Let’s not forget that athletes, URM, legacy, international, rural, development etc bring average down but for non hooked, it’s usually much higher than average. I wouldn’t be surprised if every category’s average is different at every college.
Just curious. Is this the average ADMITTED, or the average ATTENDING (those who matriculated)? There is a difference.
Also, curious why you think the size matters. The average is the average is the average… especially if these are “admitted” scores, then it seems even less relevant.
It seems BI performed lazily in its analysis. For example, Bowdoin, which collects and reports SAT data for all its matriculants, appears to have been omitted because of its “test optional” policy. By proper analysis, Bowdoin would place around 36th. On the other hand, colleges that seem to report incomplete data (Middlebury, Colby) do appear. At one point, when Psychology Today introduced this concept of “smartest colleges” (which was then republished by BI) the research appears to have been reasonably disciplined. At this stage, however, the foundational research seems to have been substantially disregarded.
WOW!! Some colleges have more students than our town and others have less than our elementary school. I feel 3-7K seems like a more reasonable size for most kids.
Personally, I don’t like the idea of a human jungle or a fish bowl but to each it’s own. If you add graduate students, faculty, administration, non administrative staff etc, some of these schools have 100K feet walking campus every day? Talk about congestion.
For 2018, Boston College reported around 15,000 total enrollment among which roughly 10,000 are undergrads. They are quite big but not truly a mega school. However, SAT scores are on lower side.
Until we find a more reliable stick, standardized testing is one of the sticks available to us. You can’t go by other sticks like high school GPA or class rank or college rank either, no way to weigh rigor without AP, SAT or SAT II scores. Odds of high IQ and high performance existing together aren’t anywhere near absolute but they often exist together.
In an age when standardized testing, class ranks, writing scores etc are being bashed (and may be rightfully), no one is talking about alternatives. You can’t leave it all to admission officer’s discretion. That leaves so much room for unfair decisions to help institutional needs.
Agree totally wit CupcakeMuffins! There is so much grade inflation going on in so many public school districts - this is done to cover up under performing schools and school districts!!
there are kids with UWGPA 4.0 that are clearly do not deserve it …even in these threads there people who report UWGPA with 4.0 - their rank is 63 out of 357 - and we do not know how many more have 4.0 below this rank??
When you see their AP scores or SAT scores - it does not compute with the high GPAs.
There are many top ranking schools (based on US ranking - Top 10) and Top 20% students get a minimum of 1500 in SAT and get 4s and 5s in AP tests. Grade inflation is a real issue and we were told that college admission people know about these schools - hope it is true!
Another major issue in TX - blindly admitting Top 6% of every school - really penalizes kids from Top Charter/ Magnet/ Small Public Schools that are highly ranked. This has led to bright students leaving these schools and get in to regular public school so that they can come in the Top 6%! In fact, we live in a neighborhood that has a top charter school and kids leave that school after sophomore year (because they are only in the top 20%) and go to public school and are in the Top 2% without much effort! If they did not do this -their chances of getting in to top programs in UT Austin went from 0% to getting an auto admit and then pretty good chance of getting to the program if they have good ECs etc.
P.S. - Parents in TX who send their kids to these Top Schools need to be aware of this!!
