<p>Congratulations to all of you who have received an invite to the March CW!!</p>
<p>Just out of curiosity, has anyone for the U.S received an invite yet? Thanks! :)</p>
<p>I personally think students in the UK, USA, Gulf countries, etc. will receive their invites at a later date, for the simple reason that citizens of these countries donāt need visas to visit the UAE. Since the visa process itself takes 2 weeks, I think they probably first finish off with students who will need to undergo this procedure. </p>
<p>Just my opinion though.</p>
<p>I am from the United States and have received my invitation. Iām so excited!!</p>
<p>I noticed that NYUAD lists only the 75th percentile SAT scores of their incoming class, and not the 25th percentile scores (unlike all other universities). </p>
<p>This is what I found on the NYUAD website:</p>
<p>[NYU</a> Abu Dhabi Welcomes Class of 2015](<a href=āhttp://nyuad.nyu.edu/news.events/press-release-2015-class.html]NYUā>http://nyuad.nyu.edu/news.events/press-release-2015-class.html)</p>
<p>Does anyone know what the 25th percentile NYUAD SAT scores are, and why NYUAD does not make them public? Given only the 75th percentile scores, the average SAT scores of the students could be almost anything.</p>
<p>Thanks for any information.</p>
<p>@Plotinus</p>
<p>I donāt believe that NYUAD ever released any of that information. My only guess for as to why they only listed 75th percentile is because it makes the stats of the incoming class sound much more competitive. I mean if you really think about, if 75% of the incoming class has such superb scores, thatās saying something. As for the 25th percentile, you are right, they could be almost anything, but I highly believe that they are still very high scores, like SAT 2000+ in most cases. However, this is all just my opinion from what I have read throughout this thread. By the way, have you applied/been invited to the candidate weekend?</p>
<p>To field2:</p>
<p>You should note that the 75th percentile scores tell us only that 25% of the students scored the same or more than those scores. It does not tell us anything about scores of the 75% who scored lower than the 75th percentile. For example, if the 75th percentile score is 800 in math, we know 25% of the students scored 800 in mathematics, but nothing about what the other 75% scored.</p>
<p>NYUAD also lists the median composite score for the class of 2015 as 1460, but this still gives much less information than the 25th percentile scores in CR and M, firstly, because there is no breakdown between CR and M, and secondly because the median tells us that 50% of the composite scores were lower than 1460, but nothing about what these other scores were or how they were distributed.</p>
<p>It is accepted practice among universities to list both the 75th and 25th percentile scores. Why does NYUAD not do this?</p>
<p>I am a parent, not a student, and just curious.</p>
<p>@plotinus</p>
<p>I must have misunderstood the concept of percentiles when I first read NYUAD class of 2015 stats. Thank you for clarifying 
As to your question, I guess thatās just something that should be directed towards NYUAD, because although it is obvious that admitted students have top rate test scores, the little info they have released does not give a clear picture of the stats of the entire classā¦</p>
<p>To field2</p>
<p>I think it would be more accurate to say āit is obvious that the upper 50% of the admitted students have top SAT scoresā. NYUAD has not released any information about the lower 50% of their SAT scores, so it is not obvious that these students have top scores.</p>
<p>In addition, NYUADās standardized testing requirements are very flexible. NYUAD accepts a wide variety of international standardized test scores, and does not require that every applicant submit either SAT or ACT scores, as do other U.S. universities. Thus the question arises: do the reported SAT 75th percentiles refer to the entire admitted pool, or only to the subset of students who submitted SAT scores? That is, did 25% of all the 196 students admitted to the class of 2015 score 800 in math, or only 25% of those students who submitted SAT scores? If the latter, how many students submitted SAT scores and how many did not? </p>
<p>Maybe it seems that I am nit-picking, but I find it difficult make rational comparisons between institutions when stats are not presented in the same way and testing requirements are different.</p>
<p>question everyone, are you guys getting the invites through mail or email?</p>
<p>@pbarnuevo</p>
<p>E-mail. I donāt think they send invites via mail.</p>
<p>Emailā¦</p>
<p>No way they could use snail mail considering the time they have to help with the visa process, book the tickets and so onā¦</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>Regarding listing of SAT scores 75th %tile & 25th %tileā¦ </p>
<p>I am a parent whose son made it into NYUAD last year & we are from India. I remember asking them how they compared SAT scores across different countries as we did not even have book stores that sold SAT prep books in our State, let alone get a coach or prep school. The whole method of study at schools here are very different too as the SAT is based on curricula in US schools. They said they were aware of that and that they did not hold SAT scores from Kids outside the US sacrosanct & absolute </p>
