<p>i was referring to the 5500 number u said… it just seemed low. idk its an interesting statistic i just wanted to see where it was written</p>
<p><a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools;
<p>The extent to which the numbers have inflated for the '09 admission season is impossible to predict, but there’s the general layout.</p>
<p>That’s the table. I added the numbers up. </p>
<p>wjb:
You do realize that’s a somewhat absurd statement, don’t you? Or, to put it another way, 75% of Yale students were admitted with GPAs and/or SATs – and mathmatically it has to be “and” rather than “or” in the majority of cases – that made their chances of being admitted to Yale “unrealistic”? Given Yale’s yield, that’s at least 60% of the people admitted, probably more. Granted, they represent a small percentage of the applicant pool, but I suspect that something made their applications “realistic” in most cases, something other than grades or test scores.</p>
<p>Yale gets enough applicants above its 75th percentile level in everything to fill a class if it wanted to; the 75th percentile could be the floor. But it doesn’t want to. And it’s also not true that 75% of each class is “hooked”. Maybe 20%, maybe 30%, maybe even 40% if you consider every legacy “hooked” (but if you do it diminishes the importance of “hooks” considerably).</p>
<p>My point is that Yale’s behavior indicates that factors other than SATs and grades are exercising a very powerful influence on admissions. SATs and grades (and rank) are important, no doubt, but they don’t really explain ANY admissions decisions, since at practically every point on the SAT/GPA grid there are more applicants rejected than accepted. There are really only three factors that could possibly matter in the majority of cases (i.e., for non-developmental admits): recommendations, ECs, and essays. I can’t believe that recommendations are given THAT much weight, because there’s no inter-rater reliability, and it depends too much on the skill of the teacher, not that of the student. So I’m left with ECs and essays. And I believe that, once you get above a certain SAT/GPA threshold, those factors make all the difference, or most of it.</p>
<p>I would add that I’ve always been skeptical about the idea that essays make the difference. Although adcoms claim they can tell whether a kid wrote his own essay, I don’t believe they can really tell how much input others have had into the essay, and that makes it very hard to know what you are comparing. As JHS says, recs are also very hard to compare. ECs, on the other hand, can be pretty easy to understand, and to compare.</p>
<p>I have a slightly different take on essays. I think it’s really hard to fake a “voice”, or to produce it by committee. So, sure, if you were ranking all the applicants’ essays 1-25,000, you would probably get to some competent but fairly uninspiring essays pretty early on, and you might legitimately wonder who wrote what. But the top 5-10% or so of essays won’t be a problem, and really that’s all they have to identify. This is just pure speculation, but my guess is that if you could identify the top 1,000 essays, you would see a large majority of those kids admitted.</p>
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<p>JHS, I have great respect for you, but please accept that my statement was quite accurate with respect to MY COMMUNITY. I do acknowledge it is a small sampling. My children have attended two different local high schools, one an affluent, large, well-respected public and the other a new-ish parochial. We live in ACT territory, and the Naviance graphs tell the story. With two exceptions, both of them recruited athletes, no student at either high school has been admitted to HYP over the last few years without a 35 ACT or better. (Actually, the public hasn’t gotten a single kid into Princeton since 2003.) Yale’s mid-range ACT (25-75%) is 29-34.</p>
<p>wjb, I’m not denying your experience at all. I could have written the same thing based on my experience, but it would still be wrong. The numbers can’t lie that much. The keys are what’s a “realistic” chance, and where are all those other kids coming from? (Hint: not inner-city ghettos.)</p>
<p>I think it’s entirely possible that, based on SATs and GPA alone, only those kids who are over the 75th percentile have a realistic chance (“realistic” here probably meaning around 25%). But, as I said, most of the kids admitted don’t have that kind of realistic chance based on their numbers. They DO, however, have a realistic chance, as it turns out, based on something else, and so does some larger group of applicants that looked almost, but not quite, like the ones admitted.</p>
<p>This is a tautology, but I suspect that if we could measure the EC/essay factors easily, we would determine that some of the kids in your high-numbers category DIDN’T really have a realistic chance of admissions at all, and that others were shoo-ins.</p>
<p>“I think it’s really hard to fake a “voice”, or to produce it by committee.”</p>
<p>I guess I’m just more cynical about this. Also, if they really cared that much about voice, they would make interviews more important, or use the SAT essay, which can’t be massaged by others.</p>
<p>I am quite surprised when I read the stats of some of the students on CC who say they have been admitted to HYP. Just wouldn’t happen around here, where droves of kids with similar grades, scores, ECs, etc. receive thin envelopes every spring. Although we read that the importance of the good old boy high school/admissions office network is fading, I have to believe that relationships still play a major role in admissions. There’s no other way to explain the poor odds for admission to HYP around here. Venerable private and public high schools on the East coast (and probably in California as well) must still carry plenty of weight with top schools. Geography (Montana, Mississippi, etc.) has to play a role as well. OTOH, my son’s small, no-name high school got several kids into some or all of HYP this year. But, as I said, the admitted students had grades and stats that were astronomical – got them a foot in the door and got their applications a very close look. And that, to me, is the single greatest value of perfect test scores.</p>