<p>@pizzagirl, In the case of a 4% vs. an 8% chance to be admitted, I think it’s more relevant to focus on the chance of success. If the difference in the admission rates were caused by the difference in scores, as opposed to some other factor that correlates with getting a perfect score, then for a student applying to 7 Ivy-type schools, the difference would be a 24% chance of an acceptance vs. a 44% chance. I don’t believe that’s actually true. But I think it’s plausible that score alone might boost you from 4% admit to 5% admit, and that would raise your chances from 24% to 30%. Is that worth another try? It might be in some cases.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t dream of placing my own purely speculative comment above an MIT admissions officer’s statement, but I can’t help recalling the admissions presentation I attended at Vanderbilt. After insisting that they practice holistic admissions, and look at everything about every candidate, the same representative clearly stated that students scoring beneath the 25th-percentile for test scores would need a “hook.” Some applicants are truly exceptional. I have said that, if Malala Youssafzai (sp?) wants to attend college in the United States, she should be able to go anywhere she likes, even if someone with higher stats is rejected. She is an extraordinary young woman, who has demonstrated her potential and ability on a global scale. I still suspect that perfect test scores are a “hook” unto themselves. I think it’s probably why Harvard, and several of the most selective colleges, request a full test history. They want to see whether someone got those scores on a single try, or needed multiple attempts over several years to attain them. This is total conjecture on my part, but I know my eyes widen when I see a 2400. Perfection is just that. Just as I suspect that - outside of certain public universities’ “local context” admissions policies - class rank isn’t really terribly important beneath valedictorian/salutatorian. Being the best counts, but I doubt that admissions officers pay much attention to whether someone was #18, #28, or #38. If a student has a competitive GPA in rigorous subjects, a fraction of a point will matter less than other criteria. </p>
<p>The problem is that admissions is not a game of chance. Anyone who is applying to a college thinking that they have a 10% chance of admission and a higher test score will boost their chances to 12% is wasting an application fee. </p>
<p>The Ivies and other elite schools get a large number of applications from students who have -0- chances of admission, a relatively small number of apps from individuals whose chances of admission are 80% or better, and then another chunk of apps from students who probably have 50/50 chances. That’s why every year there is always some news account about some first generation child of immigrant parents who has been accepted to all 8 Ivies. It’s not luck – it’s that the kid was an 80-percenter to start with. (In that case, terrific grades combined with great back story and the right demographics – and those kids probably don’t want a test score that is too high, lest it detract from the back story of being underprivileged and succeeding against all odds)</p>
<p>So what do those 50/50 kids need to do: they need something that makes their application stand out. And a high test score in a sea of high test scores is not going to do that. It is not a case of the ad coms looking at two identical applicants and picking the one with the higher score – a hypothetical often put forth on CC – but it’s going be some differentiating factor that makes the ad com like some candidates more, or be more intrigued by some. Maybe a funny essay, or more likely just something unusual about the kid – some accomplishment or something about the educational history that is different and more interesting than others.</p>
<p>Some will get in without anything special or quirky or amazing about their apps – but it won’t be the test scores. It will still be something different that appealed to the admissions reader, or perhaps happens to fit within some institutional priority. </p>
<p>Very weak tests scores will keep many students out – that’s what is meant with the idea of a “threshold” – but once in the gate with a sufficiently high test score, a slightly higher test score isn’t going to be enough to tip the balance either. </p>
<p>"I don’t believe that’s actually true. But I think it’s plausible that score alone might boost you from 4% admit to 5% admit, and that would raise your chances from 24% to 30%. Is that worth another try? "</p>
<p>I think you’re mistaken. You can’t just add up the chances like that. Otherwise, every kid could just apply to the top 20 schools and have a 100% chance of getting in at least one, and it doesn’t work that way.</p>