<p>We could give them anything else that was indicative of his abilities . Only some 65 of the 180 kids in the class of 2015 are US kids. The rest are a heady mix from all over the world . The diversity factor is above 60% , 10 times the US univ average! Obviously SAT scores do not play a big role in this 60% and they use school records, spectacular ECA s & other measures to select kids. That could be one reason why they do not publish SAT profiles & %tiles. </p>
<p>Incidentally my son could not do a SAT in time & we submitted no SAT scores at all. We instead submitted SAT 2 scores for Physics & Math which were 720 & 770. But he had good Extra Curricular Activity report having won prizes at debate, public speaking, Swimming ( district champ for 3 years ) + 2 pan India prizes in a talent hunt show & a science essay competition. During the interview they discussed his fav. movie - The Matrix and its philosophy . Very well equipped college with great profs poached from other univs & really small classes - completely funded by the Abu Dhabi Govt .not relying on a dwindling endowment funds in these uncertain times. Semester Abroad are also funded . Curriculum difficulty is quite high its not easy to score here he says. Great mix & match of courses possible in a liberal arts setting along with a design your own major option slowly opening up.</p>
<p>Abu Dhabi is a modern city several times bigger than say Philly or most American cities - not as big as NYC & Chicago - may be 70% the size of LA . But Dubai nearby ( 1 hour) is slicker & far more exciting . No hassles of strict Islamic laws here unlike say in Saudi Arabia. Booze is free flowing & a huge number of Brits & Australians live here too along with people from all across Asia. Malls & amusement parks are in plenty . Dune buggies & launches are in huge numbers. Check out in Google maps & see the coast lines to believe it. Great place to spend 4 years ā¦</p>
<p>all the best to everyone trying to get in. Feel free to ask me anything else u want to know.</p>
<p>Hey - dont get me wrong on that mention of Booze being free flowing. That was only to indicate the cityās tolerance to immigrants who valued a drink or two as 98% of UAE citizens do not drink at all. You will never see Arabs at bars here. It is just to indicate the non-strict nature of City as most people in this forum felt Abu DHabi was a very strict Islamic city. I have lived there for 2 years and i felt that while they were strict Muslims themselves , they were accommodating of people who needed an occasional drink as one does not need a permit to drink at the bars among the several mosques here. It is not a statement on the city ( u dont see unruly drunks loitering about even at night ever !) Neither was it a statement on NYUAD at all. From what i know drinking & partying is minimal at NYUAD. My son has not mentioned any wild party sessions at all & i am glad !! :)</p>
<p>Thanks for your very informative post. Could you give some examples of the āgreat professors poached from other universitiesā who are resident at NYUAD? I went over the resident faculty list on the website and I saw almost no one who had previously held a tenured faculty position in the U.S. It looked like mostly newly minted PhDās with no previous faculty experience at all. Am I wrong about this?
Also, what department is your son majoring in, how many resident professors are there in his department, and what are the distribution requirements in the major? Are the courses the same courses a typical US university would require in this major?
I read on the NUAD website that only 19% of the class of 2016 is from the US, down from 30% for the class of 2015. Do you know the reason for this decline?
Thanks again for any information.</p>
<p>I am not sure if there are any other RD applicants left still waiting for an answer, but I just called the admissions office and was told that the majority of invites have already been sent out. There may be a few more candidates they decide to extend an invitation to within the next few days, but for the most part it is all done. </p>
<p>I donāt know if I have ever been more disappointed in anything in my life, but I can only pray that I will still have more incredible opportunities like this in my future. Iāll keep my hopes up over the next day or two. Who knows I might be one of the few last minute invited candidates. Itās hard to keep hoping at this point but if anyone else hears anything, please let me know. I canāt believe this is it, but I guess cāest la vie. </p>
<p>Anyways, enough of me rambling. I just wanted to say congrats again to everyone who has been invited, and I hope you have an incredible time at the CW. Best of luck throughout the rest of the admissions process :)</p>
<p>@Plotinus</p>
<p>Al Bloom from Swarthmore is probably the tip of the poached faculty iceberg. The list of faculty is here - [NYU</a> Abu Dhabi Faculty](<a href=āUndergraduate - NYU Abu Dhabiā>Undergraduate - NYU Abu Dhabi) . Are you saying the deans in this listing are not those āwho had previously held a tenured faculty position in the U.S.ā? There is a scramble to get on to the NYUAD faculty for a simple reason. The pay & perks are very generous even without the current situation with the endowments funds of Univs, the recession, etcā¦ I have professor friends at some of the better Univs in US and i have heard them mention NYUAD is actively head hunting. So, yes - you are probably wrong about this.</p>
