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My superscore was 2230. 99th percentile or not, it’s irrelevant because it’s not good enough to get into any top schools.
by akhilcacharya 7y ago
My superscore was 2230. 99th percentile or not, it’s irrelevant because it’s not good enough to get into any top schools.
- DuskStar 7y agoThat's actually around the median for Harvard students, IIRC. It's not enough to guarantee your admission, but then 2400 isn't either.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoThe median includes recruited athletes and legacies. It’s effectively useless as a measure.
- DuskStar 7y agoHalf of Harvard students are athletes and legacies? In any case, my experience was that SAT basically doesn't matter past 2200/2400 - everything after that is extracurriculars, connections and luck.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoI have doubts - most people I know got far more than me and none got into elite institutions. I can’t even imagine how exponentially superior the people who got into multiple must be.
- DuskStar 7y agoOh, I don't mean that getting higher scores makes you likely to get in - only that having a 'low' score (less than 2100, let's say) makes it far harder to the point of being nearly impossible. If you check out some stats from Stanford [0] and MIT [1] you can see that admit rates fall off VERY quickly. For instance, Stanford's fall 2014 freshmen had a 5.1% overall admit rate, climbing to 13% for those who received an 800 on their critical reading SAT but only 2% for those scoring below 600 on the same. Or look at MIT - 9% admit rate for 750+ Math SAT, 0.05% for <700. (Literally one person out of 1828) 0: https://admission.stanford.edu/apply/selection/profile14.html https://admission.stanford.edu/apply/selection/profile14.htm... 1: https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/stats/ https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/stats/
- akhilcacharya 7y agoRight, I’m in the middle ground where I’m still considered to be exponentially inferior to the admits.