I note NMSF is significantly less selective than the most selective colleges, and also state-based. There are also some people who score significantly higher on the SAT/ACT than they do on the PSAT.
Again, to do this truly properly, there would have to be something like a universal IB HL or A-Level system in the United States. And there is not.
While the sample size is too small to really be meaningful, it is interesting that there was a negative trend in acceptance rate among hooked applicants as GPA rose from 4.1 up.
That sort of pattern can be an indicator of yield protection, but that is truly just speculation based on extremely limited data.
Still, maybe Pomona really hates being treated as a backup option by Harvard-Westlake kids . . . .
I may have missed someone saying this already, but a possible private school advantage is that they both actively and passively curate what kids apply to what schools. The entire senior class isnât shotgunning the entire USNWR top 25 and kids arenât shooting 0.1% shots at Harvard.
The tacit understanding by the colleges is that the high school has done some work on fit, and the high schoolâs parents are willing to forgo some Hail Marys in exchange for better odds elsewhere.
Contrast that to what a VP of enrollment said before a mass tour of an Ivy+ to put everyoneâs odds in context: the previous cycle the college had gotten applications from many hundreds of students at a renowned exam school, easily more than half of the class, probably closer to two-thirds.
Very much so, and it is often combined with putting a lot of work into helping kids find alternatives to just looking at US News for college lists. And once you get below that superficial level, there are so many different ways to think about desirable colleges. So they can at least try to make sure each kid has at least some targets and reaches where not a lot of other students are applying (maybe none, in fact).
And of course they often have a lot of experience, including as AOs and now as counselors. So, they can also point kids towards colleges that might well see them as good fits in return.
While this matches my experience, I have been surprised to read that it doesnât happen at some other private schools at least according to some posters here. Iâve been surprised to hear about private school kids applying to more than ten schools, and I think their schoolâs must be pretty different than my kidsâ. Ours have strongly encouraged ED and EA apps, which cuts way down the average number of applications per student. For ED applicants, it is all done if admitted so those kids only apply to one. For both EA and REA applicants at D22âs school, if admitted they are told not to apply to more than a few additional schools unless finances are a concern. It is considered very bad form to get an EA acceptance and then apply to a bunch of additional schools thereby potentially reducing a classmatesâ chances; besides, theoretically the kids have put in early apps to schools that they would be delighted to attend. Even those who donât have an EA acceptance are discouraged from applying to more than one or two reaches (for the max of 8 or so colleges). In my observation, a lot of curation went on to avoid having kids compete with each other for the same schools. After all, in the end, you can only go to one, and the main focus seems to be on cutting the number of apps down in the fall of senior year. On the other hand, lots of these kids are wealthy so they may not be merit hunting.
I wish there were better measures than PSAT. Thereâre a couple of things about PSAT that I like:
Few students who are likely to get into tippy-top privates care about PSAT or NMSF, so they donât really prepare for the test. As a result, their PSAT scores may be better indicators than SAT/ACT scores.
Theyâre taken by almost every student, unlike AP or IB exams.
If Student A didnât prepare for the PSAT and Student B did, to me that makes the PSAT less and not more valuable for trying to compare Student A and Student B.
I guess if no kids who ended up applying to Ivy+ colleges prepared for the PSAT, then maybe this wouldnât be an issue. But just at our HS, there was a big difference in terms of preparing or not preparing for the PSAT, among kids who are now going to be applying to one or more Ivy+.
Anyway, from my perspective this is all trying to make these incredibly crude and limited tests into something they can never be. Because the academic qualifications that these colleges actually care about the most are grades in the most advanced courses, which correlate with the sorts of actual academic tasks students will be doing in college.
The PSAT is so far away from that standard both in terms of content and format that using it as a proxy for how colleges rationally evaluate academic qualifications isnât going to help us shed light on what actually explains the different placement rates at different high schools. For example, that approach wonât tell us if A was preferred over B because A excelled in more advanced and challenging course work than B, or instead because A had some non-academic advantage.
And sometimes the right answer is that a suitable measure simply isnât available.
