<p>
</p>
<p>You can only go to 1 school at a time, right? Anyone who applies to a bunch of top schools and gets into one should be jumping for joy at his or her good fortune, not complaining that he or she didn’t sweep all the schools.</p>
<p>There are apparently anomalous results, but I think much more often you see a kid who applied to, say H, Y, and S–and then the next most selective schools were places like Hopkins, Rice, and Emory. I think that approach will generate a number of unhooked high-stats kids who will end up at the Hopkins-type schools. The very top schools are putting the puzzle together in a way that may shut even a super-achieving kid out if he happens to be from New Jersey and not Idaho, or plays the clarinet and not the euphonium. This is why I always tell kids gunning for super-selective schools to apply to more of them, not less, if that’s the kind of school they want.
As PG suggests, the kid who got into 1 of 10 top schools is in a much better position than the one who got into none of 8.</p>
<p>Perfect scores don’t assure one of getting into a highly selective school. It gives them a higher probability than the average applicant. I suspect it has to do with better LORs, better grades etc that go in tandem with those scores. </p>
<p>Perfect ACT score at Brown - 1 out of 3 got in.</p>
<p>Princeton - 2300-2400 range 21.5% got in
below 2300 the admission rate dropped to normal at 8.5% or so.</p>
<p>Of course you should be happy to get into 1 in 10 top schools. I was just pointing out the probability. 1 in 10 is probably one essay error away from close to 0 in 10.</p>
<p>At least 4 in S’s HS.</p>
<p>If we take as a given that it actually happens periodically that a kid with “perfect” stats gets in to only 1 of 10 “top schools,” what are the possible explanations for this? It seems to me that the following are possible, and several of them could be true:
- There are a lot of kids with great stats, a limited number of spaces, and this kid just had bad luck.
- Top schools don’t see perfect stats as significantly better than really, really good stats, and there are a lot of kids with really, really good stats.
- The kid had an “anti-hook” that observers may not know about–fair or unfair–such as a bad interview, a disciplinary record at school, a recommendation that is not as good as the kid expected, something bad that appears when the kid is Googled, etc.
- The schools are limiting the number of kids in this kid’s category–whether it is a racial group, kids from prep schools, kids from New York City, etc.
- Some people may not understand what “great ECs” really are in the context of the most selective schools.</p>
<p>Hunt. I agree with all these possibilities. But I still believe that for a legacy or an URM applicant with perfect stats the probability of getting admitted is close to 1.</p>
<p>Isn’t the above a good thing? If they have perfect scores, at least it means the discussion related to them being unqualified is moot?</p>
<p>this is a good thing if it is also true for unhooked kids.</p>
<p>There’s an issue of supply and demand here. For any one college, how many legacy applicants are there with perfect stats? Not many. For all colleges altogether, how many URMs are there with perfect stats? Again, not enough to go around.</p>
<p>I can understand people who think there should be no legacy preference. They can vote with their feet and go to schools where there is no such preference. But I have noted before that if a school says that there is a legacy preference, it has an interest in convincing legacy families that the preference is large, and convincing everybody else that it is small. That’s why you will never get really clear information on it.</p>
<p>There are not that many kids with perfect stats (2400SAT1 in one sitting, 800 in all SAT2s, 240 PSAT, 4.0 uwGPA, 5 in all APs), hooked or unhooked.
