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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]...[/quote]

The Naviance data has to be taken with a huge shaker of salt because many of those admits (perhaps as many as 50%) are probably recruited athletes, ED applicants, URM, legacy, first generation etc.   For kids without any of those hooks, the average is probably a 4.0/1550.  [/quote]

PP. You’re missing my point. The applicant pool is centered there, not the admit pool.

That is telling you that the typical competitive applicant to Top 30-40 schools (if CS, roughly UC Irvine or NYU) or better are not 4.0/1500 by a long shot.

Also, W school so hooked are not development cases (those kids are Big 3) or URM. Recruited athletes at that level are rare enough that they don’t dominate the sample.[/quote]

It is you who are confused.  The applicant pool displayed on Naviance does not tell you who is a "competitive" applicant for an Ivy+ school when 90% of the applicants on the scattergram are not admitted.  Many of those kids applying are simply not competitive at all and never should have wasted their application in the first place -- particularly if they are not ED, legacy, URM, athlete, etc.

And even when the [b]admit [/b]pool is centered at 3.92 and 1500 that does not mean those stats are competitive for an unhooked applicant given the prevalence of ED, legacy, URM and athlete admits at a high SES school like a W school.

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Ugh, no. Since you are wilfully misrepresenting what I am saying, I went and counted. At our W school, there are about 10 years of data with about 55-65 applicants to Harvard total who have SAT >= 1500 and uwGPA >= 3.9. I'll use those facts as a starting point.

[b]So if you want to claim that there is this huge dark pool of 4.0/1550/all-state somethings out there that are blocking all the normies from getting into their dream school,[/b] you would need to explain why that aren't on that scattergram. Since our school uses Naviance to process letters and manage the flow of information to the schools, I think it's fair to conclude that the uwGPA, SAT, and applied variables are correct and essentially complete. (I know the waitlist, admit/deny and matriculate are self-reported, but I'm not using them.) So either there isn't this huge dark pool, or for some reason Harvard isn't cool and all the smart kids at my W want to go to YPSM but not H.

I'm argiung for the former, but I know it goes against DCUM received wisdom that our kids all really deserve to go to an Ivy, but it's just so unfair now and it wasn't back then.

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I never claimed the bolded and I don't understand the relevance of your counting exercise unless you also consider the number of admitted students from that pool, and how many were hooked in some way?

What I said was (1) Typical stats of [b]applicants[/b] does not tell you who is "competitive" for admissions to an Ivy+ because the vast majority of applicants with even tippy top stats are rejected.  (2) Naviance does not tell you which admits are hooked (and sometimes multiple hooks) so if you are an unhooked applicant simply looking at [b]admitted student[/b] typical stats on Naviance will overstate admission odds.  So an unhooked applicant will need to have stats better than the typical or "average" applicants.    Do you disagree with those points?

Let me add a third point that your latest post highlights ... you also need to toss out any data that is older than 3-4 years old because it is no longer useful in predicting admissions in 2021.   GPA's of top applicants have continued to rise, numbers of international applicants  to top colleges have continued to rise, standardized test scores have continued to rise, and acceptance rates at Ivy+ schools have continued to fall. [/quote]

We can certainly ask if the data suggest that it's become harder to get admitted. (And, remember, class sizes have been increasing along with applicant pool sizes.) I broke down the admissions rate from our W school by 3-year periods, starting with the most recent 3 years, and going back as far as the data allow. I'm aware that this is self-reported data, but almost all of the admits also matriculated, which Naviance would be able to verify because the guidance department would have used it to send a final transcript and proof of high school degree. So I'm going to assume that this data is correct. The short answer is that in all of the 3-year periods that I can access, the admit rate and applicant pool sizes are more or less the same (the term of art would be "the differences are not statistically significant").

To the PP, if you've read this far, rather than just bolding things you don't like, hopefully you can agree that the above is just data and is quite likely to be substantially correct, even if not exactly so.

If you think about this data, you would realize that the story you are trying to tell about all admits are hooked is inconsistent with what we observe when we look at the applicant pool.

I don't believe in repeating myself on the Internet, so after this, I'm out. As an aside, I strongly believe that MCPS should compute class ranks or at least quantiles down to 2% granularity, because it would go a long way to dispelling the myth that anything less than almost all A's in the hardest classes constitutes worthwhile academic achievement at the secondary school level. I believe that myth has real mental and physical health consequences for a number of students.
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