I think @1NJParent was suggesting that typically kids in top private schools have the advantage of way more prep resources for the SAT/ACT than the typical public school student, so their SAT scores would reflect the benefit of that privilege, whereas if they donât prepare for the PSAT that just puts them on a more level playing field with most public school kids who also wouldnât prep for a standardized test. I have no idea if itâs true that top private kids donât prep for the PSAT (or if some consciously are chasing NM status).
Your experience is very different from mine then. I didnât even know when my kid took PSAT, because he didnât think it was such a big deal to tell me about it. He told me later that his classmates didnât think it was a big deal either.
Interestingly, I believe studies have found once you control for family characteristics, there is basically no additional value-added by private schools when it comes to the ACT/SAT.
Which makes sense to me. Our private HS does a lot of expensive things to help in college admissions, but ACT/SAT prep is not one of those things. The college counselors will help a bit with testing strategy, and also they make it easy to sign up for classes with one particular test prep company if you would like. But thatâs really pretty minimal compared to the long list of other more substantial things they are doing.
And in fact if anything, Iâd say my peer parents using the top public schools seem more, not less, likely to do things like hire a test tutor (as opposed to just buying a book and maybe doing a class). I think that is maybe because our counselors are pretty confident they know what counts as a âgood enoughâ test score, and so are guiding us to devoting our resources (including the increasingly scarce resource of the kidâs time and energy) toward what they see as more valuable pursuits.
Anyway, it would be interesting to know once you controlled for family characteristics, did independent-private families or top-public families tend to spend more on test prep? Just based on my own experience, Iâm not sure the privates would be ahead in that one.
That was my kid, but we later learned some of his friends had prepped. The school didnât encourage that, but some families did it anyway.
Iâm sure Iâll get some disagreement for saying this: these other kids are less likely to get into tippy-top colleges, and if they did, theyâre less likely to excel if and when they face real academic challenges at those schools.
I guess I am just puzzled why you said that.
I donât really know the details, but generally most of these things seem to be parent-driven to me, so I wouldnât ordinarily assume it says anything about the kid that their parents wanted them to prep for the PSAT.
Iâd also agree that this makes the PSAT even less useful as a measure of college preparation (and it was not a good measure to begin with). But that doesnât mean I think it is a negative indicator. I just think it is noise.
My personal observations (at a few of the most challenging schools) were that the best students werenât the ones driven by their parents. Those who were driven by their parents tend to flame out at some point.
Interesting. I would agree that things like mental, emotional, social, and physical health can end up playing a big role in sustaining academic success, and I would agree some of the more âparent-drivenâ kids can appear to be at heightened risk in one or more of those ways. Not that high school is always effortless or stress free for the more âself-drivenâ kids, but I do think perhaps more of them ultimately find a balance that really works for them.
As these things go, I think prepping for the PSAT was a pretty minor transgression in itself. But I could see how if it was correlated with a lot more of that sort of thing, that could become an adverse indicator.
I see no reason to make this assumption. The study and other sources suggests the opposite. Wealthier students have much higher rate of high scores. HSs with a larger portion of wealthier students also generally show a much higher rate of high scores. The study implies that the private school category has a much higher rate of affluent students (calls one group of public âlow incomeâ and the other group âthe types of schools most Ivy-Plus applicants from the middle class or upper middle class attendâ). While the study doesnât explicitly break down SAT scores by HS type, I see no reason to assume the same scores âamong this group of studentsâ.
The not-top scoring kids are also expected to bring down the average score of applying students â not just portion who applied, but as stated in my earlier post, the specific distribution for top scores is not known. However, one would expect there to be a relationship between the listed mean scores in a reasonable statistical distribution. For example, the study defines the referenced 1500+ SAT group as corresponding to 34+ ACT. Iâd expect a far larger portion of the mean 33 ACT school (Rye Country) to fall in to this 34+ ACT group than the mean 30 ACT school (Scarsdale).
I wish that standardized tests were administered at random and without prior announcements, or that they were made less preppable (or even unpreppable)âŠ
On PSAT prep, having had kids at both private and public high schools, Iâd guess that most students do not prep specifically for PSAT. However, prep for a fall junior year SAT may coincidentally function as PSAT prep. Which raises the question, which kids prep for an early junior year SAT.
No, their respective numbers of students with NMSF suggest otherwise.