^oh brother…
every year some parent or student tries to turn the holistic college application selection process used at many colleges into a mathematical guessing game.
sigh…
" anyone who gets into the top school is almost assuredly going to get into the other school" .
Oh really? I guess you have not heard of “Tufts Syndrome”, have you?
That is what happens when admissions committees deny a top applicant, such as your theoretical “anyone” candidate , because they figure that he will NOT end up enrolling at their college, but applied there just to have a “safety” school. It happens every year , many more times than one can accurately predict mathematically.
Because the decisions to accept or deny are made by humans, factoring in the many parts of each students application, and not by humans randomly flipping coins.
Show me how you can accurately calculate the mathematical odds of top students NOT being accepted at lesser schools and maybe I’ll pay attention.
You have not been a witness over the past 12 years to the entirely unpredictable nature of college acceptances, as some of us have.
It cant be reduced to a mathematical equation.
To suggest that it can be does not help college applicants prepare for unpredictable admissions results.
Stick around here for 12 more years and prove me wrong.
So your argument that admission decisions are INDEPENDENT is that some school might not admit someone because they think they’re going to be accepted at another school?! Yeah, that clearly shows that “What ONE committee decides does NOT effect the decision of ANY OTHER committee.”!
@csdad2 you are trying to turn a human process into a bunch of numbers. I don’t understand numbers, so to me, what you say makes no sense. And you can argue that it doesn’t have to make sense to me, and you might be right, or not. OP is talking about a well-qualified student. This student submits apps to HYPSM. H is looking at the app during a committee. Two of the adcoms have colds and feel grumpy. They have a seen a bunch of students like this one already. They vote no, along with a few others. The kid is denied. They feel better the next day, and a similar kid is admitted. Same kid applied to M, everyone is feeling great because the Pats won the Super Bowl, this same kid is accepted. MIT reads another app submitted by a supremely well qualified kid from Atlanta, and is rejected. They arent even aware of why they rejected him. Is it subconsciously becasue he is from Atlanta?
There is a really good video out there about actually being in the room when Amherst is at committee making its decisions. One of the officers says “sometimes I don’t even know why I raise my hand in favor of one kid and not another.” I am saying that numbers simply can’t account for human emotions on the part of the applicant, and the people who are reading that application.
Yeah, it’s frustrating when everything has to be turned into a math question.
And it’s not even about grumpy.
“don’t the schools then look at all of the other factors”
If you’re going to ask about “Ivy-types,” you have got to know they’re holistic. It’s College Apps 101. k?
When you all talk about probability, you entirely miss that there is no one definition of a perfect candidate and it certainly isn’t all about stats, “2300/35/3.9.” And many, many high school kids can’t pull together a truly good app package (the right collective activities, how they preset them, the thinking that shows in the writing- all of it, not just the big essay.)
They’re so full of this assumption or that advice. They are thinking on a hs level, not for the leap to college. They assume some bright shiny ‘one thing’ is their ticket. Or just declaring “passion” for something, whether or not it has value.
So write a stinky essay or answer the Why Us generically (or worse,) or have spotty activities: and no predictive math will help.
No, with a poor presentation, applying to more will not increase your chances.
But if someone asserts that they do, and mis-interprets the definitions used, then that matters, right? Because it could give someone earlier in the mysterious college admissions learning cycle the wrong idea?
I know, CC is not a debate society etc etc, understood and agreed, I will drop it. Your point is well taken and I have made mine.
Postmodern, I get it, But it matters less to anyone trying to understand what truly increases chances. And just shotgunning all the Ivies isn’t it, if you’re not informed and careful. It’s the notion applying to more tippy top colleges will somehow yield some admit that’s the problem. That misunderstanding.
The reality is that each TT college makes its own decisions, looking at the actual app/supp that kid chose to create (over the hs years and when filing out the forms.) In that respect, it’s independent, as we commonly use the word.
