<p>Lol, many overrate what having a URM status means in College Admissions.</p>
<p>Don’t forget the kids who have overcome economic challenges, including poor high schools. Many people can’t afford an SAT tutor, or have lower GPAs because they are working. There has to be some equivocation in judging an applicant from a lower-class background. They have a great deal to contribute to a school.</p>
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Yes, and that’s where other factors come into play. Once again using Duke as an example, applicants from North and South Carolina are generally admitted with lower scores.</p>
<p>Having seen the GPA/test score distribution for my son’s LAC, Northstarmom has it just right. Most of the “bottom 25%” will be males.</p>
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<p>This is definitely part of it. For example, at Duke, many people with ‘low’ SATs often had very high grades in high school and strong EC’s and there are also many people who have the reverse situation.</p>
<p>Are there published statistics which show that URM’s in general are in the bottom 25% at top schools? My guess would be that the very best universities have enough URM’s with fantastic stats - enough to turn away some every year. I would think that when you get into the lower stats with URM’s or non-URM’s, those are students who need to show that they have had to overcome some type of hardship (or they are development admits, or any of the other special cases listed already on this thread). </p>
<p>I don’t think the assumption can be made that URM’s have lower stats and got in because of their race or ethnicity.</p>
<p>The URM population that has been best studied in relation to higher education admission in the United States is the black American population, to which a whole journal, the [Journal</a> of Blacks in Higher Education](<a href=“http://www.jbhe.com/]Journal”>http://www.jbhe.com/), is devoted. There is actually a rather huge disparity between “white” and “black” test scores–especially at the high end–and between high school grades for each ill-defined social group. I think that has more to do with early learning experiences and high school activities than to do with genes (in other words, I think the black-white educational attainment gap could close a lot over the next several years). But colleges have to decide what to do with the application pools they actually have, not the application pools they wish they had in a society with no noticeable group differences of that kind. </p>
<p>I think the most important point made above in the thread, by other posters, is that a person who is in the bottom 25 percent as to test scores may not be in the bottom 25 percent as to high school grades, and, yes, it is possible to have test scores that are unbalanced between the reading and math sections. Harvard, in [its</a> NCAA self-study](<a href=“http://www.college.harvard.edu/deans_office/NCAASelfStudy.pdf]its”>http://www.college.harvard.edu/deans_office/NCAASelfStudy.pdf), makes clear that applicants who are truly outstanding in sports or in performing arts can safely be admitted even with test scores below Harvard’s usual averages, because their scores are only so “low” because they were very busy perfecting their sport or performing art–it is presumed that they would have scored higher on the tests if they weren’t so busy.</p>
<p>what’s a URM?</p>
<p>Oh, I see no one expanded the abbreviation in this thread. URM means “underrepresented minority.”</p>
<p>hmmm, Iranian? ;)</p>
<p>it seems to me that the students in the lower 25% category are just that-students who are in the lower 25% of accepted students at any one university. the socioecomically (dis)advantaged, urms, legacies, and athletes are not the only ones who make up this sector- anyone who scored below the top 75% of accepted students is.</p>