<p>Hello all,
Figured this might be a good place to pose the following question for statisticians or other folks better in math (or the intricasies of college admissions) than I am…</p>
<p>Say a college like, oh, MIT, has an overall acceptance rate of 10% and a 25/75 percentile SAT split of 2080-2330. If a student has SAT scores in the top 25th percentile (all other things like GPA, recs, ECs, essays, being equal) are their odds of acceptance higher than the overall 10% admission rate? Is there a rule of thumb for this sort of thing?</p>
<p>Disclosure…my daughter has applied to MIT and, like everyone else, is waiting on the proverbial pins & needles. So her nervous dad seeks ways to manage our expecations. And to kill a little time with my Excel spreadsheet of applications.</p>
<p>There is no real way of judging the odds of admission. You can do all the math you want, and it probably won’t tell you anything. They reject 2400’s every year, and accept 1900’s. I think the best approach would be to just wait until March 14th :)</p>
<p>Yes, it is higher than 10%. No, it isn’t much higher. They’ve said on their website and here that a 2100 is the same as a 2400 for them, and that it just shows that you’re qualified. After that, other factors are much more important and they don’t even look at scores.
But it does place your daughter above anyone who doesn’t even qualify, which accounts for some percentage of applicants.</p>
<p>Thank you for your informative responses…
moonman676 - you’re absolutely right about patience being the best approach, though patience is often an aspirational goal rather than a daily practice :)</p>
<p>dogod11 - good point about the 2100-2400 range. One imagines that anyone who has achieved those scores, has the drive and intelligence to make it through four years of higher education at MIT. Then it’s a case of sculpting a class.</p>
<p>MITChris - thank you for providing the link to that blog post. Most informative. It’s a natural tendency, I guess, to try to describe (and derive) as much as we can with numbers, but there are obvious limitations to that approach. As the blog post makes most persuasively. Still…one always like to try to discern patterns. OMG…I just calculated that MIT admitted females in 2011 at a 16% rate and males at a 7.6% rate!!! Can’t wait to tell my daughter!!!</p>
<p>While you shouldn’t destroy your daughter’s hopes of getting in or anything like that, I really think the most important thing is to frame your daughter’s life in the context of what she will do, become, etc. </p>
<p>I say this because MIT has to reject a lot of people it would love to have – it’s best not to be utterly devastated and embittered in that likelihood, which happens far too often.</p>
<p>piperxp…thank you for your thoughtful response. You are absolutely right. Although my initial question was a sincere inquiry, my followup post was more whimsical. Hopefully that came through. All jokes aside, my daughter (and me, for that matter) has a very realistic view of her odds of being accepted at this, the “reach-iest” of her reach schools. Thankfully, she has an attitude and work ethic that will permit her to succeed wherever she ends up, be it a state school, liberal arts college or MIT. And beyond.</p>