<p>I applied to Cornell Early Decision to CALS and the AEM department. My SAT ended up being mid 1300's out of 1600 and slightly over 2100 out of 2400 (though from what i know Cornell doesn't care about the writing section). My ACT, on the other hand, ended up being a 33/36 which is equivalent tot a 1470/1600 and 2190/2400 SAT Scores (from the data i have). Seeing as my ACT is clearly better, i used that as my admissions test (with writing b.c it is required). Has anyone gotten into Cornell with this grade and only sending the ACT, and do you guys think this will inhibit my chances of gaining admission to Cornell b/c they don't have my SAT? Close to 95% of applicants submit their SAT to Cornell whereas only 20% or so submit their ACT, which makes me somewhat skeptical. When schools really do say they take the ACT in lieu of the SAT, has anyone seen this assertion justified through admission responses? </p>
<p>Let's hear all your thoughts and comments on my situation and the SAT vs ACT situation in general</p>
<p>you should be fine.
if you’re really worried, you could send both. they’ll only consider the score that makes you more competitive, besides your SAT score is within decent range for Cornell</p>
<p>LOL: The colleges spend tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of manhours to market themselves broadly, across a whole spectrum of potential applicants. And feiny and others suggest then that they automatically penalize about a third of these applicants because they come from school districts that traditionally emphasize only the ACT. Logic behind this?</p>
<p>C’mom. I know of no school that would be so stupid. Can anyone cite a single US college that doesn’t take the ACT? </p>
<p>“They value the SAT over the ACT.” I don’t think so. To do so would be to put yourself at a huge disadvantage over every other school that doesn’t . Let that urban myth fade away.</p>
<p>@T26E4
i don’t come from an area that emphasizes the ACT (Long Island, NY) but nonetheless i’d assume that you still hold your opinion that a college truly will take the SAT or ACT w/ Writing and weigh them equally.</p>
<p>It really annoys me that these threads keep popping up. Why do people continue to refuse to believe that the ACT and SAT are treated equally by admissions officers? Maybe it’s just an outlet for people’s paranoia, but I still find it pointless.</p>
<p>Can you guys explain just in terms of pure common sense, why adcoms would trust the, what 10- 20 year old, ACT over the trusty SAT with a significantly longer history?</p>
<p>Let me also remind that the SAT was created by the Ivies…</p>
<p>I have read that it is more based off of region. For midwest people, they consider ACT as normal and take that. For coast people, they consider SAT normal and take that. If an applicant sends an ACT but not an SAT from the coast, or a midwest person sends a SAT but no ACT, I believe they doubt it a little.</p>
<p>If you compare ACT and SAT scores at the same school and use the conversion tables it appears that they actually favor the ACT as the average will be lower on the ACT compared with the “comparable” SAT score. Try it.</p>
<p>Hmmm…well, most schools at least claim to treat the SAT/ACT equally. They shouldn’t as the ACT is flat out inferior to the SAT, and I do believe that you will get admissions officers who do have a bias toward the SAT.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, SAT has been significantly longer.</p>
<p>Why should the ACT be trusted?</p>
<p>The SAT does not reward for guessing… the ACT does. The SAT has 5 choices. The ACT has 4. Which one sounds harder to do well on and therefore more impressive?</p>
<p>By sheer luck you could technically get 25% of all questions right on ACT. On the SAT, you’d get a raw score of (on average) 0 if you guessed all on of the questions randomly.</p>
<p>“[M]ost schools at least claim to treat the SAT/ACT equally. They shouldn’t as the ACT is flat out inferior to the SAT…” </p>
<p>“Nevertheless, SAT has been [around] significantly longer.
Why should the ACT be trusted?”</p>
<p>And colleges are supposed to trust the SAT, a test created by a white supremecist whose purpose and desire in creating and marketing it was to have a standardized test that whites would score higher on than any minorities (including, at the time, blacks, asians, Italians, and Jews) and thus aid in preventing those low-life minorities from polluting the superior white gene pool by assuring they would not get into better colleges and improperly co-mingle with favored members of the white anglo saxon race? And, by the way, that white supremecist, Carl Bingham (a Princeton professor), himself later had an epiphany, abandoned his white supremecist beliefs and fought for a few years before his death to get colleges to cease relying on the SAT because he knew the test could not be trusted because it was biased to favor of the educational backgrounds of white upper crust males. Interesting how many taut the sacredness of the SAT without knowing its history or that the ACT was created partly because it was thought to eliminate much of the bias built into the SAT.</p>
<p>As to the OP, be aware that Cornell does not appear to allow you to do what you intend to do if you are applying to any program that requires SAT IIs. It prohibits exercise of score choice on the SAT and thus if you send SAT IIs, you will also have to send any SAT taken before you order the send. The ability to send only the ACT and not the SAT appears to apply only to those programs at Cornell (some) that do not require you to submit SAT IIs.</p>
<p>If the college says it weighs each test equally, then that is that. There is really no logical reason for them to favor one test over the other, and it would be simply disastrous for a school to say one thing and put into practice something else.</p>
<p>barrons, you’re absolutely right about the numbers but I believe there are a couple of reasons for this. First, many schools superscore the SAT but do not superscore the ACT. This will artificially inflate the reported SAT scores of multiple-time test-takers, as ACT-takers will only have their highest single sitting count. Second, the 25th/75th percentile CR+M SAT composites you see reported on US News are not true figures. Schools report their entering class 25th and 75th percentile CR scores on the Common Data Set; and then separately, they report their 25th and 75th percentile M scores. But these are in many cases not the same students; many scoring in the top quartile in CR score in the 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th quartile in M, and vice-versa. So the figure you get by adding the 75th percentile CR for the freshman class as a whole to the 75th percentile M for the freshman class as a whole will almost always be higher than the actual 75th percentile of (CR+M) for actual live freshman, most of whom will be a little lop-sided one way or the other. This, too, inflates schools’ reported 75th percentile SAT scores vis-a-vis their reported 75th percentile ACT scores, which are based only on a single ACT composite score.</p>
<p>Just one more way in which the statistical measures used by US News are really sloppy, unprofessional, and downright misleading.</p>
<p>That said, I haven’t seen any real evidence that colleges that say they have no preference as between SAT and ACT actually do prefer one or the other. That, too, would be really sloppy, unprofessional, and misleading, not to mention downright dishonest—and they just don’t want to go there.</p>