Ivy League Admissions Difficulty is Exaggerated

[zoogies]

<p>

Agreed. I should clarify my statement.</p>

<p>Your chances at any one school is random.
If you say to yourself, “I want to get into … Columbia”. Your chances, unless truly amazing stuff, is more or less wishy washy ~we’ll use 30% (RD acceptance rate at the College last year was 5%).</p>

<p>Okay but my original point was assume 30% at all 8 Ivy league schools (for the person that applies to 8)</p>

<p>The chance of rejection of any one independently is 1-0.3 = 0.7 => 70% right?</p>

<p>The chance of being rejected from EVERY SINGLE IVY with those stats are, mathematically, 0.7^8 = 5.76%</p>

<p>So statistically, assuming you have an equal, independent 30% chance of admissions based on those SAT and GPA’s (which is supported by the data i cited earlier), if you apply to all 8 Ivies, you have a 100% - 5.76% = 94.3% of admissions into 1 of them.

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<p>You say ‘statistically’ like this has actual mathematical merit.</p>

<p>Suppose you have eight drawers full of socks. (30% green, 70% red, it’s Christmas time, right?) You pull one sock from each drawer. The chances of pulling a red sock, from any one independently, is 1-0.3 = 0.7 => 70%, right?</p>

<p>The chance of pulling red socks from EVERY SINGLE DRAWER are, mathematically, 0.7^8 = 5.76%.</p>

<p>So statistically, you have a 94.3% chance of pulling out a green sock somewhere there.</p>

<p>

assuming you have an equal, independent 30% chance of admissions based on those SAT and GPA’s (which is supported by the data i cited earlier)

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<p>It may be that the data supports this, but I would contend that common sense dictates that college admissions is a bit different from pulling socks from drawers. To model them as statistically equivalent circumstances is rather pointless.</p>

<p>(edit) Well, I didn’t realize that post was 18 pages ago.</p>