<p>“Without a “hook,” so to speak, on your application, a 1780 on your SAT would not get you into MIT. There are certainly situations in which what I have said will not hold true – namely if a student did not perform as well as they could have on the PSAT, for whatever reason. I am also aware that a student can improve their test performance between years, but I stand by my assertion that it is unlikely that a student who scores a 178 on the PSAT under optimal conditions would produce an SAT that would get them into MIT.”</p>
<p>waterbean, read what I wrote above. Obviously there are people at any of this country’s finest institutions – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Duke, et al – who have PSAT scores that are quite a bit lower than those of typical admitted students. </p>
<p>texaspg - I didn’t say that it was impossible. I said admission was unlikely, barring any “hook” to your application. Most students with a 1780 on the SAT or a 178 on the PSAT have slim chances at MIT (a school that already accepts less than 10 percent of all applicants), as demonstrated by the data which you have so kindly provided. Heck, admission is “highly unlikely” for the lion’s share of even an unusually talented applicant pool to MIT, as there are so few spaces in each class relative to the amount of applicants.</p>