What's a CS Safety?

reasonabledad
Mon, 18 Apr 2005 18:02:32 +0000

Wow, that was fast! Thank you all for these great suggestions. I have been wondering where the line is between match and safety. I was thinking of UIUC as more of a match…but then my uncertainty is why I was posting this question in the first place.

Penn State Honors impressed us a lot when we visited recently. However, they only admit about one out of six or seven applicants (avg SAT of 1426), so we began to wonder if that wasn’t a match as well.

There were some heartrending stories recently of kids who did not apply to any true safeties, just to lots of reach and match schools. I would like to advise my S to avoid this problem. We went through his “top ten” list and discovered that he would have a statistical 8% chance of ten rejections, and that assumes there is no penalty in the odds for being a homeschooler with a parent-derived transcript and GPA.