“Give admissions more credit than that. It has never been the case and that isn’t going to change now.”
Giving admissions a lot of credit - and I do, it’s a huge task to sort through the apps - it’s hard for me to see how going test optional will help poor students, especially those from no-name schools. NoName High School graduates several students each year with high GPAs. The NoName graduates with good parental support will have some great ECs, while the poor students will have a lot of work experience and fewer ECs. If the AO is choosing between those, a poor student with a high SAT/ACT will stand out as being one who is capable of doing the school work even though s/he hasn’t been able to do much so far but go to school and work. Without the high test scores, how will AOs be able to pick between the straight A students from NoName who did just fine when 50% of the grade was homework and not being arrested vs the ones who have the potential to do really advanced things if given the chance?
I’m cynical by nature, but I think this has to do with increasing applications (thereby reducing % admitted) more than anything. One of my kids got a 21 on his first ACT, and you would think he was an All American quarterback with a 36 ACT the way Chicago sent him personalized letters asking him to apply.
It’s a great school, but they are more interested in gaming the USNWR system than anyone else in the country. Which makes no sense to me, but it is definitely a top priority.
Hardly anyone talks about what I have always viewed as the elephant in the room, which is the fact that low-income kids often do not have access to savvy guidance counselors or teachers with experience writing effective letters of recommendation. My kids go to a private college prep high school and receive fantastic support from a pair of dedicated college counselors who spend all of their time networking with AOs, assisting students, and crafting rec letters while working with teachers. I have also worked at a public high school that serves a disadvantaged majority-minority population, and that has the same number of counselors for 6x the number of students, these counselors were not experienced with elite admissions nor had the time to improve, and teachers rarely wrote letters of recommendation so lacked savvy on how to talk up their kids.
If you take test scores off the table, that leaves grades, essays, and letters of rec. While grades are grades are grades, essays and rec letters are two areas where having access to experienced (and expensive) college counseling can have the greatest impact. My kids at their private high school get a dedicated college essay workshop, the counselors proofread ALL essays, and the teachers write dozens and dozens of rec letters each and every year. Kids at a standard public school (or a more struggling one) do not get this sort of help automatically.
I can see where people THINK going test-optional helps disadvantaged applicants, but colleges already knew how to weigh test scores for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds against test scores for kids from elite schools (with test prep, yada, yada). I think going test-optional will actually help the mediocre privileged kid who gets lots of polish from school, family, and private coaching.
^Very good point. Lots of people are unaware that 91% of US high schools kids attend public schools which may only have a few GCs for several thousands kids. I know my kids HS has student to GC ratio of 850:1! For vast majority of unhooked middle class kids having an outstanding score is the only measure of comparison with kids from other schools.
@BooBooBear , I agree that poor kids will labor under the other disadvantages you describe. If AO’s can take account of such disadvantages in evaluating test scores, as you suggest, why would they not be able to do the same for these other factors?
What I don’t like about these tests is the way they fetishize numerically a score that pretends to be something close to pure intelligence but is really something else entirely - a technical learned skill in taking a particular kind of test. It’s not only that those avenues of specialized learning are unavailable to the poor but that they’re not very significant in themselves as a measure of receptivity to a Chicago-style education. That said, a smart poor kid who does have the chops - or gains them through study - to score well should certainly send those scores in to Chicago. They will have all the greater impact when put together with the other data about where that kid is coming from. Likewise, if that kid lacks super-polished essays, loving letters from guidance and an amazing array of EC’s I believe the AO’s will take account of the factors that have made the kid look less good in all the ways that more privileged kids do.
Some are indicating that Chicago will now be less attractive to a high-scoring but more conventionally privileged kid. I will start to believe that as and when the reputation of the school itself changes. Nobody in Admissions, I feel confident, will permit the ethos of the University of Chicago in that department to be transformed from what it has been throughout its history. If a kid chooses not to apply to the school for the silly reason that it has made test scores optional, then that kid doesn’t have the stuff the U of C is seeking.
What percent of poor students have access to a school like Stuyvesant? It would be surprising to hear that even 5% of the poor students in the US have access to a school like that.
If the “something you are good at” is taking standardized tests, then that’s not a quality that deserves to be valued at all. I hate that many kids seem to see their test scores as an actual accomplishment worthy of respect. Learning stuff is an accomplishment worthy of respect. Producing stuff is an accomplishment worthy of respect. Helping people is an accomplishment worthy of respect. Acing an SAT test is not an accomplishment worthy of respect. At best, it’s a diagnostic indication that you are smart and acculturated. At worst, it shows that you can learn how to play a game successfully.
