<p>haha expect, you could’ve asked Northstarmom here instead of spending $11. Both are from Harvard. ;)</p>
<p>THe only solid indicator for judging your odds are the 50% SAT ranges. The SAT scores are not the most important thing on the app, but they are probably the best way to pick safeties, matches, and reaches. If an unhooked applicant is at the 75% mark, the school is close to being a match. If an unhooked applicant is at the 50% mark, then the school is a reach.</p>
<p>The difficult part is to assign a % to your chance of getting into a specific college. The %-accepted is useless. It gives you an idea of who applied, but not who was accepted. There are a LOT of colleges in Barron’s list of 1650 colleges that accept less than 20% of the applicants, but has a median SAT score of around 1050/1600. The service academies have about the same %-accepted numbers as the ivies, but the SAT scores are not even close. Using %-accepted, the most selective college in the country is typically the Coast Guard Academy.</p>
<p>However, let’s say that you are an unhooked applicant to Harvard and you are at the 75% mark on the SAT scores. At the extremely selective colleges, the applicants having identical stats tend to stack up, and they semi-randomly just take somebody in the final cut. </p>
<p>If you decide that the chance of getting into each of the eight ivies is 10%, 10%, 10%, 20%, 20%, 20%, 30%, 30%, the chance of getting into all eight is:
(.1)(.1)(.1)(.2)(.2)(.2)(.3)(.3) = 0.000072%</p>
<p>and the chance of getting into at least one is:
1 - (.9)(.9)(.9)(.8)(.8)(.8)(.7)(.7) = 81.7%</p>
<p>There are people who get into multiple ivies. I assume that they are either very luck, hooked applicants, or have higher odd’s for each individual college than assumed above. On the other hand, 81.7% sounds high to me even for those individual college odds.</p>
<p>I’m above the 75% mark of every school in the country…but that doesn’t mean they are matches or even close to guarenteed admission.</p>
<p>I agree with spartanphoenix that the top 10-15 schools are not matches for anyone. THe number of qualified applicants overwhelms the number of available slots. Occassionally somebody will have an anecdote that is surprising such an URM legacy with 1580/1600 being denied, but there are not even anecdotes (that I have heard) about unhooked applicants with 1450/1600 being accepted. However, anyone who is going to regret not applying should apply, and maybe they have a hook.</p>