<p>“Qualified” is a least common denominator kind of term.</p>
<p>The “X” factor I described in post #250 applies at all schools, and it is neither fluid nor meaningless – nor is it limited to legacies, recruited athletes, & URMs. It is actually quite predictable if one does appropriate research or inquiry into the needs & focus of the given school. That doesn’t make it a guarantee - but it was clear to me that my daughter’s X factor was the background & interest in studying a language where many colleges were having difficulty keeping up desired enrollment, and her background & talent as a dancer. Obviously, we did some research into the colleges to figure out which ones would value Russian-studying dancers. </p>
<p>If my kid had been a viola-playing, budding archaeologist - then we would have been searching out schools with strong but under-enrolled archeology departments in need of more string players. </p>
<p>The problem that most kids face in admissions is that their specialties in terms of talent or interest is not unique or strong enough to provide much of an X factor. Most of the elite colleges have plenty of students interested in studying biology or English or psychology – so you can’t get much mileage out of those interests unless you excel to an degree that is unreasonable for most teenagers. So the X-factor bar is too high for those students, and they must rely on the Q-factor – and for them that number will be very high. </p>
<p>But I think that the OP’s question is answered by figuring the minimum value of Q where X is at its maximum – and that is the answer to OP’s question in post #1. That minimum will only get the student in in very limited cases – and logically that has to be at least the bare minimum that indicates to the ad com that the student will be able to maintain a passing (2.0) GPA while. </p>
<p>I do NOT think “qualified” = “selected” – since we can also reasonably assume that every student who is waitlisted is also “qualified” – we should assume that at the very least, all “unqualified” students will be rejected outright. And as we all know, the number of students offered waitlist spots for the elite colleges tends to be quite large.</p>
<p>
I agree with this thought.</p>
<p>I also think this plays with the (in my opinion misguided) complaints about colleges marketing to get lots of applicants so they can make their acceptence rate look good (be low). Instead I think they are casting a wide net over applicants with the minimum value of Q, not so they will have lots of rejections, but so that they can find as many kids as possible with a maximum X.</p>
<p>There are lots of potential definitions of what constitutes “qualified” and “unqualified”. If I were an admin, the type of students that I would be looking for are those that 10 - 20 years in the future will have a significant impact whether it is academic, athletic, music, acting etc. This extends way beyond test scores and gpa. I know a lot of really smart adults who are content to sit in their cubicles and work on their mundane little problems - oblivious to the world around them. I would want students that I think in the future are going to be illustrious alumni and add to the prestige and endowment of my institution. One method of doing this is to seek out students who already have significant accomplishments that show true passion coupled with some assessment of their character and the ability to persevere under any circumstances.</p>
<p>Ok, “the minimum amount of Q for maximum X,” I think that works. If we take all admissions characteristics and divide them into two bins Q and X, we still have to define what goes into each. I think Q is a measure of academic ability as measured by standardized test scores (SAT’S, ACT’s SAT II’s, AP’s), grades (normed by the difficulty of the curriculum and the high school), academic recommendations, and academic accomplishments outside the classroom. X is everything else: EC’s, legacy/development status, diversity, recruited athlete status even an exceptionally moving personal story. What then is the minimum Q for HYPS or any other subset of elite colleges and universities that you care to focus on?</p>
<p>If a college publishes its common data set, you will not only be able to see the median range for SAT scores and GPA, but also the distribution of scores/GPA across all enrollees. That should give you a pretty good idea of the minimum required Q.</p>
<p>Let’s look at Yale’s CDS for 2006-2007, which is online here:
<a href=“http://www.yale.edu/oir/cds.pdf[/url]”>http://www.yale.edu/oir/cds.pdf</a></p>
<p>Testing data is item C9 – we see that in general the median score range for SATs is 690-790, for ACTs 29-34. So we know that 75% of enrolled students have scores of 690 or above.</p>
<p>Then we can see that around 21-24% of enrolled students have SAT scores in the range of 600-690, and only 2-3% have scores in the 500-590 range. Since there are SOME students with scores in the 500’s, we know that the bottom line is below 600 – but since there are so FEW in the 500’s and there are NONE in the 400s, we can reasonably assume that those few probably have scores in the HIGH 500’s (like 580 or 590). Also, with so little having scores in that range, it is probably safe to assume that none of them have uniformly low scores – it is far more likely that they have a combined scores of at least 1800 even if one of the 3 are in the 500’s. From item C10 we know that 95% of Yale admits are in the top 10% of their high school class, and all are at least in the top quarter – again, with so few below the top 10% we can safely assume they are close to that level (top 12% perhaps?) Yale doesn’t give GPA or ACT data – so that’s all we have:</p>
<p>There is a reasonably good chance of getting into Yale (more than one in 5) with scores in the 600 range and in the top 10% of their class,** if **the student has a hook of some kind, with “hook” being broadly interpreted to include anything that might convince the ad com to pull in the students with lower-than-typical scores. </p>
<p>Interestingly enough, I’ve looked at the CDS for Yale, Princeton, & Dartmouth and none of them reports broken down ranges for GPA, which makes it hard to assess the impact of that number. Since other numbers are very similar, I think we have to conclude that for the Ivies, with extremely rare exceptions, students need to be in the top 10% of their high school classes and have SATs at least in the 600’s. (I think we can safely assume that a high class rank will counterbalance a lower SAT score, and vice versa, but it is unlikely that the very small percentage of low end admits are weak in all areas)</p>
