I found an explanation for why Jian Li might have expected to be admitted to Princeton and all those other schools which waitlisted him: perhaps he went and used Michelle Hernandez’s Academic Index Calculator? Michelle Hernandez is “America’s premiere college consultant,” according to her website.

Hernandez invites us to calculate our own academic indices using this calculator: “Want to calculate your own Academic Index and give yourself a baseline for your chances of admission to top colleges? Enter your SAT I, SAT II and rank information below.” This Academic Index is analogous to the “numbers” that readers give to applicants on the basis of academics; apparently, this calculator approximates the ‘formula’ that all these top schools use.
There are some words of warning about the incomplete nature of this calculator as a tool, but it still reads a (lot) bit deceptive to the unwary:

Obviously admissions offices that use the AI use it along with all the subjective information and make informed decisions about how to understand the most complex part of the formula, the CRS. Why then does the AI matter? Most importantly, it will help you gage your chances for admission since there is a very high correlation between high AI’s and high acceptance rates.

Uh oh! ‘Correlation’ –that’s always dangerous, because people are so quick to leap from correlation to causation and assume dependency. Anyways, I put in Jian Li’s stats and played around with them a little bit since we don’t have a complete picture.

So how’d Jian Li fare?

I gave him excellent grades and rank (top 10%, so forth) and he came out between 236 and 239 AI on the 240 point scale (9/9 reader points, I suppose), after I put in his perfect SAT and near-perfect SAT2s. The worst part of this calculator, in my mind, was the accompanying graphic titled: “Academic Index: chances of Ivy League or Ivy Level Acceptance” which is just damned misrepresentative, regardless of the vague disclaimers pasted around the thing. Those AI rankings, in Hernandez Consulting’s opinion, mean that hypothetical Jian Li-like student, (regardless of race!) has an “excellent” chance of acceptance for Ivy League or Ivy Level. The chart is dated 2004, but nonetheless, I can’t help but disapprove.

“The approximate average of Ivy applicants is around 200 while the average AI of accepted students is closer to the 211 range.”

Good thing Ivy League admissions is all about numbers–oh wait, it isn’t.

Using the same criteria, I get around 223, 7/9 or so (since Phillips Exeter does not rank, I used GPA; quintiles give much the same answer). Guess I should start buying up Ivy League sweatshirts now, right? Fun.

How’d I come across Michelle Hernandez’s website? Someone was searching her name and the name of her books on my site, and I’d never heard of her before; I used google to investigate the mystery. She worked in admissions at Dartmouth for a while before starting the consulting she is now doing.