<p>Perfect score URM. There’s your lock. As long as the person didn’t commit any serious crimes.</p>
<p>What about a student who is a low-income, URM, first generation student? If he/she fell in the 50th percentile of applicants.</p>
<p>monstor, what if the person was ranked 256/256 or GPA was 1.5, etc there are many reasons why its not a lock, but like I was saying, it should be a sense of security, if the applicant is in line with the school’s average.</p>
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In the case of Penn, a legacy applying ED has a major advantage. </p>
<p>[Penn</a> Admissions: Incoming Class Profile](<a href=“http://www.admissions.upenn.edu/profile/]Penn”>http://www.admissions.upenn.edu/profile/)
Look at the acceptance rates of each of these groups taken alone: ED applicants (33%), Valedictorians (45%), People with 750-800 on CR (30%), and Legacies (34%).</p>
<p>Now this is total speculation, but the intersection of all of these probably gets in much more than 50% of the time.</p>
<p>vasudevank: Have you never heard of people going like, “Oh, I/you/he got a 2350. I/you/he can go wherever they want”?</p>
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I get that all the time, and it’s freaking annoying, especially since my grades are substandard. “Oh, you’re totally going to Harvard”, “Lol, MIT? You probably just have to do really good on the SAT and act like a nerd in the interview.”</p>
<p>As for the valedictorian point, I don’t think it always helps. At my school we don’t even find out our rank until May of senior year, so that definitely won’t help.</p>
<p>^I agree. I don’t think the label of being a valedictorian helps much, if at all (some colleges like to brag about how many valedictorians they turned down). Honestly, if there are three students: one with a 3.99 (valedictorian), another with a 3.98, and a third with a 3.97, I really don’t see much of a difference. But, since by being a valedictorian you also have very high grades, that is what helps (hence, the work put in to get to a valedictorian is much more important than the valedictorian label itself).</p>
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<p>It’s a couple of great hooks, but it’s not going to get you in anywhere. It might give you a boost, but mostly, it’s going to come down to everything else on your application. Now if it comes down to you and a similarly qualified white guy, you’re going to win the competition.</p>
<p>Full disclosure: I am a low-income, first generation URM.</p>
<p>Applicannot, I know what you’re saying. But I’m well-qualified in all other aspects of my application. I’m curious to see if this will make me appear more unique in comparison.</p>
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<p>True, but I didn’t say that. I only said that doing well in science olympiad would make that club carry any weight on the app. If you’re just part of a club and you never accomplish/do anything, then the club is basically meaningless on the application.</p>
<p>^My b, I wasn’t saying you were wrong. I was just adding another thing that give people false senses of security. Your bringing up science olympiad just “inspired” me to mention about national medal winners</p>
<p>Well, most of my observations are based on College Confidential and not what I’ve heard seniors say outside of here.</p>
<p>Underrepresented minority status is the biggest thing on here that I see misconceived, but it’s generally not the underrepresented minorities who are doing it. I have never heard an African American person say “I don’t need to do any work, just being black will get me in” because we KNOW it’s not true. That’s why we’re UNDERREPRESENTED at these colleges; if any warm breathing minority student could get in they’d have a perfect balance of percentages modeled after the proportions of minorities in the U.S. They don’t.</p>
<p>I think people overestimate class rank – it’s used in the context of everything else, not a factor like everything else. If you have a 3.98 and are only in the top 50%, that’s a problem, but there’s not a huge difference between top 10% and top 11% outside of policies like Texas’s and California’s.</p>
<p>I also see a false sense of insecurity about some things. A lot of overrepresented racial groups will lament that they will never have a chance simply because they are white or Asian, while forgetting the fact that they are overrepresented at their school (which means despite the fact that the admissions office is trying to balance the racial breakdown, they still get into the school at a higher proportion than they represent in the population).</p>
<p>I also see false insecurity about SAT scores that are lower than around a 2100. I remember someone here saying that they had a “bad” SAT score; it was an 1890. I think some students forget about the actual distribution of SAT scores in the nation; an 1890 puts one in the top 12% of students in the nation. Even an 1800 still represents the top 20%. Meanwhile, a 2100 is hard to achieve; only around 3% of test takers in the nation get that score. And less than one percent break 2300. (Rates taken from the SAT Percentile Ranks, CR + M + W, published by the College Board in 2008.)</p>
<p>People overblow the “Harvard turns away 2300s and valedictorians all the time”, but honestly, the top schools accept many more 2300s than anyone else. Penn admitted 30% of the people who scored between a 750-800 on CR and writing, and 45% of the valedictorians who applied. These are both much higher than their 17% admissions rate.</p>
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<p>I don’t think that it is an overrated measure. It’s much better than GPA. Grade inflation is pretty common in schools. </p>
