Of course, there are some easy "hard conditions", such as submitting the required application materials and application fees on time, and international students also require TOEFL scores.
Almost every applicant can meet these hard conditions, so how is this 7% selected?
There are no fixed admission conditions at all.
Many people interpret the SAT in the United States as the college entrance examination in China, which is totally wrong. Although the average SAT score of students admitted to Harvard is very high, it does not mean that they can enter Harvard University with full SAT score. On the contrary, you may not get into Harvard University just because you get full SAT scores. According to reliable sources, Harvard controls the number of students with perfect SAT scores to a certain percentage every year. Why? It is not difficult for good students in the United States to get full marks on the SAT. Harvard is worried that if too many students get full marks, students will become too concerned about the test results and ignore other aspects.
Harvard attaches importance to diversity, and students must be excellent students of different types. The definition of excellent students is that Harvard can be more brilliant in the future or now.
The following are just some, and there should be more:
1) reach the national or world-class level in a certain respect (such as the Olympic figure skating champion)
2) Demonstrate extraordinary scientific research ability (for example, have published scientific papers in first-class magazines)
3) Demonstrate extraordinary leadership (leaders of important organizations)
4) Have a very important family background or social relationship.
5) Excellent academic performance (generally GPA, SAT, AP exam)
6) Demonstrate excellent oral and social skills and good attitude (interview)
7) Show extraordinary literary level and publish literary works.
It can be just one of them or more than two at the same time. Every year, some students enter Harvard just because of their good academic performance, but the percentage is quite low.
There are so many applicants all over the world, how can we check them one by one? The staff of the Harvard Admissions Office are in charge of all areas, and everyone is in contact with some high schools that they value. Most of the students come from these traditional excellent high schools, but at the same time they have to take care of African-Americans and other ethnic minorities in ordinary high schools in some poor areas. For a big student source area like China, of course, it depends more on which school you come from (there are too many people applying for American universities in China now, which puts a lot of pressure on the admissions office. The Asian Admissions Officer of a school ranked around 30 told me that their school only recruits less than 800 undergraduates every year, while the number of applicants from China was as high as 850 last year! )。