¹ *Ralph Gardner, Jr., “Poor Little Smart Kids,” New york, March 18, 1996, p. 37 (back to text)

 

² *I have taken these acceptance rates from Peterson's Competitive Colleges: i998–1999. Keep in mind that these 1998 numbers actually refer to the class from the year before. (back to text)

 

³ *Ralph Gardner, Jr., “Poor Little Smart Kids,” New York, March 18, 1996, p. 33. (back to text)

 

⁴ *Advanced Placement courses (usually referred to as APs) are one category of advanced course work available at many high schools. You can receive college credit for such courses by taking the nationally administered AP tests, which are graded on a scale of 1–5, with 5 being the highest. Some schools offer the International Baccalaureate degree, or IB, which is counted the same as AP for admissions purposes and has a corresponding worldwide test scored on a scale of 1–7, with 7 being the highest. (back to text)

 

⁵ *For the class of 2000, these are the early-decision numbers as reported by the Ivy (and MIT) directors during the annual Ivy League meeting in the spring of 1996: Princeton accepted 38 percent of early-decision applicants and filled 48 percent of the freshman class. Yale admitted 38 percent of the early-decision applicants—18 percent of the class. Cornell admitted 38 percent of early-decision applicants and filled roughly 25 percent of the freshman class. Dartmouth admitted 31 percent of early-decision applicants and filled 35 percent of the class. MIT accepted 37 percent of those who applied early action (75 percent of those students decided to attend MIT) and filled 36 percent of the freshman class. Brown admitted 23 percent early action, 32 percent of the freshman class. The University of Pennsylvania accepted 35 percent of the early-decision applicants and filled about one-third of the class. Columbia admitted 33 percent of the early-decision applicants and filled about one-third of the class. Harvard accepted 25 percent of the early-action applicants (88 percent of those students decided to attend Harvard) and filled up 48 percent of the class. Amherst filled up 37 percent of the class, Swarthmore, 26 percent, Williams, 34 percent. See New York Times, November 27, 1996. (back to text)

 

⁶ *This is not a hard-and-fast rule. The schools can always decide not to honor an appeal. It is not an automatic process. In general, the applicant would have to provide new information in order for an appeal to be granted in the first place. It's worth a try, but there is no guarantee. (back to text)

 

⁷ *See Lois K. Shea and Ralph Jimenez, “Study Finds Lifestyle Has Big Influence on SAT Score.” Boston Globe New Hampshire Weekly, September 3,1995. (back to text)

 

⁸ *Remember that there is no perfect score that will guarantee admission, and, as we shall see, the SAT I is evaluated with regard to socioeconomic background, so that while a 610V, 630M might be low for a well-educated, well-off applicant, it might be very high for an economically disadvantaged applicant. (back to text)

 

⁹ *SAT II subject tests, like the SAT Is, have also been reentered and are scored on an 800 scale, with 500 being the median score. (back to text)

 

¹⁰ *Curiously, Al does not stand for athletic index. Insiders use the term AI, so I will refer to it this way throughout this book. It was originally intended to prevent any of the schools in this athletic league from accepting students who were tremendous athletes but were below a certain academic standard. (back to text)

 

¹¹ *In some areas of the country, such as many midwestern states, a test called the ACT is taken instead of the SAT I. The Ivy League does have a provision kg this substitution: First the single ACT score is converted to an approximate SAT I score and that number is doubled to stand in for both the math and the verbal sections for use in the formula. In other words, instead of using the average of the SAT Is, the ACT conversion is used twice. If a student takes both the SAT I and the ACT, for AI purposes the college will use whichever score is higher, but remember that in any case the officer will see both the SAT I and the ACT score, so taking both tests merely to try to beat the formula is a wasted effort. A perfect ACT score of 36 converts to 800V, 800M; 35 = 780/780; a 34 = 760/760; a 33 = 740/740; a 32 = 710/710; a 31 = 690/690; a 30 = 670/670; 29 = 650/650; down to the minimum of 15 = 370/370. (back to text)

 

¹² *80 (the average of the verbal and math scores for the SAT I) + 80 (the average of the three SAT II subject tests) + 80 (the converted rank score for being numinr one in a big class) = 240. (back to text)

 

¹³ *Note, the Ivies use the best rank available. Since, in this case, the weighted rank is not reported, the unweighted rank is used in the computation of the CRS. The formula itself makes no allowance for weighted or unweighted ranks. (back to text)

 

¹⁴ *There are ten deciles, four quartiles, and five quintiles To be ranked in the top decile means that the student is superior to at least 90 percent of his classmates. A student in the top quintile is superior to at least 80 percent of his classmates and a student in the top quartile is superior to at least 75 percent of his classmates. (back to text)

 

¹⁵ *The second dedie means that the student is between the top 90 percent and the top 80 percent of the class, so we take the midpoint, which is Ss. Thus: 100 minus 85 equals 15, and 15 divided by 100 yields .15. Then we multiply .15 times the size of the class, 153, which yields 23. Thus, the imputed rank is 23/153, which, if you look at table A, is equivalent to a CRS of 62. (back to text)

 

¹⁶ *Just about every private and public high school in the country has a school profile. It usually contains a description of what kind of socioeconomic area the school is in, where the students get accepted to college, average test scores, and so on if you are ever considering moving to a new area and you want to investigate schools, call up the guidance office and request the profile that is sent to colleges. (back to text)