<p>Course requirements are here: [NYU</a> Abu Dhabi Academics > Undergraduate Programs](<a href=āUndergraduate - NYU Abu Dhabiā>Undergraduate - NYU Abu Dhabi) & they are , in the case of electives , the same courses as offered in NYU as the same profs fly in to NYUAD or students are flown to NYUNY for 2 semesters if needed. But the courses āFoundations of scienceā & āEngineering Foundationsā taught during the first 2 years are great examples of a radically different approach. The courses were structured by a team of NYU faculty & others from outside and have accreditation like any other US Univ. </p>
<p>Where did u read that only 19% of the class of 2016 are from US especially as they have yet to admit anyone into class of 2016 ! They are just sending out candidate weekend invites & have admitted no one yet! </p>
<p>Is there a plot here, Plotinus? To establish that this is a lousy school with no tenured faculty & watered down courses & with no real links to a good US university?</p>
<p>To nrousrep:</p>
<p>I am so sorry, you are quite right that the class of 2016 has not yet been selected. I meant the class of 2015 has only 19% US students. I read it here on the NYUAD website:</p>
<p>[NYU</a> Abu Dhabi Welcomes Class of 2015](<a href=āhttp://nyuad.nyu.edu/news.events/press-release-2015-class.html]NYUā>http://nyuad.nyu.edu/news.events/press-release-2015-class.html)</p>
<p>Here is the citation which I have pasted from the above link: </p>
<p>āNineteen percent of the Class of 2015 comes from the United States, with the next most popular countries of citizenship being the United Arab Emirates, India, China, Ethiopia, Canada, Russia, and the UK.ā</p>
<p>I must apologize if I seem overly critical. I should that I have no information whatsoever about NYUAD other than what I have read on the internet, and would be extremely grateful if you can help me out and also correct any misconceptions I may have. I am a parent and am evaluating the school as a potential college for my son. As I am sure you will appreciate as a parent yourself, this is an important decision and I would like to know as much as possible about NYUAD before advising my son what to do.</p>
<p>I realize that the NYUAD visiting faculty, unlike its resident faculty, have tenured positions in the US. However, it is not customary in U.S. university catalogues to list visiting and resident faculty together. In my experience undergraduate students do not get to have much contact with visiting faculty because visiting faculty typically come in for a couple of weeks or months, do teaching but no advising, and then are gone and maybe the students will never see or hear from them again. The resident faculty (or at most the regularly recurrent visitors) are the ones who give the university its character. Are relations between undergrads and visiting faculty at NYUAD closer than this? What has your sonās experience been with visiting faculty?</p>
<p>About the deans: I saw that the deans had tenure in the U.S., but it seemed to me that the deans do not actually teach courses at NYUAD or at least not much, and that the vast majority of the resident faculty who are teaching courses are new PhDās or post-docs have not previously held faculty positions in the U.S. Please correct me if this is wrong as I would be very happy to hear it.</p>
<p>From what he read about NYUAD in its literature, my son had the impression that the institution is comparable to or even more selective than Harvard. I am sure that the NYUAD student body is extremely talented, multicultural, and altogether impressive. But if NYUAD has many students who have neither SAT Reasoning Test nor ACT scores, then the requirements and selection criteria, however stringent, are different from the requirements and selection criteria applied not only at Ivy League but also at top 50 U.S. universities. Even New York University in the US, which accepts SAT subject test scores in lieu of SAT Reasoning Test scores, requires at least 3 Subject Tests distributed across literature or humanities, math or science, and one non-language of the studentās choice. Most US universities will not even process an application, much less admit a student, without SAT Reasoning or ACT scores. Given these differences in requirements and criteria, I think it might be a little misleading for NYUAD to list its 75th percentile SAT scores as 800 math and 750 critical reading, and its median composite SAT score as 1460, published statistics which made my son believe that the students at NYUAD have higher average SAT Reasoning Test scores than do students at Harvard. I do not know whether they do or do not; I am just trying to find out. When I looked into it, I was puzzled by the atypical way that NYUAD lists its SAT statistics. I would be very grateful for any further information you might have.</p>
<p>If I may interject (itās been a while since I was last on):</p>
<p>@Plotinus, I believe the reason why the proportion of US students went down is not so much due to a weakening of US students but rather, more schools (in more countries) are finding out about NYUAD and thus more of them are applying. The Class of 2014 has roughly 40 countries of origin; the Class of 2015 has 60. Hence the proportion of US students (which was already over-represented, in the sense that they are still the largest citizenship bloc) would go down.</p>
