As an aside, I knew nothing about Chicago or its quirkiness until reading this forum. Having looked over the essay prompts, I’m suddenly dying to apply! I could get lost for hours answering those prompts. Hey, do you think they will except an SAT score from a few decades ago? Do you think “advanced age” is a hook?
Extremely few at Chicago are likely to have scores in that range, and almost all admits to UoC are likely to have more to their story than scores. If you look at students who do get admitted to highly selective colleges with abnormally low scores (with control for hook status), it’s not just a bunch a kids who can’t handle the coursework and do poorly. You might find the same thing at your HS, if they had a similar admission policy.
For example, the most successful CC alumni that I am familiar was a low SES kid who scored a 24/25 on his science/math ACT. He attended Stanford where he received a co-terminal master’s degree with honors, received the highest award Stanford gives to students (Dinklespiel), interned at both Google and the White House, and became the youngest ever elected official of his home town, starting his campaign while a student at Stanford. In 2016, he became the youngest ever mayor of a city with population 100k+. If he was planning on engineering or pre-med , maybe he would have struggled at Stanford. Whether true or not, it didn’t matter for him, because that wasn’t his goal.
…and now you know why the essays are so important, at least at UChicago.
Oh, Chicago was legendary for those prompts!
The biggest “risk” my daughter probably took with her application was in choosing the option to write her own prompt and going for something humorous, rather than making a serious effort at responding to their suggestions for that year.
I’d note that the reason that Chicago’s admit rate was high in those days was that their financial aid was terrible. Not NYU-bad, but in no way competitive with other elites. Many simply couldn’t attend because Chicago’s aid was very heavy on loans and student work requirements. And overall COA was on the high end. So that impacted yield-- I know many people from that time who got in but couldn’t afford to attend. They didn’t have ED in those days either – just EA - so no way for them to lock in full pay applicants.
A year or so after my daughter’s app year, they got an influx of money and started to offer financial aid that was competitive with the Ivies… and somewhere along the line they also started accepting the Common Application. So that made it easier to apply and more affordable for students who did get in. ED I and ED II were added to the mix much more recently.
“If you look at students who do get admitted to highly selective colleges with abnormally low scores (with control for hook status), it’s not just a bunch a kids who can’t handle the coursework and do poorly. You might find the same thing at your HS, if they had a similar admission policy.”
The only exceptions to the admissions policy that I’m aware of have been related to minority enrollment. Not sure if they are still doing it, but for several years in response to the outcry about low URM enrollment, they dropped the IQ test requirement for URM by (if I remember correctly) 16 points. It didn’t work well; the few kids admitted under that exception really struggled. But that is very small sample, just like your example of the most successful low income student you mentioned.
What 24/1200 applicants are you referring to? Why do some here insist it will be perilously unprepared kids? I missed that memo. The mid 50% is now 32-35 or 1460-1550. Why is your example so much lower?
This doesn’t have to follow your high school’s example. Nor is it about IQ. When I say, they aren’t going after unprepared, why is the answer an example of a much lower pool of stats? There are more reasons for kids choosing not to report scores than masking being incapable of meeting the U Chi opportunity.
It doesn’t even make sense to me that the counter to “prepared kids” is an example of a possibly unprepared kid. No, make that hordes of them.
If admission to your high school is primarily determined by score on an IQ test, that’s not what I’d call a “similar admissions policy” to the system used by UoC. UoC has many other criteria that influence the decision, which are expected to flag the bulk of students that would not be academically successful, leading to a relatively small incremental benefit beyond those criteria for scores.
For example, one study of 30+k UC students (the other UC) found a simple model considering HS GPA, number of honors courses, and demographics could explain 26.3% of variance in college GPA for engineering students. Considering all of these factors + M SAT + V SAT increased the prediction from explaining 26.3% of variance to explaining 28.5% of variance in college GPA. The incremental additional 2.3% of variance explained was relatively small in comparison to the other criteria. It’s also worthwhile to note that 70+% of the variance was unexplained by either model. Success in college depends on far more than just stats.
No it isn’t. Not that the “name” of any college matters that much, but low SES students who attend elite colleges (including, but hardly limited to, Chicago) and who do well there do fine in the job market, even if they don’t have one of the four or five majors considered most employable. Major is a big issue at your local directional public university, but it really isn’t nearly as significant an issue at the very top colleges. There, the mere fact that a student was admitted signals that there’s probably something pretty special about him or her, and if the student has gotten deeply involved in any major and produced work at the level expected by that university, the student will have demonstrated high-value workplace skills galore. Employers like brand-name investment banks or management consulting firms recruit without regard to specific major.
