University and scholarship research · biological sciences · prepared for the Vahi family

What the two tables show

• Her 1550 splits the list exactly in half. It sits at or above the 75th percentile of the enrolled class at eleven of the twenty-seven, and below it at eleven. The eleven where it is at or above are Cornell, NYU, Washington University, Washington, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Boston University, Texas, Penn State and Emory. The eleven where it is below are Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Penn, Princeton, Duke, Chicago and Northwestern, and at all eleven the gap is small, between ten and thirty points. There is no university on this list where her score is a problem. There are eleven where it is not, by itself, an advantage.
• At four of them the score is worth nothing at all. Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego and Davis do not look at SAT or ACT scores in any part of the decision, and say so at C8A of their own filings. Between them those four received 504,942 applications for the year in this table. A 1550 buys her exactly as much there as a 1200 would. Caltech is the opposite case: it restored the requirement in April 2024 for applicants entering from 2025, so scores count for her cycle, but its most recent filing still covers the last test-blind class and carries no range.
• Fifteen of the twenty-seven publish no average GPA at all. Yale, Cornell, Columbia, Duke, Washington University and Northwestern all leave C12 of their own Common Data Set blank. Of the twelve that do file one, three file it on a weighted scale that runs above 4.0, which is why Chicago shows 4.97 and North Carolina 4.47 next to Michigan’s 3.90. Those numbers are not on the same scale and should never be read against each other. For an IB student with no American GPA the column is context, not a target.
• The early advantage is real, and it is a quarter of what the folklore says. The widest gap on the list is Columbia, whose binding round admits at 4.69 times the rate of its own regular round. Then Northwestern at 3.89 and Duke at 3.68. At the other end, MIT’s early action, which is non-binding and therefore free, runs at 1.68, and Johns Hopkins’ binding round at 2.08. Signing away every other option for a 2.08 is a different transaction from signing it away for a 4.69.
• Cornell moved further in one year than any other university on this list. Its binding round admitted 1,161 of 9,973 for the class that entered in 2024 and 1,889 of 10,057 for the class that entered in 2025. The advantage went from 1.49 to 2.80 in a single cycle. Any early-decision number older than the last filed Common Data Set should be treated as decoration.
• Ten of the twenty-one American universities with an early round publish no count at all. Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and Caltech file a Common Data Set that records no early figures. NYU and Chicago run binding rounds and leave the field blank in their own filing. Michigan, Wisconsin, Penn State and North Carolina run early action, and the Common Data Set collects no early action counts from anyone, anywhere. Where this table is blank the reason is printed on hover, and in every case it is the university’s choice, not a gap in this research.
• The doctorate column now carries two numbers because one number was misleading. The count is how many of a university’s graduates went on to earn a science or engineering doctorate between 2010 and 2020. The ratio is what share of its graduates did. Berkeley produced 4,586 future doctorates, more than any university in the country, and still sits 48th on the ratio, because it graduates enormous classes. Caltech produced 977 and sits first on the ratio at 40.9, more than twice MIT and more than three times Harvard. For a student who wants to be surrounded by people heading the same way, the ratio is the honest measure. For a student who wants the largest possible community of them, the count is.
• Twelve of her American universities are outside the national top fifty on the ratio, and two more are outside on both counts. Penn, UCLA, Michigan, Washington, Northwestern, San Diego, Davis, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Boston University, Texas and Penn State all place graduates into doctorates at below 6.0 per 100. New York University and Emory appear on neither national list. That is not a criticism of those universities. It is the single most relevant fact about them given her first objective.
• In Britain the ranking order and the entry order have almost nothing to do with each other. Below Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial, every British university on this list made an offer on more than four applications in ten, and four of them on more than seven in ten. In her own subject group the spread runs from 15.3% at Oxford to 88.5% at Liverpool. Restrict it further to applicants domiciled outside the UK and EU, which is the pool she is actually in, and the spread runs from 6.3% at Oxford to 90.4% at Glasgow. Seven British universities on this list would make her an offer on better than three applications in four.
• Being an international applicant is not uniformly a penalty. At Oxford it more than halves her chances in her subject, 15.3% down to 6.3%. At Glasgow, Manchester and Edinburgh it improves them. British universities charge overseas fees that domestic fee caps do not apply to, and the offer rates show it.
• Australia and Singapore do not publish comparable figures. The Australian national collection covers domestic Commonwealth-supported places only, so no Australian university on this list has a published offer rate for someone in her position. NUS states plainly that it cannot publish an IB profile at all, because too few IB applicants apply for the figure to mean anything. Entry to all eight is by published score threshold rather than by competition against a pool. UBC is the one exception on this side of the table: it assesses international applicants in a separate pool and reports that pool was admitted at 71% in 2025/26, against 55% for domestic applicants.