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<p>The argument the whiner will make is “Why do you need to even the racial breakdown? You’re rejecting students that are more qualified to achieve this balance.” What do you say to that?</p>
<p>define “qualified”. higher test scores is the only real answer. all the kids at HYPS do amazing things have the great ECs good GPA. the only real argument against balancing the student body is the fact the URMs on average have lower scores. but do these scores make them dumber than the OR peers? do they work less hard? get lower grades? are they less successful in life after graduation? the answer to these questions is a big fat no. it’s obvious these colleges are not going to judge an applicant only based on a test whose validity is uncertain. so assuming everything else about the URM applicant is amazing, which it usually is in the ivy case. the applicant is “qualified.” possibly even more so than the rejected kids. but that’s why the rejected kids were rejected</p>
<p>Class rank is used as a measure to put GPA into context. Like I said in the rest of my post, if you’ve got a 3.8 but you’re only in the top 20% or 30% of your class (which is still good, by normal standards) then we know that your school has crazy grade inflation. Class rank is used as an indicator of that. But if you have a 3.95 it doesn’t matter much whether you are in the top 10% or the top 12% – it’s still known that you have a great average, it’s just that in the second scenario you do slightly worse as compared to your peers.</p>
<p>What do I say to the second defense? Usually I don’t say anything and I’m mentally telling them to suck it, because generally those whiners are not looking for actual information but just want to whine. The response that I would give, if I thought that they were actually looking for a response, is that what makes up a good student body is about more than quantitative qualifications like GPA and test scores. There are other kinds of qualifications that count, too. A college is attempting to do what is best for their student body, not best for individual students. Most colleges have decided that it is in their best interests, and the best interests of their student body, to maintain a semblance of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic diversity so that students can exchange experiences and learn from one another.</p>
<p>I used to get into the historical and political reasons – being that underrepresented racial minorities are historically more disadvantaged in the admissions game and that their lower test scores do not mean that they are less qualified, just that they have less of an opportunity to demonstrate their qualifications than other students. However, that never ends well, so I stopped.</p>
<p>@silence_kit</p>
<p>In both cases, you’ve turned factual claims into opinions about “how it should be”. Juillet said that class rank really is counted less than people think it is (I disagree), not whether it should be that way. She then says that Asians don’t have it as bad as they think they do - which may be true. After all, they are three times represented compared to the general population at HYP (and five times at Stanford and MIT). Black and Hispanic people are half represented at HYP. The fact is, when an Asian is born, he is around five times (very very rough estimate) more likely to go to a top school than a Black kid. </p>
<p>And lets be honest, the 7% of students at Harvard that are black aren’t really affecting white applicants much, because they are a small portion of the class. If you got rejected, you wouldn’t have got in if there was no Affirmative Action (any borderline cases get waitlisted).</p>
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<p>The whiner will say, “if that is the case, then before these policies were put into place, why were there even fewer minorities in colleges?” I may be wrong, but I think they lower standards for GPA as well when implementing affirmative action policies.</p>
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<p>This is incredibly smart. This is a debate that gets ugly fast.</p>
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<p>This is a good reason (I think). However, I don’t think you’ll convince the whiner with this. This probably won’t be seen as being very valuable to someone whining about reverse racism. (oh my god i am going to throw up)</p>
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<p>These are really good reasons, and actually are much stronger than the one you gave above. But some people don’t like to hear this being said . . . This debate really sucks because it really reveals a split in ideologies. You can’t use reason to reconcile this split–you pretty much have to hope for a change in values if you want to convince the other.</p>
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<p>Yeah.</p>
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<p>I still don’t think you can say that the fraction of minority students who get in because of the slightly lower standards accorded to them aren’t displacing spots to more qualified (that is: higher GPA, SAT, etc etc) students. However, I really agree with you. I’m not shedding any tears for the recipients of Harvard rejection letters mailed to Nassau county.</p>
<p>bleh. i try to fight the good fight but a whiner is a whiner and nothing will deter their quest to scapegoat. i might come back to this later. i’m not sure i have the energy though</p>
<p>Since when are white students overrepresented? They comprise 70% of the US population. So why is Columbia’s undergrad student body only 36% white? Affirmative Action is seriously screwed up. You can’t defend it simply because it helps you. If everybody took that mentality, then slavery never would have been abolished.</p>
<p>and I don’t usually use my computer this early but I just finished my morning workout and couldn’t help myself ;)</p>