It’s interesting. I went to one a few years back that was Tufts, Northwestern, Brown and another school. They each evaluated in this way “live” to tell the audience what their thinking was.
We the audience had to guess which they would admit. It was rarely the 4.0 /36 Act student. It was really a great education in what they look for. Now it’s more obvious but back then it wasn’t.
Our student’s college advisor had our family review 3 applications to a made up university in the pacific NW. Each of the three of us were asked to admit, waitlist and deny an applicant. Each of us came up with literally three different outcomes. It was a very interesting exercise.
That’s fantastic. Wish more schools did that type of thing.
And when the three of us discussed the reasoning for our decision, none of us changed our minds or could be convinced to shift things. Imagine what goes on in those admission rooms! For real - I still think about the exercise and the applicant I wanted to admit, and the reason I denied one of the applicants (it was the essay - way too corny for me), versus my student’s decision/explanation and my partner’s decision/explanation. Three different outcomes…
Here is the book on that. It’s a quick but interesting read. I have a “signed” copy. 
…
I really like Jeff Selingo, I also read Rick Clarks book in addition to that one and it really helped me frame this process to my son that it likely has more to do with institutional priorities than anything he could have done differently.
Rick Clark from GT is the best Admission blog out there in my opinion. Tufts does a good job also. I use his stuff here and just upthread.
Question for the knowledgeable Senior Members pls - How are the SAT scores evaluated by UMICH and other similar Schools?
If one has a very good Math score which is in the “above 50%” Range for MATH, but a very low Reading Score below the 25% for Reading and the overall score is below 25% and the major applied is Business. I would think that for Business/Engg kind of majors, the higher Math Score is fine but at the same time, the lower overall score will make it a negative?
Thanks
Here is the common data set for Michigan. https://obp.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/pubdata/cds/CDS_2023-24_UMAA_10-25-24.pdf
Being 50% math and 25% English seems low but if you want to share the real numbers that might be helpful.
It’s common for an engineering student to have high math scores and lower English scores. But they tend to be higher like Math is the 75 % and English higher then 50%.
I am not a senior member, but for school like u mich, unless u are in state, kids from OOS all have close to perfect math and English in sat… And still get rejected. So unless u have extraordinary EC… Like Olympic swimmer, or start your company that has real idea and cash flow… It will be hard. my daughter has 790 in math 770 in English and salutatorian if class size of 750, OOS umich is a hard target. … however sat is not required for umich. U might consider not submitting it
Curious about the gender split, freshmen fall 2023 about 45.7% male, 54.3% female, if I did the math right. Males have a slightly higher yield but interestingly, a lower acceptance rate, 16% for males vs 20% for females. Any insight on reasons for the difference in acceptance rate?
Nope. You can go through the last several year’s and see if there is a correlation. Some fields might be vying for more women.
Fewer men are applying to college than prior years. And its been trending that way for decades.
Exactly, there were fewer male applicants, which is why I found it interesting that males had a lower acceptance rate.
Maybe it’s a function of the fields as you mention, e.g., perhaps business and engineering are more heavily male and of course those programs happen to be more competitive at UMich (I am assuming), thus the lower acceptance rate we see for males.
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Just saying: acceptance rate is not an indicator of competitiveness of the pool.
It’s highly possible that on an average women applicants have better stats in the overall pool, and hence better acceptance rates compared to men.
Yes, data support this. In general, males have lower GPAs than females. I’m sure Michigan knows the exact difference by gender. At some LACs the difference in average GPAs is dramatic due to not only the gender averages but because many of them try very hard to get a 50/50 M/F split. Only way to do that is drop the GPA floor for males (Jeff Selingo talks about his in his book that knowstuff mentioned above.) I’m sure Michigan worked hard to get to the 46/54 M/F split that they have. The national average is around 40/60.
Exactly, many folks assume that just because F acceptance rates are generally higher that colleges are vying for them, when in reality it’s the other way around. It’s harder for women.