Anyone who is involved in hiring in any capacity knows how truly rare, are intelligent, well spoken, diligent candidates with excellent written and oral communications skills. STEM majors are hot right now, but every single company in the entire country needs those well qualified non-stem employees. Those kids have plenty of job opportunities. They may start at slightly lower pay scale then the engineers and CS majors, but they can rise quickly in an organization and go far.
The 24/1200 was a misquote of post #595 where it is implied that kids with 20/1200 (the low scores posted by UChicago for the class of 2021) are already being admitted. It’s also a reply to Calmom’'s assertion that she’d expect any kid in at least the top quartile of testing (24/1200) to have the ability to do well at UChicago level course work.
Nobody has insisted the change in admissions policy will result in “perilously unprepared kids”. I am expressing concern about the ability to discover new talent without using standardized testing as one of the many data points and pointing out the difficulties associated with that.
As for the idea that a UC study’s model finds it can predict college GPA, that’s on a population sample primarily from one state. Education in a single state is often more homogenous as schools follow state standards. An A in one school isn’t vastly different than an A in a school across the state. That’s not true when you look at the entire US population; state standards vary tremendously. There’s no reason to expect that a study done on a relatively homogenous state population will apply to the US as a whole.
Of course success in college depends on far more than just stats. Of course there are many undiscovered low income, highly intelligent kids. None of that is a good reason for removing one of the data points that enables evaluation of those things.
I always thought of u of Chicago as a place where they were trying to really be a bit more crotchety and less concerned with the softer side of college. And conformity be damned.
Where the softer ambition and ideals of “shaping a class” was not their concern. Tough. Best. Brightest. Hard.
What makes most colleges tick and rightfully so for their mission was not their problem. Want to bang heads with a future difference makers in hard science and economics. The types who develop new models for investment valuation. Professors etc.
I know it is a generalization and over simplification.
It seems perhaps this change just comes across as a bit of taming this view of the school. It’s just my view. And they have every right to do so. But it is different no matter how we slice and dice it.
There’s nothing at all wrong with their decision. But it seems more a confirming move similar to some world class LACs than the Chicago way.
That’s why there’s 600 posts in this thread imho
An institution whose basic nature is a bit more benevolently crotchety (but not mean, more like the fair but cranky physics professor)
@JBStillFlying I mean ask U of C Admissions why they are making the tests optional. How many admissions officers does U of Chicago have per applicant? Perhaps its about the admission officer’s time as well as what predicts success for an undergrad at U of C.
What did they use the test score for, is another question to ask them. If they eliminated based on the score,
that step is now gone. If they found they eliminated the best essay writers by using SAT scores, that could explain
why they don’t want to use SAT scores.
Perhaps they are interested in creative autistic spectrum candidates that don’t get special accommodations for test taking?
One thing to keep in mind is the Admissions Office has only so much time per application. I did some trainings with MIT Admissions, and understood their process, but even at MIT which has a very large admissions office, for the size of the applicant pool, there is limited time to spend with any one student’s application. Eliminating the test score check box allows U of C admissions to spend more time comparing other factors like writing ability, creativity, class breadth, leadership and the recommendation letters.
For MIT admissions, the “creativity box” gets evaluated in four main ways: A very creative essay answer, the interviewer rates the student on creativity, any comments in the rec letters about creativity, and an optional portfolio can be submitted. At MIT, faculty are involved in evaluating the portfolio, so art professors, music professors or say mechanical engineering professors, if its a maker portfolio.
MIT really does not use test scores as a big box, and I would predict they may get rid of the test scores, which
for them, I believe could be a mistake, for the math scores, given the amount of math needed to get any major, even music at MIT. MIT throws away the ACT science score by the way. It does not use the ACT composite, it creates its own composite score without the science score, which will hurt some students who score very high on the science portion but lower on the reading portion, at MIT.
@milee30 wrote: “… if we’re talking in the context of low income students, how the heck are you going to reliably identify them?”
@milee30: See my post here:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21605280/#Comment_21605280
Do you think there might be a student like this out there, and Chicago might be able to discover that student through a test-optional policy?
