Unlike all those other places, who dropped their testing requirements for completely different reasons. And then there’s MIT, stuck in the middle, uniquely unable to glean their disadvantaged applicants’ true academic chops from their LORs and essays.
I dunno… This is all sounds too contrived for me, with all due respect to Caltech.
I don’t think so. I think the kids that are attracted to CalTech are a subset of the kids attracted to MIT. A lot of “average excellent” STEM kids will apply to MIT, but won’t apply to CalTech. The hardcore ones will consider both.
Also, it is likely that a “merely” “average excellent” student can succeed at MIT, but not Caltech. MIT may find that a top-end SAT/ACT score, along with other top-end ordinary high school academic indicators, gives a reasonable likelihood of success should the applicant be admitted and attend. At Caltech, such indicators would not be sufficient, so they have to look at higher level academic indicators than those, so SAT/ACT becomes much less relevant or irrelevant in that evaluation.
The number of applicants to Caltech increased dramatically (to well over 13k prior to last year when it switched to REA). Its admit rate dropped below 3.5% (lower than even MIT). For Caltech, this isn’t a good use of its faculty resource. Caltech differs from MIT, and any other elite school, in its heavy use of faculty resource in admissions (it claims that the full application of every admit is reviewed and endorsed by at least one member of its faculty). It doesn’t want to use 60% more faculty resource on so many applications that will eventually be rejected.
Caltech has extended its test blind policy, but this isn’t necessarily its final decision on this matter. For Caltech, it’s either test blind or test required. A test optional policy would force it to treat one group of applicants differently than the rest, which is inconsistent with its core belief (“No one shall take unfair advantage of any other”) extended to applicants. It’s still evaluating the effect of its test blind policy and may return to a test required policy in the future. Also, as others have pointed out, applicants to Caltech are a bit more self-selective than even MIT, so the impact of missing test scores may not be as apparent (or as quickly felt).
BTW, its yield has increased to 53-54% before it made the switch to REA.
So, as the number of Caltech applicants swelled (in large part, no doubt, thanks to the new test-blind policy), those applicants, as a group, became even more self-selective?
I mean, you and I seem to agree that ACT/SAT don’t do a good job discriminating students at the highest levels, but still, it can’t be that of those 13,000, at least half couldn’t easily be eliminated based on scores alone (if they even bothered to apply in the first place had they have to submit their scores), reducing the admissions burden on faculty.
MIT probably had seen enough data that it decided to require test scores. Caltech, on the other hand, made the decision that it wanted to keep its test blind policy for the time being until it has more data on its impact. When both schools were test optional/blind, the relative impact of missing test scores was probably less at Caltech than at MIT, because applicants to MIT were likely less self-selected than applicants to Caltech when test scores weren’t needed (i.e. more insufficiently “qualified” applicants would apply to MIT).
Our elder was one of them. And even though he ended up attending MIT for a number of reasons (lacking in hardcore-ness not being one of them:), it’s his Caltech admission we were most proud of at the time 
In the end, Caltech will, of course, not have a problem filling their 250 seats with excellent kids no matter what they do, but these latest policies, combined, will no doubt cost them some top-notch candidates that would otherwise cross-applied and perhaps ended up there, and most importantly, they already cost them the unique place in the admissions game they used to share with MIT.
For Caltech, they could easily be eliminated in other ways before needing to pass them to faculty reading.
So why REA then?
Just to force the kids to make the choice between them and MIT before they even apply?
What other schools’ applicants will be dissuaded? Everyone else is REA/ED already.
I believe they want to cut down the number of early applicants. They simply don’t have enough people (relative to the number of EA applications) to make their decisions on EA applicants by early December (remember that they wanted to announce their EA decisions a week or so before MIT).
I dunno, folks. I revere Caltech as much as the next guy, but I just sense a huge internal contradiction here. If they want fewer applications, why go test-blind?
Surely going test-blind (a new development) is a much larger factor in driving up the number of applications recently than MIT applicants cross-applying (not a new development).
I agree with you that test optional/blind policy drives up the number of applications. But given that Caltech wants to keep its test blind policy for the time being, the alternative to reduce early applications is to switch to REA. If it reverts to test required at some point, we’ll see if it also switches back to EA.
My sense is they would have to relocate from California first.
Or maybe it isn’t that complicated. CalTech has explained why it is currently test blind . . .
The current decision to extend the testing moratorium to five years is supported by a rigorous internal analysis of the academic performance of the last seven undergraduate first-year cohorts, representing classes that matriculated before and after the moratorium went into effect. The study, conducted by members of the Caltech faculty supported by professional staff, indicates that standardized test scores have little to no power in predicting students’ performance in the first-term mathematics and physics classes that first-year students must take as part of Caltech’s core curriculum. Further, the predictive power of standardized test scores appears to dissipate as students progress through the first-year core curriculum. The extension will allow for the collection of additional data from students enrolled under the moratorium, including one class that will have graduated from the Institute, and will facilitate a more extensive examination of academic performance and its relationship to standardized test scores.
Not really sure how much insight the Vice Provost of Enrollment Management (i.e. a guy responsible for juicing up the yield) at Oregon State University (a school with average 50% ACT of 21-28) can offer to the discussion of admissions to one of two schools where 75% of their students score 35 or better (at least before one of them went test blind).
But I want to specifically call him out on this part:
“One of the groups they despised was Jewish immigrants, especially from Eastern European countries. When those students worked hard and got good grades, it was hard to deny them when you admitted wealthy White kids from prep schools who didn’t have the same grades. So, a tool to root out natural genetic superiority seemed just the thing they needed. The SAT supported the Jewish quotas many highly selective universities had in the first half of the last century.”
I do not know what his source is for this (he doesn’t cite it), but I do know that the opposite is true: that the Jewish quotas in the US were instituted in spite of Jewish high academic and test performance (in fact, precisely because of it), and the entire institute of holistic admissions (quote-unquote), which is now considered part and parcel of American college admissions but is virtually unknown anywhere else in the world, was born out of the original sin of antisemitism.
Consider this century-old letter by Harvard’s President Abbott Lowell:
“To prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews, I know at present only one way which is at the same time straightforward and effective, and that is a selection by a personal estimate of character on the part of the Admissions authorities.”
Source:
Jon Boeckenstedt is a renowned leader in college admissions. I am sure if you reached out to him he would be willing to engage, as long as you are respectful.
Oregon State University has an admission rate of 90%.
I realize this may be more of a norm than the schools discussed in this thread are, and his expertise may be extremely valuable to other similarly-situated schools.
Oregon State University is a state flagship, with a mandate to educate a wide range of students in its state. This is going to be reflected in its test score range and admission rate. I fail to see how mentioning these stats gives any actual evidence that an administrator at this school is ignorant or misinformed; it just makes you sound elitist (suggesting that nobody at a school like OSU could know much of anything). It would be far better to focus on the content of the article, as you did above.
His experience is much broader than just Oregon State, where’s he been maybe 4 years. There is likely no one involved in college admissions who would argue that Jon is not one of the industry’s leaders.
Looks like he spent most of his career at DePaul, which has similar admission rates and test scores.
As for institutions like Caltech (at least pre-TB), he bluntly accuses them of gate-keeping:
“The perception that high SAT averages in your freshman class means your students are “smart,” when it can also mean you’ve built a gate to keep poor people out, is a double whammy of brand goodness for the nation’s “elite” institutions. As I wrote once, “Perhaps ‘elite” really means ‘uncluttered by poor people’.””
And as things currently stand, MIT is the last gate-keeper standing, for better or worse.