Quote:
Originally Posted by pookie bear
I disagree jeeves. Suppose you take the pool of total applicants to Harvard and divide them into two sets. Set A is those students from top ivies, public ivies, and top LACs. Set B is everyone not from ivies, public ivies, and LACs. This is pure conjecture, but I would imagine that set B is the larger of the two, I have no idea though.
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While this might be correct, it doesn't change the fact that Harvard has only seen 3 applications from Virginia Tech in the past 50 years and it has probably seen thousands from Havard, thousands from Yale, thousands from Stanford. You can't equate schools in set B. There is an information deficiency. While your "pile B" might be larger, you can't just assume that an education at Virginia Tech is roughly equal to one at CU-Boulder unless you have evidence from past applications to suggest they are equal. With too small of a sample size from either of those schools, you can't make that significant comparison. Each University is its own set. For that matter, you can't really equate the schools in set A. However, the adcoms don't lack any information about potential grad students from set A.