<p>Boy has this thread led to a bevy of tangents. Quakerman is correct to point out the inferior high schools attended by in-staters at UCB, and I agree with Birch that natural intelligence>>academic success. </p>
<p>Crab kid’s flip flopping continues. After first saying that the number of national merit scholars in the student body is not important, Crab tries to show that Berkeley has a large number of scholars, which it clearly does not. NYU has twice as many.</p>
<h1>of national merit scholars (scholars…ie, WINNERS, not finalists, not semis):</h1>
<p>NYU: 155
Berkeley: 69</p>
<p>Source (you’ll need ms excel to open this):
<a href=“http://thecenter.ufl.edu/Top200-III...op200_merit.xls[/url]”>http://thecenter.ufl.edu/Top200-III...op200_merit.xls</a></p>
<p>Interesting how Crab brings up SAT I 75th percentiles (btw NYU has the edge there 1450 vs. 1440), because if one looks at the 25th percentiles, NYU is about 100 points higher than Berkeley (1300 vs. 1190). At Berkeley you are way more likely to find a 1200 SAT I than a 1500. </p>
<p>As for the SAT II’s, those Berkeley numbers do not include the in-state transfers (mostly from community college) who make up around 25% of the student body there (NYU only enrolls about 700 transfers), and the SAT I stats for don’t include these C.C. transfers either. These people from community college further bring down Berkeley’s student body quality, and they make up 1/4 of it. </p>
<p>When the new SAT I is used, I’m certain NYU will continue to trump Berkeley in terms of average score, probably by an even larger margin than now. I’d even bet lotsa moohlah on it. One school is moving on up, the other is declining, as any wall street trader will tell you–“the trend is your friend”.</p>