No one said that Chicago is going to stop valuing intelligence or intellectualism. If that happened, I hope it would turn off potential applicants who care about intelligence and intellectualism. But devaluing test scores? Good riddance to anyone who thinks devaluing test scores means devaluing something important.
In any event, I expect this to have minimal effect on actual admissions. Most of the kids who are serious candidates for admission at Chicago will have very good test scores. Not because Chicago values high test scores, but because it values qualities that are fairly well correlated with high test scores. Most of those kids are going to send their test scores in no matter what, because they are a plus. A few kids who don’t send in test scores will also be accepted. That will consist of two groups – kids that would have applied and gotten in anyway if they sent their test scores, but now Chicago won’t have to count those lower test scores in their CDS anymore because it won’t have them, and kids whose fabulousness is absolutes apparent from their applications and files, but who would never have applied before because they thought their test scores disqualified them. If Chicago finds three or four kids like that per year, the whole program is an enormous win-win-win all over the place. Lower admission rate, higher reported scores, and some unique students who weren’t applying to the entire Ivy League.
What percent of poor kids are smart enough to thrive at a place like Stuyvesant? I’ll guess around 2-3%, and that’s a theoretic maximum, assuming all have access to quality primary education.
What percent of rich kids? Maybe 5-10%, with the same assumption.
This is the tail end of the distribution of smarts. Let’s keep at least one place for the smart kids, no?
“Let’s keep at least one place for the smart kids, no?”
Totally agree. If it were up to me there would be a Stuy type school in every school district in the US. My point isn’t that Stuy should go away, it’s that most poor kids don’t live in an area where there is a Stuy so that 2-3% of poor kids you reference end up at a low performing public school.
Many poor kids end up at low performing public schools. The standards for those schools are low, so being a 3.9 or 4.0 student at one of the low performing schools isn’t an intellectual stretch and isn’t an indicator that the student could be successful at a UChicago. Which goes back to one of my earlier questions - if there are no more standardized test scores, how does a school like UChicago figure out which of the students coming from the low performing public schools have the raw materials to be successful? Two poor kids from a low performing school may have a 4.0 and work 2 part time jobs; one might have the ability to do well at UChicago and the other be the type that got the 4.0 because s/he hands in homework and didn’t get in any flights. We’ve already covered how the teachers and GCs at these low performing schools may not know how to write the type LORs the schools are looking for. So… how does a UChicago tell the one poor student from the other? Right now, standardized test provide one more clue.
@sbballer: Low income, first generation, immigrant Asian students should stand to benefit from the expanded financial aid and the scholarship + guaranteed first internship for 1st gen students. We are focusing on the test policy, but there is more to the new slew of programs.
Mayor De Blasio has proposed eliminating the Specialized High School Admissions Test. Even without a total elimination, the mayor said that “starting in September of 2019, the city will offer 20 percent of seats at the schools to students from ** low-income families ** and just missed the cut on the exam.”
I cant help but feel that it devalues those admitted to class of 2022 who were admitted, in part, because of their test scores. I understand the holistic approach but don’t you have to set the bar somewhere
Isn’t the admissions office supposedly “need-blind”. If this is so, all AOs can really do is look at the applicants high school and infer from there whether the kid has some of the disadvantages described in this discussion - inferior LOCs, reduced access to ECs, counseling, test prep etc. and adjust their evaluation of the application accordingly. While I agree that UChicago will get some different kids applying by dropping the SAT/ACT requirement, it seems to me that test scores are not really any more biased toward privileged kids than any of the other factors considered. And some high schools have a very mixed socio-economic profile so it’s hard to tell which kid is really advantage/disadvantaged. I’m not totally against this move, but I do worry that it will be harder to tell which kids are academically up to the rigor of UChicago.
^^@Hebegebe - fortunately, the other schools he’s interested in make it clear that essay is not required. UChicago has been vague on this subject for a couple years at least.
“I sincerely hope that this new test-optional policy will enable UChicago to accept students like me – students who have that “quirky spark” it’s looking for but may have sub-par standardized exam performance.”
@poplicola at #43: how do you feel about standardized testing for med/grad school?