As far as your vote with feet point. The issues is that these top schools has the most resources to hire the most in-demand faculty. Provide most funding to research, etc. It like you still have to take the bus to get where you want to go even if you’re ask to sit in the back.</p>
<p>
That’s true. And the number of kids like that who have disappointing admissions results is even tinier. I’m sorry, but I can’t weep too much over a kid who wanted to go to Harvard but had to settle for Brown or Williams. That’s not the back of the bus–the second row, maybe.</p>
<p>The PSAT score is definitely not relevant and AP scores are usually not relevant (no one requires the scores to be official) to the admission process at most schools.</p>
<p>Btw - most top schools are also admitting 10% internationals.</p>
<p>Oh gag, tigerdad. You don’t “have” to go to only a handful of schools in this country. Other countries are stratified like that, but not the US.</p>
<p>What defines “most in-demand faculty,” anyway? Teaching, publication, research, desirability of concentration? Different schools value different things in professors as in students–and, as with students, there are many, many very, very good professors at schools outside the top 10 university list. Schools that hire professors in only at the height of their career are doing so at a cost to the school that is not just financial; a department made up of stars has a very different feel from one that has developed more gradually. What’s more, professors on their way up have a different attitude–toward students, toward other professors–from those who feel that their place in the academic world is unimpeachable. And a university with a graduate school places, as it should, different emphases on research and teaching than a college does. The university where I did my graduate work was great for graduate work; I think I was better served as an undergraduate at my college.</p>
<p>PG, you don’t even have to go to college. But that’s not we’re discussing here.</p>
<p>I think PG’s point, and mine too, is that none of these hooked students are knocking unhooked students out of Harvard and forcing them to go to Nowheresville College. My observation is that the kind of kids you’re talking about are disappointed that they didn’t get into Harvard, but they’re pretty happy with Brown, Northwestern, Williams, Wesleyan, etc. Some must suffer the torments of going to Notre Dame or even Tulane. If a kid with perfect stats is rejected at Harvard and next best school he gets in is Nowheresville, the problem was with his list.</p>
<p>And what’s more, if you look at the results threads for the most selective schools, you’ll see plenty of unhooked kids, both white and Asian, getting admitted to those schools even though they don’t have perfect stats. This supports my theory that really good stats and perfect stats aren’t all that different in the eyes of the top schools.</p>
<p>My “hooked” kid (not really, but legacy status at three colleges where he applied) didn’t have perfect stats, but his were darn good. 2330 SAT I the only time he took it, 2370 on three SAT IIs, ranked 6th in a class of 550, excellent if not bowl-you-over ECs, the most all-around challenging curriculum in his class. He wasn’t accepted at any of his legacy colleges, or indeed any other college with an acceptance rate below 20%. The unhooked ethnic Asian kid ranked right below my kid, at #7, based on GPA, with slightly lower SATs and no meaningful ECs, was accepted at every college to which he applied (which happened to be Harvard EA and Stanford). And no one thought that was strange at all, because everyone, including my son, saw this kid as intellectually the most exciting kid in the class. #5 in the class, by the way, was a URM who was also rejected at Harvard and Stanford but accepted at MIT, #8 a triple-threat unhooked ORM (half-Jewish, half-Asian, humanities-oriented woman) who was turned down at HYPS, Columbia and Chicago but accepted at Brown and Dartmouth.</p>
<p>My points are: (1) all of these kids were fine, don’t worry, and (2) it’s still better to be brilliant than to be a legacy, at least sometimes.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Oh, don’t worry though. Given that these schools are all crawling with unqualified URM’s, athletes, and legacies, the top faculty won’t want to be there, right? (I never seem to get an answer to the question that if the truly ‘good’ / deserving kids don’t get into these schools, where DO they wind up at the end of the day? You know, if there are SO many kids shut out of Harvard unfairly.</p>
<p>What is truly great about the US college system is that there are numerous excellent schools who graduate students qualified for professional schools, graduate schools, and probably most importantly, for the workplace. We don’t have just 1 or 2 top schools and if you don’t get in, you are doomed.</p>
<p>If you do not agree with a school’s holistic admissions decisions, then don’t give them your time and money by applying. There are numerous schools who admit based on numbers. If you choose to apply to certain schools (most competitive), then your entire package will be evaluated. This includes legacy and other pros and cons. If you think this is unacceptable, I don’t understand giving your money to apply.</p>
<p>BTW–Not every supposed “perfect” stat kid actually is (how would you truly know this anyway??), and those that really are, might not be as qualified in other areas. Adcoms also know that there is a huge difference in quality of high schools around the country and having perfect scores from one may actually be less impressive than a lower GPA at a more challenging and competitive school. Essays, recommendations, extracurricular activities can really set kids apart at the upper levels and maybe this is where those supposed “perfect” score kids are not impressing adcoms. Their lack of legacy or URM status may not be holding them back, as most of those accepted have neither of these things either.</p>