Of course there are some really super apps, holistically speaking. And sometimes, more than just “perfect” for Ivy X; you just know H will be interested. Or S. But that’s incredibly rare. And it hinges on a more complete understanding of the process than just looking at stats, CDS, or one’s own hs standing.
Among the big institutional needs are geo diversity and balancing interest in various majors.
I totally get that LF. IF you could know your exact odds at a number of colleges, then you could accurately predict your chances (not your results, i.e. “red is due”). But you CAN’T really know your odds at any one elite college, so you can’t accurately predict your odds, making it a poor strategy, and why nearly everyone in the know recommends R-M-S.
Yep. Independent events! (lol sorry I said I would stop, couldn’t help myself).
Applying to Stanford does not increase your odds of getting in to Harvard. Getting in to Stanford does not increase your chance of getting in to Harvard. The two decisions are independent of each other. There is, however, a correlation between the two, in the sense that a super-qualified student that Stanford would want is more likely to be someone that Harvard might also want.
However, actually applying to Stanford definitely increases your chances at getting into one school - Stanford. That chance may be very small, but it is zero if you don’t apply. Actually applying to more such schools will not increase your chances at any one school, but it does put you in the running for more schools.
If your chance at Stanford is 2%, and your chance at Harvard is also 2%, this does not mean that your chance at one or the other suddenly becomes 4%. You are the same applicant you always were, and your chances at each school remain the same. But having another committee considering your application is another chance to get admitted to one of these schools. There is no way to quantify the math to know exactly what your overall probability to get into one great school is, and it probably hasn’t changed much with each application - but it has changed a little tiny bit.
“…a super-qualified student that Stanford would want is more likely to be someone that Harvard might also want.”
Maybe not. There’s overlap in the basics, but not in all the factors important to each. And it still depends on what the applicant gives them. And the pool(s) of applicants.
And then the institutional factors we seem to be ignoring.
“There’s overlap in the basics” is exactly what I meant. A person with a 4.0 from a rigorous high school and a 36 ACT statistically has a better chance of getting in to both Stanford and Harvard than a person with a 3.8 from a mediocre high school and a 33 ACT score. It is more common for someone who is accepted to Stanford to find out that they also got into Harvard than it is for someone rejected by Stanford to find out that they got into Harvard. So there is a statistical correlation - but it has nothing to do with any coordination between the admissions offices of Stanford and Harvard.
And it doesn’t settle the fate of any individual application, because none of us are statistics.
Wow. It’s amazing how so many people on this site are having so much trouble with a relatively simple mathematical concept. I’ll try once more to explain some things and respond to people.
@Lindagaf: First off, what’s been covered in this thread is not about turning the entire process into a bunch of numbers.
As a bit of an aside, because I don’t want to sidetrack things: In fact, almost anything can be modeled mathematically, to a certain degree of accuracy. Further, it’s almost impossible not to think about it mathematically, whether you’re doing it consciously or not. You’re doing it. What’s essential to realize, though, is that even if you argue that modeling it mathematically is not effective or accurate, basic mathematical concepts (like statistical independence) are still valid.
Back to this thread. It’s really been about two things: Does a top student applying to multiple top schools increase their chances of getting into at least one of them, and are admissions events independent.
On that first question, consider this: Does a student applying to two schools have a greater chance of getting into at least one school than if they had only applied to one school? Don’t overcomplicate this, that’s what it really boils down to. And, other than some exceptional circumstances, the answer has to be yes. How can it be otherwise?! It’s got nothing to do with whether you’re modeling the whole process mathematically.
One exceptional circumstance is if the decisions at the two schools are perfectly correlated. (BUT BY THE MATHEMATICAL DEFINITIONS, THAT MEANS THAT THEY AREN’T INDEPENDENT. [ALLCAPS used intentionally.]) This is possible, but highly unlikely. Think of what you’re saying – that the decisions at schools are somewhat random and unpredictable (which, BTW, is thinking about them mathematically). Which means that the decisions at two different schools are likely to be based on different factors. Which should lead you to the conclusion that applying to multiple schools increases the chances of getting into at least one of them. To put things the way you’re phrasing them, you might hit one committee on a bad day and another on on a good day.
