Indian Male from the south
GPA: 3.9UW, 4.7W
SAT/ACT:test optional (rip), 1410
Take IB program:
HL: math, physics, cs, history
sl: english and spanish
School doesn’t offer AP
ECs:
financial publications in peer review journal
devised my own trading algorithm
won some state awards and local awards in FBLA
book awards
leadership in some clubs
internship at NASA and some financial firms
my essays are decent
HOW BAD IS TEST OPTIONAL FOR AN ORM be frank please
What grade are you in?
If you are a Junior, you are a solid applicant for any college, but “top” colleges with admission rates of under 30% are reaches for anybody. However, they won’t be out of reach.
Going TO won’t hurt you in most cases, especially since your grades are good, and your classes seem rigorous.
You should try and figure out which colleges, whatever their “prestige” factor may be, are good fits for you. Your query indicates that, at the moment, you are not sure what you want from a college, and that the only criterion by which you are selecting colleges is prestige level.
Start focusing on what you really want and need from a college, and what you require in a college for you to succeed. membership in some arbitrary classification of “top 30” is almost certainly not one of those needs, wants, or requirements.
I am a senior lol. I just want to know if this will hurt me test op bc thats my main weakness in my app more than anything
If you applications are already in, you’ve done all that you could, and now just wait. My guess is that, this year, going TO will not hurt your chances almost anywhere.
Even though many of the top colleges are going test optional, sometimes they don’t really mean it. There are plenty of students on the east coast who were able to take the tests (either before COVID), or the summer of '20. So you’ll be up against a lot of students with similar background who have high test scores.
So when given a choice to pick between two similar students, they most likely will take the one with the higher test scores. Asians/Indians tend to score on the high end, so the students that they do take serve to bring up the average for the entire accepted pool.
If you are a senior, then did you apply early anywhere? That would have been your best chance get into a T20 as test optional. If you did apply early where was it?
I think that you may be making unwarranted assumptions. Even before COVID, test scores were not a major factor at “top” colleges, compared to GPA, rigor, and almost everything else.
Students aren’t being selected by a pairwise comparison, so such a scenario, in which they have two identical profiles, and the only difference between them is that one has an SAT and the other doesn’t, and they can only select one of them, is a more or less imaginary situation.
An SAT helps build a profile of a person as academically strong. An applicant like the OP doesn’t need an SAT to support that.
Agree with @MWolf. Not sure there is much evidence this has been the case with test optional applicant results of past years or this year. The current TO kids are doing very well. This year, some feel they are doing too well - if you are a pro-test type. My child is in a friend group with 8 smart students. 7/8 went test optional and 6 of the TO group are already into top 50’s. The one ED rejection submitted his 34. I realize this is a small sample, but I see no evidence of what you are implying.