If they were, they’d be little more meaningful. The parental involvement and advantage that matters isn’t about a PSAT prep test class, it is about overall education, neighborhoods, school choices, home life, opportunities, values, and beyond. While they may not realize it and will deny it, Ph.D. parents who place an extremely high value on education are driving their kids educational attainment whether or not they send them to PSAT prep class. Do away with formal test prep and the kids with the advantages will still do better.
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Why? Don’t some families rely on the NMSF designation for financial aid/merit scholarships?
My kids’ (private) schools completely downplay the PSAT. They’ve suggested that it is merely a chance to practice for the SAT and not worth prepping for. I actually think they are doing a disservice to kids who are going to need some sort of financial assistance and perhaps basically ignoring the PSAT shows the bias of a school where 60% or so are full pay. On the other hand, I suspect very few students (full pay or on FA) apply to schools where a NMSF status is going to lead to a significant aid package. I think prepping makes ton of sense if you need aid. My kids did no prep, but I wish that they had.
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Note that what a college sees as a good fit in a student may not necessarily be the same as what a student sees as a good fit in a college. Students who are aspiring CS majors may see CMU as a good fit, and students who are aspiring BME pre-meds may see JHU as a good fit, but CMU and JHU are probably flooded with CS and BME pre-med applicants respectively, while needing to fill their classes with students in other majors.
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For #1, while the students who get into those most selective privates may not care about NMSF/NMF, they will not know that at the time they may sign up for the PSAT. They may want to have backup options with big scholarships that NMF can enable. For #2, taking the PSAT may be almost universal for college-bound students in some schools, but not others (particularly in ACT-dominant states).
Any test with high enough stakes will attract test-specific preparation, including that which tries to find ways to score higher on the test than the test taker’s strength in what the test intends to measure or proxy.
Exactly. Some families in NYC start formal prep programs for the SHSAT in 6th grade.
I wish NMSF weren’t used for that purpose. If students need to prep in order to become NMSF, what does “merit” in merit scholarships actually mean?
I know what you mean. At our local public, the normal math sequence tracks a student to take Calc BC as seniors (although many students drop down and substitute just calc AB, or AP Stats, or something else instead.) But many students are on the “accelerated” track and take Calc BC as juniors. A fair number are also on the “double accelerated” track or even on the “send them to the university starting in 7th grade” specialized program for the mathematically talented.
Our school district has a lot of families who are middle class immigrants who came here on specialized Visas to work in STEM, although not all the good math students come from these groups, of course. Kids from our district don’t do as well as it seems to me they should when it comes to admissions to Ivy+ schools. I think it comes down to them lacking the money and social/cultural capital that these schools seek. The Ivy+ schools can’t come out and say that, so it is coded as lower “personality” scores. Someone might ask why they don’t improve their personality scores by being football team captain etc, because sports captains make such good leaders in the eyes of many Americans. But in a school of 3,200 students, you would be lucky to even make the football team at all! No, these kids have to settle for being presidents of clubs, but this is looked down on by so many.
That they worked hard and achieved a great result?
Excellent point and another thing I have seen our college counselors try to get across, that going the road most traveled is not always the easiest road.
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I note when Harvard was pushed on these issues in the lawsuit, one of the defenses was that what the Plaintiffs were suggesting was the result of bias was actually just the result of correlations with things like patterns of public versus private attendance. Not necessarily something Harvard would ordinarily want to make explicit, but it beat the alternative, and it underscores that Harvard on some level understands its criteria are going to end up being easier to meet at privates.
As an aside, athletic team leadership was a common example, but Harvard pointed out it was also crediting things like debate team captains, school newspaper editors-in-chief, student body presidents, and so on. But obviously the same issue applies–at a large public, the set of such things per capita is going to be much lower than at a smaller private.
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NMSs are not the same ACT scores for a variety of reasons. One of the many relevant differences is that NMS are based on PSAT scores rather than SAT/ACT. PSAT scores play a much lesser role in college admission than SAT/ACT. As such there tends to be far less effort spent prepping for PSAT and achieving a high score than on SAT/ACT.
That said, Scarsdale has 379 students in their graduating class. Rye Country has 95 students in their graduating class. When you factor in the 4x difference in class size, Rye Country has a far higher rate of NMSs.
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Harvard doesn’t (and didn’t) assign a “personality” score or “personality” rating.
It really depends on the high school. There are high schools (e.g. certain quality publics) that produce many more NMSFs than successful candidates to the tippy-top schools. But there are also high schools (e.g. expensive private day schools) that produce many more successful applicants to the tippy-tops than they do NMSFs. It comes down to hooks and “personality” ratings.
Why do you insist on repeatedly misrepresenting this?
And possibly better non-standardized-test academic qualifications.
Not to rehash, but the most selective colleges care more about your actual scholastic performance than they do your ACT/SAT, let alone your PSAT. So if we see applicants from School A are getting in at a higher rate than applicants from School B controlling for standardized test scores, it could be because of non-academic factors, but it also could be because of non-standardized-test academic factors. And since we don’t have a reliable standardized measure of the latter, we don’t have a good way of controlling for it such that we could identify how much was left to explain with non-academic factors.
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So, were all the reports about it a lie? I am genuinely confused.
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/3704542-harvards-cult-of-personality/
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/15/politics/harvard-admissions-asian-american/index.html
Harvard used what it has long called a “personal rating,” not a “personality” rating. If I recall correctly, the “personal” rating is based on the essay, the interview, and the reports of his principal/GC and teachers. Harvard AOs are not rating the students “personality.”
As for whether the “reports” you cited are lies, some are heavily skewed editorials which, intentional or not, create a false impression of what Harvard was actually considering. Whether it rises to the level of a “lie” is perhaps a matter of opinion.
Most colleges, not just the most selective colleges, are likely to care more about actual scholastic performance. They look at test scores (and test score based status like NM) because:
- High school courses, curricula, rigor, and grading are somewhat variable in the US.
- USNWR rankings have historically emphasized test scores as the most important part of the student selectivity part of the ranking criteria, with top 10% class rank being a small portion.
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The last link @fiftyfifty1 provided was from the Harvard paper. And it cited Harvard’s own legal filing which stated: “Harvard’s filing states that admissions officers review candidates’ “humor, sensitivity, grit, leadership, integrity, helpfulness, courage, kindness and many other qualities” when determining the personal rating.”
Seems like semantics to deny someone could generalize this subjectivity as “personality” traits…
I also found this interesting: “In contrast, Harvard alumni rated Asians similar to whites on personality and better, on average, than Latinos and blacks. But it is the admissions office, not alumni, that ultimately determines Harvard’s personality ratings.”
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