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<p>I don’t think this is evidence that Brown is more “holistic.” It’s at best evidence that as between grades and test scores, Brown may value grades more highly than Vandy, and Vandy may value test scores more highly than Brown. That’s not “holistic” on either side.</p>
<p>Except we don’t even know that, because we don’t know that they’re reporting either grades or test scores the same way. Brown might be reporting weighted GPAs while Vandy is reporting unweighted. Or, one or both of them might be reporting “recalculated” grades according to their own formula. Vandy shows higher ACT scores, 30-34 middle 50% compared to 29-33 for Brown; but Vandy may be reporting superscored ACTs and Brown not. We just don’t know. These so-called “objective” statistics are not necessarily comparable, and not at all transparent.</p>
<p>We do know that Brown reports 93% of its freshmen who reportied a class rank were in the top 10% of their HS class, compared to 85% at Vandy. But since in both cases the percentage reporting a class rank is under 40%, that doesn’t necessarily tell us much either.</p>
<p>Bottom line, such fine parsing based on so-called “objective” stats is a fool’s errand, because we don’t know the figures are comparable.</p>
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<p>This is a wild an totally unsubstantiated inferential leap, based on nothing but some blind hatred for Michigan that you seem to carry, goldenboy. Brown’s average ACT score is 31. As Alexandre has explained, that’s probably the average ACT score for Michigan engineering. Brown reports 93% of its freshmen were in the top 10% of their HS class. Michigan reports 92% of its freshmen were in the top 10% of their HS class, but that’s for the entire university; it’s well known that admissions standards for Michigan engineering are higher than for the university as a whole, so a reasonable inference would be that the percentage of freshmen engineering students at Michigan who were in the top 10% of their HS class is as high or higher than at Brown. Again, we don’t know if these figures are entirely comparable, but the most reasonable inference would be that Michigan engineering students are roughly at the same level in terms of academic stats are Brown students. You certainly can’t conclude from these stats that Brown students are stronger. Much less that they’re “much stronger,” which is just risible.</p>
<p>For Vandy it’s a little more complicated. For some reason, Vandy seems incapable of calculating an average ACT. At least they don’t report one. Makes me suspect it’s a 31 rather than a 32, the midway point between their reported 25th and 75th percentile; otherwise, why wouldn’t they just say? But in any event, the difference between a 31 and a 32 is negligible, at best. On the other hand, only 85% of Vandy freshmen were in the top 10% of their HS class, compared to 92% for Michigan as a whole and almost certainly higher for Michigan engineering. So I’d conclude that, on balance, Michigan engineering student are at least roughly as strong if not stronger than Vandy students. </p>
<p>Pretty much only blind prejudice could tell you otherwise.</p>