<p>Being hispanic will help quite a lot. Your test scores and grades can be far lower than the average. When schools report ranges of the middle fifty percent of their students (25 percentile to 75 percentile), you should know that the overwhelming bulk of the bottom 25 percent of the entire class (those below this middle range) is made up of underprivileged minorities - i.e. blacks and hispanics - at the elite schools, which try to admit about 25 percent of their classes from these underprivileged minority groups. Of course, these students are not necessarily underprivileged now, and they are overwhelmingly of higher economic status within the minority communities from which they come. The top 25 percent (above this middle range) are almost all Asian and white. Most of those in the middle range (25 percent to 75 percent ranking) are also mostly Asian and white, with athletes, legacy candidates, children of VIPS, at the low end of that middle group.</p>