<p>Also, you are right about the SAT. I was an international applicant (now freshman at NYUAD), though I did submit the SAT (but only because I had been intending to apply to US universities, which required it). My high school mainly did the A-Level system, which turned out to be adequate preparation for the SAT Subject tests (3x800 in Math2, Physics, Chem), but because the SAT is still a very American test (in the sense that few outside of the USA actually do them), NYUAD accepts A-Levels, IB, and so forth as measures of academic success. Please do note that the application requirements do require SOME sort of academic measure - so for a US applicant, the SAT would generally be that, unless they did IB too - so it would not be the case such that an applicant applied using ONLY his high school grades. I cannot really estimate how many people submitted the SAT, although I have asked around and I only know of a few people who did not (most of these submitted their national standardised exam results, which are essentially their countryās form of the SAT and are therefore of comparable quality).</p>
<p>As a quick aside - the deans DO teach here, although not very much, because they have a lot of administrative duties. </p>
<p>Personally, I find the (resident) faculty very good and helpful. The visiting faculty are a bit hit-and-miss (the same anywhere, I would say) though they do tend to come from prestigious universities (ETH Zurich, Univ. of Paris, as well as NYU-affiliated ones). You are right in saying that they come, teach, then depart, though I would personally say that the interactions are closer than other schools, simply because of the smaller class size. This may or may not lead to building a network of contacts (this really depends on the professor and the student) but it definitely does lead to a quality education.</p>
<p>Like I said before, I am a current freshman at NYUAD. I really would recommend your son to apply - remember, before he has to accept, he would have attended a candidate weekend where he would see us students for himself! I truly study with amazing classmates, often with hidden/unpublicised talents, and I in no way regret coming here.</p>
<p>Plotinus, you are right to be skeptical. NYUAD is so new, and the students there are pioneers, in a way. We were highly skeptical before our daughter decided to attend NYUAD. Then we were extremely wary before she went there last Fall. Now we are just very happy that she made the right choice for herself. (Her words.)</p>
<p>I canāt speak about her experience, because Iām just the parent. But she had great scores and in the end, she had her choice of Ivies, top ten universities, and top ten LACs. She chose NYUAD. Itās different, itās exciting, the students there are amazing, the mix is unbelievable, making class discussion very dynamic. She knows her professors, and they know her. I donāt know what their full qualifications are - all I know is that she is interested, she is not bored, she studies a lot, her professors are accessible, and she has had experiences that I never dreamed she would have and has met people I only read about.</p>
<p>But itās definitely not for everyone. Thankfully, for her, it is.</p>
<p>Aha ! So there was a plot afterall ! Plotting to send your son there ! </p>
<p>I was wary of NYUAD too initially. But as i read more & went through the website i realised what we have here is a charged team of enthusiastic educators wanting set up a truly global university without having to worry about funding . </p>
<p>Deans do teach the UG students as there are no Graduate students there yet. For example, u can see Science Dean Prof. David Scicchitanoās name in a Foundation of science Course description . Names of other deans pop up in several courses even for first year students. [NYU</a> Abu Dhabi Academics > Undergraduate Programs](<a href=āUndergraduate - NYU Abu Dhabiā>Undergraduate - NYU Abu Dhabi) </p>
<p>NYUAD is an atypical university. It really is very different from universities in the US as far as the students go. a 60% diversity changes things drastically. Given the location & global nature of this univ., it just cannot go by the SAT criterion for students from outside the US, which is , by design the majority lot. NYUAD therefore probably uses the SAT only for American students and is reporting the SAT %tiles & profiles of just these US students. </p>
<p>Your worries about how they evaluate a student is valid & that probably explains why they personally interview each student before they admit him /her (most univs have interviews as optional mode of evaluation , if at all, while it is compulsory at NYUAD) . They state very clearly that admissions are only through Candidate weekends. They even pay for CW candidates trip to & back from wherever they may be on the planet to prove it! Thats how serious they are about their criteria on selecting students. I would presume that a personal interview + a 3 day interaction session will tell seasoned educators far more than what a SAT score can ! So the students are literally a hand picked lot! You probably can ask yourself how many univs in the US do that ? </p>
<p>Given the times ahead with increasingly globalized businesses & opps, trade & the rapidly expanding global communication networks, you son may be better off earning a degree having also interacted with Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Africans, Russians, Brits, French & others while getting a first hand Middle East / Asian /African / Eu exposure during his UG years. Will it give him an edge over his counterparts from other US univs.? I think it will. It also depends on what he wants to major in i presume. </p>
<p>NYUAD is an atypical university without a doubt!</p>