On to the second question:
You really think mathisfun and mathgoodies are “qualified” and “precise” (let alone “very, very precise”?! I gave you the one true pure precise mathematical definition of probabilistic independence: P(A.B) = P(A) * P(B). That’s it. Look it up in a probability/statistics textbook, and you’ll see that’s all it is.
So tell me, how do you get from that to anything involving some events occurring before another, or some events affecting another? You can’t. They’re not there. They only come from thinking about it intuitively and imprecisely.
Show me, using this formula, how you can justify believing that someone who gets into a top school is very likely to get into a lesser school, but yet the two events are independent.
I’ll show you the opposite. A corollary of the above mathematical definition is that if A and B are independent, P(A|B) = P(A). That is, the conditional probability of A given B is the same as the unconditional probability of A. Let’s say B is getting into that top school and A is getting into the lesser school. This corollary says that the likelihood of A, getting into the lesser school, is not changed if A, getting into the top school, is true. But that’s inconsistent with believing that someone who gets into a top school is very likely to get into a lesser school. Which means we’ve reached a contradiction, so the two events are not independent.
I’ll reiterate one thing, because it seems to be repeated multiple times in this thread. Many people are saying that the admissions decisions at top schools correlate fairly strongly. This is probably true. BUT THAT MEANS THEY AREN’T (MATHEMATICALLY) INDEPENDENT. It doesn’t matter how the decisions are made, any degree of correlation means not independent. Don’t confuse the everyday meaning of independent with the mathematical definition.
“This is both wrong, and rude. You should apologize to the person you posted this to for this. No one has called you stupid. It’s uncalled for.”
What I find amazing is that many participants on this thread seem to have missed the OP’s point, which was that, in some cases, colleges’ “institutional priorities” might make admissions outcomes less correlated than would generally be expected. The OP used the example of the proverbial oboist and I ran with the idea in post #10, but most of the other commentary has strayed from the OP’s actual question.
“BUT THAT MEANS THEY AREN’T (MATHEMATICALLY) INDEPENDENT. It doesn’t matter how the decisions are made, any degree of correlation means not independent. Don’t confuse the everyday meaning of independent with the mathematical definition.”
yawn ,
who cares? really? you do obviously, but others who are NOT fixated with the idea that there MUST be a mathematical correlation to explain the admissions decisions of different college have long tired of your lectures.
the point is that all the mathematical models created so far dont and cant help students know specifically which colleges they will or wont get into. All we can do is say is the decision process is holistic, or it is like trying to peer into a black hole, or it depends on so many factors that there IS no way to predict it with certainty. Which currently are all true.
So repeatedly talking about mathematical formulas and equations which cannot generate usable, concrete predictions is a waste of time. There is no formula to predict , with certainty, the “where” of college admissions… yet.
Maybe you should start by learning the difference between a definition and a formula.
Everyone is well aware of the formula, it is used every time this stupid argument gets had here. I used it myself last May. Search if you want to, you’ll find it. You’ll also find deep, cited discussion of independence vs. correlation in the same thread.
If you can keep ignoring multiple citations that contradict your point, without providing a single one that supports it, then I will wish you happiness in the world of alternative facts, and bid you good day.
OP there are so many variables that this strategy might not work. For example to bring oboe back it might be your bad luck and exactly one more oboist might apply that happened to be from a more desirable state and you are out. That’s why no matter the situation applying to more sub 10% schools is never the answer. You always have to apply strategically. Apply to a few of those that you think match your profile and then expand. I see other posters went far and beyond answering but use common sense. Even if your chances increase or whatever still those chances are small and still you have to expand your application pool.You have limited time to visit schools and prepare apps. For best results you must use the time effectively.
