA
- SAT - I know for the last years SAT was optional, however I believe kids who applied with a good SAT scored a bit more than the ones with no SAT. Good SAT = min 1450/1600
- leadership - kids need to show leadership in something - president of a club, captain of a sport, tutoring, camp councilor
- meaningful community service - this is vague but out of my experience - my S had community service through NHS and I feel was not significant. He had better stats than my D (higher GPA, higher SAT) and probably that helped his admissions.
My D was heavily involved in Special Olympics and Valerie Fund due to her best friend being diagnosed in 7th grade with brain cancer. She spent 4 years with these organizations next to her friend and she wrote her essay about how her friendās journey changed her. I really believe her application stand out because of this as not every teenager witnessed and participated in such drama.
Now it is really unfair that my daughter āscoredā due to her friendās drama because not every kid in high school have the āopportunityā (for the lack of a better word) to do something out of the norm. It shouldnāt be like this - kids should be left to be kids and not pushed to find something out of the ordinary. In my opinion, the acceptance process is not fair - there are too many variables that count and donāt have anything to do with the kidās potential to succeed in college and later in life. But it is what it is and we need to navigate it this way.