My Parents want me to Apply Early at an Ivy

[Data10]

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I do not claim that I have greater insight into the admissions process

In your earlier post, you wrote that the Harvard and Stanford professors have little to no insight in the admissions process. If you still think they have “little to no insight”, then it shouldn’t take much insight to have greater than little to none.</p>

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I am simply saying that I have empirical evidence gathered from something that is more than just statistics. Viewing students by their numbers is the most repugnant form of dehumanization in college admissions. I can humanize those numbers that the study crunched and, from what I have seen so far, there is no reason to suggest that SCEA gives any significant advantage to students - if they got in SCEA, they were going to get in RD anyway.

We are not talking about football players being accepted with stats at the bottom of the class that are obviously weaker academically than the vast majority of the class. Instead we are talking about borderline candidates that almost, but not quite meet the acceptance threshold. Do you really think that you can tell in a casual day-to-day conversation whether they are a borderline candidate that would have a greater chance via SCEA or RD, especially since you called admissions a random crapshoot where you don’t know who is likely and unlikely to be admitted?</p>

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If I cited data from over a decade ago in my field of research, I would be laughed out of the room

The study was published in December 2010. The Harvard and Stanford professors publishing the study obviously thought the data was still applicable and were not laughed out of the room. Instead the study has It has been cited in dozens of other studies since then, some in recent months.</p>

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How applicable do you think your method is to Princeton applicants? If it does not apply to Princeton, then why mention it in a discussion about Princeton SCEA? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way)

I’ll quote a portion of the earlier post – “Nevertheless, the point remains that the admissions decisions did not appear anything close to random. Instead they appeared to be highly predictable among the unique CC poster subgroup.” The point was that admissions did not appear to be a random crapshoot, as you previously stated. Instead using a simple set of rules one could accurately predict the vast majority of the posted results. Sure it’s theoretically possible that Princeton makes their admissions decisions completely randomly among posters with similar stats, such as reviewers throwing the apps in the air and giving high ratings to the ones that fall on top, but I think it’s far more likely that the vast majority of weighting in Princeton admissions decisions are not random and instead applicant strength can be roughly estimated by looking a a combination of stat and non-stat qualities, just as Stanford decisions did not appear to be random and instead could be predicted well by looking at a combination of qualities (among CC thread posters).</p>