OK MIT, Princeton, Harvey Mudd, Cornell, Franklin Olin

Calcruzer
Wed, 07 Jun 2006 14:30:37 +0000

chocolatelvr88, if someone is at the 50% range on all the criteria ranked by the school, and if they have good ECs, want to major in a standard program offered by the school, have good teacher recs, and have a hook like an expertise in a sport or academic olympiad, I am not going to be swayed by your argument that “everybody applies with these stats and only 10% of these people get in, so at most this person has a 20% chance”.

Why am I not swayed? Because your argument presumes that the application pool follow an exact bell curve with the averages being at the 50% numbers.

But the statistics given are for applicants accepted, so obviously the statistics for those that applied will be much lower. Not everybody that applies is at the 50% range at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Caltech, Duke, Stanford, Cornell, Dartmouth, Penn, Brown, Columbia, Michigan, and UC Berkeley. In fact, I would go so far as to say not even 30% of the applicants will fall at or above the average GPA/test scores at most of these schools (HYPS possibly being the exceptions). Why–because tons of “reach” candidates apply to all of the top schools–hoping to beat the odds. And if less than 30% are at the grade/test score cutoffs, then even fewer are at these levels with the ECs, and good recs, and even fewer have focused, excellent essays, and even fewer have some kind of “hook” like a legacy, or sport/academic specialty/awards.

Thus, most people at the 50% range that have all of the “extras” are not competing against all of the other applicants–they are competing against something like the 20% or so of applicants that have similar or better stats as them–meaning that if acceptances average 10%, than a 50% shot for these people is a reality.