<p>@Inigo Montoya, which schools don’t report SATs and aren’t on this list? I know that the USNWR list has strange placement of several schools that won’t cooperate with them–Reed springs to mind–but it is on the original list posted here.</p>
<p>I think that the virtue of the list is that it gives one a fresh look at a lot of schools. Sure, it’s only one criteria, and doesn’t present the whole picture, but I found it interesting to see the relative placement of schools I don’t know much about and schools I’m more familiar with. </p>
<p>That’s why I thought it was interesting also. Certainly there is data in ipeds, common data sets etc. that would enable someone to sort based on the same criteria, but stripping out all the non-subjective criteria created an interesting list in my opinion. So many parent post and lament the fact that private LACs do admit subjectively and that doesn’t really change, but it does expose some lesser known LACs without digging through ipeds or common data sets in a very simple list format.</p>
<p>@consolation - I haven’t compared this list to others to find out who dropped off, but reading the methodology of the study, but it’s clearly stated in the intro paragraphs that schools not reporting scores are not included. What they did was take the top USNWR schools (hence the similarities) and then filter them based solely on standardized test scores. Which is helpful to those of us whose kids score highly on standardized tests, just like the list of test-optional schools is useful to those kids who don’t score highly on standardized tests. Given the caveats in the survey and the general questions around the fairness of standardized testing, it may be debated if this truly shows the “smartest” schools but it is a reasonable list of academically strong liberal arts schools.</p>
<p>Ins’t there another controversy about test scores.
Some schools report SAT scores of accepted students while others report SAT scores of incoming freshmen - with former being a potentially higher than latter (especially those “poor” schools who are the perennial “second choice”).</p>
<p>^^^ good point. My younger son attends a test optional school on the list. He chose to not submit test scores but once accepted and after choosing to attend, was asked to report his scores. </p>
<p>My D’s school, which is test optional, also requires matriculating students to report scores for data purposes. So perhaps the test optional schools on the list include scores of all enrolled students. </p>
<p>“They didn’t say why other than for record keeping.”</p>
<p>The have been studying students who submit versus those that don’t since they went test optional in 1990 so I would assume they want the scores of non submitters for research purposes, also. </p>
<p>@emilybee it would be interesting to see the findings of their research and how college performance compares for submitters and non-submitters and their respective scores.</p>
<p>The big study released last year using 33 colleges stats was conducted by the same person (Hiss) who had been Dean of Admission at Bates and headed up Bates 20 year study. </p>
<p>"The recent study, “Defining Promise: Optional Standardized Testing Policies in American College and University Admissions,” looked at 123,000 student and alumni records at 33 private and public colleges. Submitter GPAs were .05 of a GPA point higher than non-submitters’, and submitter graduation rates were 0.6 percent higher than non-submitters’.</p>
<p>“By any standard, these are trivial differences,” write Hiss and Franks.: </p>
<p>@emilybee Thank you for the link. I suspected this might be the results, but with so much grade inflation at some high schools, I wasn’t sure. Obviously Bates and other colleges wouldn’t have kept their test-optional admissions policies if they found the students they admitted without test scores were not doing poorly. </p>
<p>Either: Obviously Bates and other colleges have kept their test-optional admissions policies because they found the students they admitted without test scores were not doing poorly.</p>
<p>Or: Obviously Bates and other colleges wouldn’t have kept their test-optional admissions policies if they found the students they admitted without test scores were doing poorly.</p>
<p>@JHS yes clearly my post needs editing. I originally wrote “not doing well” and intended to change it to “doing poorly” but forgot to delete the “not”.</p>