How many 2400 SAT scores (including superscoring)?

[Data10]

I'm not sure why the applicant pool at Stanford would skew lower on SAT scores than Harvard's applicant pool.

Sports. The only people from our high school who were accepted to Stanford when my son applied had SAT scores in the 1200s (out of 1600 - this was in 2007 and writing had just been introduced). No one with a 1300+ had ever been accepted. My son added to those rejection numbers with a 1570 and so did a number of other academic superstar kids that year. Now that Stanford has gotten more popular their numbers may have gone up, but they still need a football team.

Note that the quote was in reference to the applicant pool, not who was accepted. You mentioned your high scoring son and other academic superstar kids were a part of the applicant pool even if they were not accepted, so it’s not suggestive that high scoring applicants are primarily applying to Harvard instead of Stanford, or vice versa. Naviance for the HS I attended shows both Harvard and Stanford applicants had a median score of ~2200. Harvard had the wider score range, with lowest scoring applicants having SAT scores of ~1600, while Stanford started at ~1800; which likely relates to being located in an area of the Northeast, where Harvard is more popular.

Regarding sports, Harvard also does well in some Div I sports, and I expect accepts some Low-Low band stat athlete admits, as permitted under Ivy League conference rules. Their Men’s basketball team has done well enough to participate in the NCAA tournament in each of the past 4 years, sometimes making it to the 3rd round of 32. Looking at the percentage of entering class with scores in the 500s or lower SATs, Stanford averages ~4% per section and Harvard averages ~2.5% per section, so there is a difference, but neither one has a huge portion of the admitted class with low scores. Stanford and Harvard athletes have an identical GSR grad rate of 98%, which does not suggest one group is notably more academically qualified than the other. While Stanford may admit more 500 or less scoring athletes, I wouldn’t assume that all of those scores are athletes. My CR score of 500 was one of the ~6 lowest in my class at Stanford, yet I didn’t play any sports in HS. The lowest scoring admits I’ve heard of are often exceptional persons in non athletic fields. A good example is the poster Mr. Tubbs (won highest award given to Stanford students and was youngest ever elected official of home town during graduation year) who had the ACT equivalent of 500s on his math/science scores. I expect Stanford generally places less emphasis on scores in their admissions decisions than Harvard, so we see Stanford’s class having a bit lower scores than Harvard in all score ranges, including top scores.