 

¹⁷ *All these averages are presumed to be out of a total of 100 points. On a 4.0 scale, a 40 is an A average, 3.0 a B average, 20 a C average, and so on. (back to text)

 

¹⁸ *An annoying trend among big public schools is to call everyone with a 4.0 GPA “valedictorian,” even if that means that twenty-two people will share the rank. In states like Texas, it is not uncommon to find as many as forty students sharing a number-one rank. If it were up to admissions people, they would end this policy immediately because it does not allow them to differentiate between the true number one and the solid students. In almost every case, this shared rank hurts the students rather than helps them, since officers have CO rely more on standardized resting because the transcript tells almost nothing about how the student compares to others in the class. (back to text)

 

¹⁹ *See Bill Paul, “Getting In: An Inside Look at Admissions and Its Dean, Fred Hargadon.” Princeton Alumni Magazine, November 22, 1995. (back to text)

 

²⁰ *These stanines reflect the adjusted AI assignations, so if an officer bumped a stanine up or down because of an inequity in the CRS, those adjustments are reflected in these figures. (back to text)

 

²¹ *Again, each Ivy has a slightly different system. In addition, at some schools, professors have input in the process, but this is the exception, not the rule. The only school I know of that does this is Cornell. (back to text)

 

²² *See Bill Paul, “Getting In: An Inside Look at Admissions and Its Dean, Fred Hargadon,” Princeton Alumni Magazine, November 22, 1995. (back to text)

 

²³ *The index for determining whether you are a National Merit semifinalist or “commended” (ie., runner-up) student varies by state. Some states double your verbal and add the math; some treat them both the same—obviously in states like New York and Connecticut, it will be much harder to become a semifinalist because of the high concentration of excellent schools and talented students than it would somewhere like Montana or Idaho, where there are many fewer students and schools to compete with. The Ivies are aware of the high-competition scares, so they may give some weight to a “commended” student from a very competitive area. (back to text)

 

²⁴ *Boykin Curry and Brian Kasbar, eds., Essays That Worked: Fifty Essays from Successful Applications to the Nation's Top Colleges (Baltimore: Ballantine, 1990). (back to text)

 

²⁵ *Harry Bauld, On Writing the College Application Essay: The Key to Acceptance at the College of Your Choice (New York: Harper Collins, 1987). (back to text)

 

²⁶ *As I mentioned earlier, a few schools (Brown is one example) do things differently and make nearly all decisions through committee vote. (back to text)

 

²⁷ *In 1997 at Dartmouth, only one out of eight or nine students, out of roughly a thousand who reached committee, was accepted. (back to text)

 

²⁸ *As I mentioned earlier, not all the Ivies use the AI to guide their academic rankings, but they usually generate an Al for every student, which must be used for recruited athletes in order to uphold Ivy League athletic regulations. (back to text)

 

²⁹ † The number will vary a little by year, but this is what it was set at for the class of 2001. (back to text)

 

³⁰ *These tags are the convention that Dartmouth uses. The other Ivies identify the particular folders by some kind of code, although not necessarily with Dartmouth's color-coded tag system. (back to text)

 

³¹ *Again, since Stanford is not part of the Ivy League, they do not have any AI cutoff, because the Al is strictly used for Ivy League schools. (back to text)

 

³² *There are no strict cutoff points used in the Ivy League—the numbers I am using are rough guides to the unspoken cutoff. Below these scores, the applicant's admission is unlikely, although not impossible, if there are other mitigating factors. (back to text)

 

³³ *Naturally, this percentage will vary by school. (back to text)

 

³⁴ *Again, all of these statistics are for the class of 2000 at Dartmouth College. (back to text)

 

³⁵ *There are a few exceptions to the neutrality rule. The most pointecd; The director of admissions at Georgetown goes through every file and assigns several ratings to each student based on ethnicity, low socioeconomic background, and geographic desirability, among others. Thus, in this case, the geographic distribution would have some effect on admissions, although still not a tremendous one. (back to text)

 

³⁶ *Unlike the other schools that send between 20 and 111 applicants to Dartmouth each year, Norfolk Academy only had 9 applicants, so the unusually high acceptance rate reflects the fact that their very top students applied and were accepted. The sample, however, is not comparable to the other schools in the top ten. (back to text)

 

³⁷ *Surprisingly, almost all the Ivies operate on different computer systems, so no information is shared electronically. The lists have to be input manually so that they are intelligible to a particular school's system. (back to text)

 

³⁸ * The typical per capita income in the PRC is $1120 a year. (back to text)

 

³⁹ *At Harvard, the acceptance rate for transfer students is about 10 percent a year (roughly 100 are accepted out of 1,030); at Cornell, the rate is 18 percent for all seven schools (550 are accepted out of 3,000), but most are not for the Arts and Sciences, to which only 123 are accepted; at Columbia, the rare is about 6 percent (between 1,300 and 1,400 apply and between 60 and 100 are admitted): at Yale, 6 percent are accepted (about 600 apply a year); at Brown, 17 percent are accepted (100 out of 600); at the University of Pennsylvania, about 33 percent are accepted into the Arts and Sciences; and Princeton does not accept transfers on a regular basis. Dartmouth accepts about 45 students out of between 250 and 400. All these schools, with the exceptions of Brown and Columbia, are need-blind for transfer financial-aid applicants. (back to text)