<p>93tiger16’s anecdotes about students he knows at Princeton are confirmed by my own anecdotes at our son’s medium-sized public high school. In the last 3 years, there have been two students who went to Stanford, two to Harvard, and two to Yale. Not a single one of them won any national or regional awards. They were just smart, interesting kids who were active to some extent in their school. Two of them were the student body president. Some of them were among the better athletes at the school.</p>
<p>Now, these are just anecdotes. But they have the advantage that they are randomly chosen from students who are attending HYPS. By contrast, the problem with Data10’s technique of analyzing data posted on College Confidential about Stanford acceptances is that the students who post here are the college obsessed. Because they are obsessed, they do what they perceive will increase their chance of acceptance, and that includes loading up their resume with a lot of awards, etc.</p>
<p>You don’t get data on CC about the students who are not college obsessed, because they do not post here. Typically, they are not trying to load up their resume with awards, but instead do what interests them. Imagine you are a college admissions officer, and you are choosing between a lot of interesting kids without awards, and other kids with awards. Most of your acceptances may come from the first group. Yet since that group does not post to CC, the students in that group are not in Data10’s data base.</p>
<p>More generally, all of the result threads on CC contain information on the students who are college obsessed. Yet what percent of HYPS students post their results on CC? Only a very small percentage. You won’t find any information here about the non-college-obsessed. Therefore, much of the analysis on CC about how to get accepted at HYPS could be based on information that is not representative of the typical HYPS student.</p>