Thank you for making my point. Someone who meets my strawman is the type of athlete that Harvard recruits. They are exceptional across multiple areas and if they are merely great academically that’s fine. I see kids like this every year and people solely focused on academics really underestimate how rare these kids are.
Played people a bit with this to see what the responses would be. This example is a student admitted to Harvard ( and I think 5 other Ivy’s) as well as most of the T20+ for this coming year. When her results first popped onto my RADAR I was shocked enough to dig a bit deeper and they did create durable and impactful.
I don’t think anyone here is disputing that judgement needs to come into play for Harvard admissions. It’s just that some are advocating for transparent, measurable inputs, and some are looking towards heavy weighting fuzzy “character” measurements that are, IMO, VERY hard for admissions staff to get right, and that seem to have been used historically for very questionable purposes (racial tilting/favoritism in both the 20th and 21st century, and as cover for a lot of other dicey hooks nowadays).
And again, a lot of the “character” stuff can essentially be bought - the charity startups by prep-school kids. The gushy LoRs from teachers at Pauncey Prep who know they need to deliver on this front. The essays about personal struggles, with who knows how much coaching (or worse).
Ideally, zero. No more than a handful in any case.
Then have colleges compete for them, and others down the list, so that they can assemble the most capable class that they can, and then challenge them at the highest possible level.
I won’t go nearly as far as the previous poster who answered this and was flagged for it. (it isn’t an IQ test…)
However, it could be said that the SAT is a snapshot of a student’s knowledge in the areas that are tested. So – it could be used to judge college preparation.
It is also an objective way for adcoms to distinguish between all the high-GPA kids, since not all 4.0s are equal…
(They can also use AP scores as additional objective inputs, of course)
Given a reasonably broad definition of citizen-leader, doesn’t this study show exactly that?
I think the deeper question is whether that effect depends on those HS prodigies mingling with the other kids these schools admit.
So there was an interesting little skirmish in the battle of the experts over this. Long story short, it at least seemed like an athletic 2 was an alternative to an activities 2 (recruited athletes were athletic 1s).
So here is what Harvard said internally about athletic 3s and athletic 2s (as usual, this is really the critical boundary line for the unhooked):
3: Active participation.
2: Strong secondary school contribution in one or more areas; possible leadership role(s).
As usual with Harvard 2s, I think that’s surprisingly normal to some. As in, a “normal” outstanding HS student-athlete who letters in multiple sports, maybe ends up captaining one, but isn’t good enough in any to do varsity in the Ivy League, seems like the prototype Harvard athletic 2.
Obviously this is going to continue to bother the academics uber alles sorts. But if you know those kids, one thing that is quite clear is that usually a lot of their time is involved. Many hours of weekly practice during the season, additional game time during the week and weekends, often preseason practices as well, and if you are captain you might be expected to run those preseasons, and so on. And maybe club too, although Harvard (as usual) isn’t apparently requiring that, instead it seems they are OK with giving 2s to people who excel within the context of “normal” school activities. Multiply this across multiple seasons, and it is a lot of time.
So if you view every possible Ivy+ selection scheme as telling the kids who are not selected that they are bad kids, then necessarily the academics uber alles view is saying we should tell the kids who spent their time that way that they were bad kids.
Again to me, that’s not desirable. And to me, the solution is to break out of the habit of telling kids if they don’t get into a Ivy+ school, that means they are a bad kid.
I would think you’d want a high enough ceiling so that anyone who rang the bell (perfect score), was CLEARLY someone who should be admitted to the nation’s best schools. (i.e. beyond margins of error - the kid who got a 36 today could easily get a 35 on a re-take).
Since the nation’s best students probably aim for roughly HYPMS(C) (not so much the full Ivy+), that’s about, what, 9000 seats? Not every kid will go for these schools, and these schools won’t go solely to tests, but I’d want there to be a testing granularity such that the top 5000 or so are clearly on top. By today’s standards, that might mean an ACT ceiling of 38 or so, and an SAT ceiling of 850 or 900 per sub-test. Note that there was already one major down-rating of the SAT ceiling (the re-norming in 1995), and there likely has been more of this since.
Oxbridge are very good at designing this type of test. My daughter had to sit their Thinking Skill Assessment which is considerably harder than any American test. Here is their explanation of results below. My D scored around 68 which was sufficient for getting an interview and ultimately being accepted. Note that in UK you can apply to only Cambridge or Oxford but not both. This naturally makes their acceptance rates higher but would be unthinkable as a limitation in US. People will complain to high heaven about limiting personal choice even if it is in the name of collective benefit.
“Total raw scores on Section 1 of the TSA Oxford are converted to scores on a scale which
runs roughly from 0 to 100, but which varies to take into account the overall difficulty of the
questions included in a test. The use of this scale allows the scores of candidates who have
taken different versions of the test to be directly compared. Extreme scores are expected to
be comparatively rare. The scale has been designed so that typical applicants to the most highly selective undergraduate university courses in the UK (who are by definition academically very able) will score around 60. The best applicants will score more highly, but 70 represents a comparatively high score and only a few very exceptional applicants will achieve scores higher than 80.”
