My Parents want me to Apply Early at an Ivy

[Data10]

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I merely stated that these people would have been “borderline” by your standards - weak GPA/SAT, weak ECs, and/or unhooked, nonsignificant background.

In many posts, including my first post of the thread, I made it clear that weak GPA/SAT + weak ECs does not equal borderline applicant (unless there are other factors in the rest of the app).</p>

<p>Let’s review the quoted Princeton admissions data and suggested theory. It has been posted that in 2016 Princeton SCEA had a 21.1% acceptance rate, and Princeton RD had a 5.9% acceptance rate. The implication was that the majority of the difference in acceptance the rate is due to different strengths of applicant pools + different rates of hooks, and a minority is due to favoring SCEA. If you had a sample size large enough to be statistically significant, we’d expect your SCEA friends as a whole to be academically stronger than your RD friends, but a higher rate of acceptance among the borderline apps that could go either way via a combination of stats, ECs, awards, LORs, essays, personality qualities, achievements, etc. You did not mention any apps who were less qualified among your small sample size, suggesting that you are looking for a large difference in some measure to be unqualified. We are not talking about unqualified apps. The vast majority of apps are qualified at highly selective colleges, and most of those qualified apps get rejected, with both SCEA and RD. Instead we are looking at minor differences among the qualified apps.</p>

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What does a 2% chance of admittance for a SINGLE student mean versus a 19% chance? In concrete terms, please - none of that “Oh, that’s such a HUGE statistical difference”. Again, there is a discrepancy between the (outdated) data you report and what I observe.

The stats I have listed in reference to the 2% admit rate vs 19% and percent of existing students with weaker stats were all reported by Princeton from the class 2016, not outdated information. </p>

<p>A 2% acceptance rate in a low stat range usually indicates the actual acceptance rate is well below 2% for unhooked apps due to the higher rate of hooks in lower stats. For example, the ivy league athletic league requires that recruited athletes have average stats no worse than 1 standard deviation below the general population, and permits a small portion of recruited athletes to have stats several standard deviations below the mean for the overall student body. Recruited athletes are almost certainly heavily overrepresented in this 2% low-stat group. Many other hooks are as well. Once you remove hooks, athletes, URMs, and similar you may be looking at an acceptance rate far below 2%, maybe far below 1%. It’s not impossible to be accepted in this range, but it is extremely unlikely unless you stand out in a really exceptional way. The vast majority do not do this by definition, indicating extremely unlikely odds of acceptance for the vast majority. Most on this site would probably say don’t bother applying with a chance of acceptance in this range. Personally, I think there isn’t anything wrong with applying to extreme reaches like this, so long as you are aware it’s extremely unlikely odds and apply to some other schools with better expected odds, along with a safety (or safeties).</p>

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I said the cited studies were not pertinent to “early action and advantages”. The previous study you cited was clearly only about early DECISION and its impact upon academic performance, NOT advantages.

If you read the study and review the reasons why the study states that early decision had such a large impact on acceptance rate among the subject group, you’ll find that the same reasons apply to Single Choice Early Action. I’d consider a large increase in chance of acceptance to be an advantage. Wouldn’t you?</p>