<p>If we looked at the data set for my daughter’s college – we would be able to add GPA into the mix – her school, Barnard, reports SATs in the 640-740 score range, with about 9-10% of admits in the 500-590 range, and a tiny fraction (~1%) below 500. GPA data tells us that 83% of students are in the top 10% of their high school class, with 99% being in the top 25% – and only a small fraction (4%) have GPAs below 3.5, and none have GPAs below 3.25. So we can look at the bottom line Q for that school as being a SAT’s in the 500s & GPA of 3.5 or above. Again, it is probably safe to assume that students who are uniformly low on all counts are not being admitted, but we have to guess somewhat more to figure out what the chances would be for, say, the daughter of a well-known politician with a GPA of 3.6 and combined SATs of 1700. </p>
<p>But if the point is to ascertain the point at which it is a waste of money to even apply - I think we can use that data to set the bottom line. I think its fair to assume that once the numbers go below 5% in any category, the only ones who get in are those whose hooks are so extreme that they wouldn’t need to be asking the question of whether they could get in.</p>
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</p>
<p>I agree.</p>
<p>I don’t buy the statement, “If you are admitted, then you are qualified.” To disprove it, I can disprove its contrapositive, “If you are not qualified, then you are not admitted” by mentioning Jian Li.</p>
<p>Li ranked in the top 1% of his class, earned full marks on the SAT and SAT Subject Tests, volunteered internationally, and placed at his state’s math and physics competitions. Far from being a faceless and textureless math grind, he has proven able to withstand with great poise the harsh criticism he received last year from the extreme ends of our country’s left wing.</p>
<p>Many students are capable of “doing the work.” It’s not difficult when the university is eager and willing to help academically weaker students through intensive tutoring and remedial coursework. I am reminded of a user’s story about a student who was admitted to Harvard on the condition that he complete remedial instruction during the summer before his first fall semester as well as the story reported by the Boston Globe earlier this year of several students from disadvantaged backgrounds who were admitted to Harvard with SAT scores around 1,900.</p>
<p>If “being able to do the work” is the standard, then it’s not much of one.</p>
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<p>Colleges have never claimed that students who are not admitted are not qualified. On the contrary, they claim that 80% of applicants are qualified.</p>
<p>marite,</p>
<p>Oh, you’re right. Colleges haven’t claimed that.</p>
<p>What about some of the users here?</p>
<p>You yourself wrote that “qualified is what [insert university here] thinks it is.” I understood that as, “If student A is accepted, then student A is qualified,” which is logically equivalent to, “If student A is not qualified, then student A is not accepted.”</p>
<p>I then presented Jian Li as an example of a student who was clearly qualified to attend several prestigious universities but was not accepted.</p>
<p>"You yourself wrote that “qualified is what [insert university here] thinks it is.” I understood that as, “If student A is accepted, then student A is qualified,” which is logically equivalent to, “If student A is not qualified, then student A is not accepted.”</p>
<p>Not true at all because there are more qualified applicants than spaces.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>By your logic “if you are a US citizen, you are a human being” is equivalent to “if you are a human being, you are a US citizen”… Obviously that is not the case.</p>
<p>fabrizio:</p>
<p>Your logic is lacking, No one has claimed that Jian Li was not qualified. As NSM has repeated, there are more qualified applicants than available spaces. More qualified applicants. Get it?</p>
<p>to nngmm:
no, I believe fabrizio was correct.</p>
<p>IF A => B is true, then the following (contrapositive) statement is true:</p>
<p>(not B) => (not A)</p>
<p>That is not necessarily true, collegealum. In most states you have to be 16 to get your license. So one could say “if you have your license, then you are at least 16.” But the opposite. “if you don’t have your license, then you are not at least 16,” isn’t necessarily true.</p>
<p>^^no, the key is to switch the order of the clauses for the contrapositive.</p>
<p>I didn’t say that A => B implies (not A) => (not B)
I said that A => B implies (not B) => (not A)</p>
<p>In your example, the first statement would be “if you have your license, then you are at least 16.”</p>
<p>The contrapositive of this statement, which is true by the rules of logic, is:
“if you are not at least 16, then you do not have your license.”</p>
<p>hotpiece – i missed this originally also – fabrizio and collegealum didn’t do what you suggest – they flipped the a and b when they added the negatives.
in your example –</p>
<p>if you have your license, then you are at least 16.</p>
<p>they aren’t saying, if you don’t have your license, then you are not at least 16 – they are saying
if you are not at least 16, then you don’t have your license which IS true.</p>
<p>oh, i got it know.</p>
<p>collegealum:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Applying that logic to Fabrizio’s statement:</p>
<p>If a student is admitted (A) then the student is qualified (B)</p>
<p>If a student is not qualified (not B) then the student is not admitted (not A).</p>
<p>This says nothing about students who are not admitted but are qualified, as colleges claim most applicants are.</p>
<p>^^I know. I was just addressing whether the formal rules of logic were violated by fabrizio, which is what poster ngmm asserted. I wasn’t talking about whether it was relevant to the discussion in general.</p>
<p>"I think Q is a measure of academic ability as measured by standardized test scores (SAT’S, ACT’s SAT II’s, AP’s), grades (normed by the difficulty of the curriculum and the high school), academic recommendations, and academic accomplishments outside the classroom…What then is the minimum Q for HYPS or any other subset of elite colleges and universities "</p>
<p>I don’t know, nor do I think that admissions officers have necessarily quantified that. (But I’m open to hearing if they have 
)Even Academic Index does not include academic recommendations/accomplishments. Given the number of 4.0’s & high test scores among Elite College apps, clearly there’s a big focus on the “other” factors within Q, & those factors must carry significant weight. I’ve just never heard of it/them being quantified.</p>