Yeah, being able to meet Harvard’s quite high academic standards for unhooked applicants AND also being a Harvard athletic 2 is not at all easy or common!
I know people will object that private high schools and such are gaming that system by offering more niche varsity sports, and there may be some truth to that.
But that really is no different from offering a bunch of niche academic-related clubs, supporting all sorts of niche academic-related competitions, and so on. It isn’t easy to fix the problem that some kids have many more opportunities to do things that really suit them well than others.
But in the end, not every kid actually ends up captain of a varsity team, and not every kid ends up with the average-excellent grades/courses/tests that Ivy+ want, and the intersection of both of those circles is not as big as some people seem to believe.
But every kid in America, from the students at Choate, to kids in bad neighborhoods in South Chicago, to kids in rural Montana, can:
Take the best classes at their school and do well at them
(admittedly this doesn’t narrow things down nearly enough for Harvard)
Take the SAT or ACT. And they know in advance it’s coming - it’s not some obscure thing they won’t have heard of unless their 9th grade math teacher was well-versed in the ins and outs of IMO or whatever.
Now, you may argue (and Harvard does!) that there are too many perfect scores on the ACT - “we can’t admit them all”. Yeah, but a (partial) solution to that is to make the ACT harder! If there were 1/10th as many kids topping out the ACT and SAT, then Harvard (plus YPMSC) could admit them all.
(Partial not full solution because I think in 2023 even a harder ACT/SAT would have some issues with extreme prep. But current issues of a glut of top scorers could be reduced, at least.)
The low ceiling of ACT/SAT tests give many in the US this false sense of sort of democratizing academic excellence. They look at tens of thousands of high school seniors with near-perfect scores and view them as essentially academic peers, at the top of their game, nothing left to learn.
In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth. There is still a huge range of abilities and academic chops hidden in that upper range.
There are some academic competitions that both tease out these abilities and allow kids to cultivate them to their limit.
Both of my sons had ACT 35 in middle school (younger in 7th grade, older in 8th). I sure am glad they didn’t treat acing a basic test as a license to go easy on academics from that point forward.
Some may view it as star collecting by shallow-character kids. As opposed to selfless pursuit of athletic excellence in fencing by the titans of human spirit, I suppose…
I think if you were serious about relying really heavily on standardized testing in the US college admissions system, at the secondary level you’d have to adopt something like the IB HL or A-Level system, both for curriculum and testing purposes. Note this all happens in a final, different, level of secondary schooling from the earlier and more general secondary levels, and is specifically a uni-prep level, including in that you specialize.
And you’d also need to adopt the standardized “courses” and course-testing in those university systems. Because it all fits together–IB HLs or A-Levels are requiring you to study and then be evaluated in the same way, and in specific relevant subjects, as you will study and be evaluated in your uni course. And that is why they are reasonably predictive.
In contrast, general “aptitude” tests like the ACT and SAT are just too divorced from academic reality. Meaning courses and evaluations in US college almost never work like that.
Indeed, some of us just have very low text anxiety and work our way through tests like that really fast and efficiently. So what? This will not help us write an advanced research paper in our major.
Others spend a lot of money on prep and eventually learn a bunch of techniques that help them get basically as good at flying through these tests as people like me are naturally. Again, so what?
The fact is the most relevant thing to doing well in school is doing well in school. The IB/A-Level to Uni system reflects that reality. The SAT/ACT do not, and I don’t think that is really fixable without a much broader overhaul of our entire educational system.
When my son was considering UK universities, I read about these exams and looked at the examples of the TSA on Oxford’s web site. I thought they looked like interesting tests. Since it is possible to take these tests in the US, I wondered at that time if scores on these tests have any value when applying to US universities.
Yes, but athletes don’t always meet that standard. I’m not talking about the Harvard athlete that “only” got a 1400 on the SAT and has a 3.75 gpa. I’m talking about the ones with a 3.5 gpa and a 1200 SAT - there may be a good reason to admit them but let’s not pretend that they are being held to the same academic standards as unhooked students because they aren’t. Why the pretense? Why not just be up front and say that athletics are an important part of the Harvard experience and we admit student athletes that we think can be successful instead of pretending they are being held to the same academic standards as everyone else.
I have never heard someone from H admissions or a coach or another administrator say anything but the truth…some athletes who are admitted have lower academic stats.
Im not saying you haven’t heard someone hiding that fact, or even saying that’s not the truth…but I for sure would be interested in knowing who said that. I generally hear reps from other highly rejectives that lower standards for some athletes be up front about that too (and not all do lower their standards).
In general, Ivies lower their standards for athletes much more than the NESCACs, to take one example.
Of course, how much the academic standards are lowered for recruited athletes varies by individual college. For example, SEC school Mississippi State University has higher admission standards for recruited athletes than for general applicants.
“Everyone admitted to Harvard has the ability to complete all academic requirements successfully.”
If everyone admitted to Harvard has the ability to complete all of the college’s academic requirement successfully, the academic standard is, in essence, whatever Harvard wants it to be.