I’m thinking possibly. Because the percentage of core classes that are reading- and writing-heavy is so high compared to those that are math-heavy, I think a student strong in verbal aptitude and skills but weak in math skills could maybe do okay at Chicago, grade- and graduation-on-time-wise. And, especially with the internet now, in addition to free school and community libraries, I can see a highly verbally gifted student who has read widely on her own throughout her life maybe gaining the reading and writing skills to do okay at Chicago, even without a lot of help from her high school curriculum. Excellent and interesting essays (from a student who’s unlikely to have been coached), maybe a portfolio of writing submitted, top grades in math and science (and everything else) in the hardest classes offered in a weak school, letter of recommendation from a moderately knowledgeable teacher, and, say, a 20-hour-a-week job (showing that the student has lots of reserve capacity) might be enough to suggest to Chicago that a student like this could benefit from what the university has to offer. (Also, it seems that virtually everyone has smartphone now, so a video is also possible. Free iMovie on a school computer or a sympathetic teacher’s computer would make a wonderful video possible. I’m not sure that a video would be needed to show anything, though, if essays are indicative of potential.)
(None of this is saying that the number of these students will be high. I strongly disagree with the idea suggested by some in this thread that anyone whose SAT/ACT scores are lower than Chicago’s 25 percentile, or not reflective of what the student thinks her potential is, should be withheld; I think withholding scores decreases the chances that the a student actually gets admitted. But if this policy is more about getting students who would have been admitted had they submitted scores, to actually apply in the first place, then maybe Chicago could find a few students that they otherwise wouldn’t even know about … ?)
@Lea111 This is exactly what I was wondering. Suppose there are some Chicago-style students in the low-mid 1400s who are daunted by the combination of low acceptance rate and high score range. Perhaps this change might signal to them that their scores aren’t likely to be the reason for a rejection, that they might as well go ahead and apply (and submit scores).
There are kids so activated, despite. Kids involved in civic committees, advocacy, maybe student govt, sports, even debate. And more. Or kids traveling a distance to that better hs. There are poor parents who support education. None of this is painted in simple brush strokes. There’s no one part of the country they come from. We aren’t talking about average bump on a log kids whose academic skills are dubious. There’s a lot to be gleaned from the academic choices,grades, LoRs, activity levels/choices, and the presentation in the app/supp. You can look at the openness, range of interests, and evidence of the ability to self advocate.
In many ways, our own happy kids could learn from some of them, eg, what stretch and dedication are, what sorts of activities have some impact, even small starting points.
It doesn’t matter if, say, some of these kids go on to teach, work govt jobs or for a non profit, set up a small business, whatever. In many respects, the best are influencers. They don’t have to be doctors, engineers, lawyers, college profs, though life tells us some will be. If they have one of those ideas and shift during college, it’s ok. Same as it’s ok for our kids.
The issue with some will be, do they matriculate at UChi or some Ivy? Or other fine colleges. Some will choose to stay local, for various reasons. The FA matters, hence that change.
These kids aren’t a threat.
Who thinks they’re a threat?
“Do you think there might be a student like this out there, and Chicago might be able to discover that student through a test-optional policy?”
There definitely are students like that out there. Might even be thousands of them, spread across the country.
I’m still not sure about any college’s ability to discover them while minimizing the risk of a “false positive” - admitting kids who won’t be able to do the work. Instead of eliminating components of the current evaluation system, maybe a more effective way to find these kids would be to determine some key common factors and add measurements of those factors instead.
People here are so overthinking this! I doubt Chicago is going to admit a ton of applicants who don’t submit scores. Most of the people interested in going to Chicago naturally have pretty high test scores. But as their admission rate has gone down and their middle-50% spread has gone up, I’m sure they are not seeing as many applications from people with scores below their 25% level. And that’s too bad, because some of those people are really creative and great candidates. It’s not even necessarily a question of admitting students with weak skills. They may simply have weak preparation, and admissions people may be able to glean from their records and interviews that they are more than capable of catching up once they are in a different environment.
How many applicants like that are we talking about? A dozen? Two dozen? Not that many? Who knows? It really doesn’t matter. A handful of students like that can really add depth to a class.
And, by going test-optional, they don’t even have to take a hit in their reported test-score spread. They can still boast of being one of the colleges with the highest test scores. That makes it a no-brainer for the institution. The only way they get hurt is if high-test-score students decide the college has cooties because it’s test-optional. I think that’s unlikely to happen at any significant scale, and to the extent some kids think that way, good riddance to them. It’s a great way to screen out people you don’t really want.
“And, by going test-optional, they don’t even have to take a hit in their reported test-score spread.” They would take a hit on the US News & World Report ranking, though, right? Because of not reporting all scores, if that’s what they decided to do? (Doesn’t mean they’d drop from #3, though - I’m not sure how big a hit is caused by failing to report all scores; does anyone know?)
Re interviews: “UChicago no longer offers on-campus or alumni interviews as part of the application process.”