<p>@gibby
That’s a really interesting list! Why Pomona, though? Pretty random.</p>
<p>@hopingdad I may have been as high as top 15%…I really don’t know. My recommendation probably helped a lot. My college counselor said that she wrote me one of the best of the year, based on holistic college-worthiness, if not grades. I’m a humanities person who went to a science-specialty public high school routinely ranked much higher than Stuyvesant on USNWR/just a few lower on gibby’s list. I have a national championship in my field of the humanities. I did try very hard at science, taking the most challenging courses, which is where the Bs came from.</p>
<p>And yes, I am a legacy. I get testy about it because several people from my high school heard that and then told me (in person) that I was clearly admitted on that basis alone. I still would like to hope that winning a national championship was more important to my admission than who my parents were… But I do sometimes doubt myself, too.</p>
<p>@enigmaa
I have no idea if this is how it actually works, but it’s how I make sense of it in my head. I assume that a high SAT puts you into the competitive-for-admission zone, in which class rank and GPA (as gibby said, telling you more about a person over time than the hours-long SAT) are the big differentiators of qualified candidates. So they say that GPA/class rank are more important, because they’re the criteria that end up being more important for admission, if not for competitiveness-for-admission.</p>
<p>@lullina
Do you want to get rid of the SAT entirely?
Also, if only 1% of test-takers rank in the 99th percentile on each section of the SAT (by definition), how much more selective do you want to make APs? I agree that their current system is not differentiated enough, but what level of differentiation are you aiming for? Do you want there to be a #1-scoring exam in each subject?</p>