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<p>Sorry, but from my vantage point that is just wrong. The Brown information really proves it: something is hardly a “hook” if it only works 25% of the time. Taking into account superscoring – remember that? – and the ACT, there are probably something like 1,000-1,200 kids/year with “perfect” test scores, and an elite college may get applications from 400-500 of them. (Not everyone with perfect scores wants to apply to Harvard or Stanford, but pretty much everyone who retakes a 2350 or a 35 to get 2400/36 does.) That’s not a huge percentage of their total applicants, but it’s hardly a unique event, either. And many of those “perfect” applicants will have something glaringly imperfect that any admissions reader will see almost at the same time, long before the eyes widen too much. Not that there aren’t some applicants who widen the eyes – William Fitzsimmons called them “WOW applicants” (for Walk On Water) – but there are fewer of them, and it takes a lot more than top test scores and top grades to get into that category.</p>
<p>As for class rank: At the private school my kids went to for a long time, it was clear that HYPS would consider anyone in top 15 or so of the class – the school didn’t rank, but provided enough information to guess decile, and the colleges would usually see enough candidates to have a pretty good idea of grade distribution near the top of the class. At their public magnet, over a period of a number of years, I never saw anyone (other than an athletic recruit) get into one of those colleges without a top-10 class rank, but it was pretty clear that it didn’t matter so much whether you were #1 or #7. (Well, if you were a #1 who blew everyone else away at a very competitive school, that mattered. But #1 by a fraction was meaningless.) Other very selective colleges would go lower into the class at both schools, but in all cases he probability of acceptance fell pretty sharply as ordinal class rank increased, even taking into account factors like diversity and athletic recruitment. I certainly thought it looked like they cared about #18 vs. #28.</p>
<p>Calmom- the mods should flag your post as a permanent sticky for every parent of every HS senior trying to figure out if being co-president of the Honor Society is prestigious enough to tip them into Dartmouth, or if the kid needs to quickly run for student council as well.</p>
<p>Here’s the thing: while the SAT has its drawbacks and shortcomings and so forth, it is at least one standard by which students can be directly compared with each other. GPA is not. Even at the same school, a GPA is not directly comparable, a fact that makes the Naviance charts fairly difficult to parse accurately, especially for schools that represent a reach for some and a match for others–not, that is to say, schools that are always reaches for everyone. For example, and as context for this rant, one of my children had a high SAT (above 75% for most of the schools) and a low-ish GPA in comparison to the typical applicant (93, which translates to a 3.8 or 9, I think), and Naviance gives you an average SAT and an average GPA for successful applicants. The SAT is helpful, because it’s a constant, but the GPA could be in APs, or honors, or a mix, or regular–how are you to know what the benchmark really is? Especially for schools that don’t have bushels of applicants. (The kid got into an Ivy with that GPA, lower than that of any other accepted student from the high school.) But the GPA is held to be more significant in admissions than the SAT, so you are left with handfuls of sand in establishing what is a school that is likely to accept your kid. And this is why (to keep this relevant to the thread) I think people want to assign more significance to the SAT score than, perhaps, it has: there is so little that has objective significance in the process that anything that is knowable seems very significant indeed.</p>
<p>Most successful applicants are not incredible talents or super beings. For your normal Wyoming rancher kid who raised rattlesnakes for charity, a jump from 700s to 800s is going to make a huge difference to his/her admissions.</p>
<p>“I think people want to assign more significance to the SAT score than, perhaps, it has: there is so little that has objective significance in the process that anything that is knowable seems very significant indeed.”</p>
<p>No, it doesn’t. I don’t see why it’s not just as easy to see SAT scores as general ballparks, just like GPA’s are.</p>
<p>I guess there are 2 different types of people. The kind of people who see numbers as very strict things, where 1>2>3>4 in a very blunt order, and the kind of people who intuitively see numbers as gradations and ranges.</p>
<p>marysidney is right that standardized tests are an important way to compare applicants from different backgrounds. (Not the only way, though. Remember, people can read their essays, which are actual, unmediated performance. And there are various national programs like Siemens/Intel, USAMO, Telluride, Questbridge, that effectively certify kids’ bona fides.) </p>
<p>But I still think that is a gating issue. A valedictorian from Bumfork, ID (or North Philly High) with low 600s isn’t going to get much of a look. The same kid with mid-700s is for real, and a strong candidate; I don’t think that going to 800 is necessary. Fewer than 300 kids in Wyoming even take the SAT, and last year there couldn’t have been more than 10 with combined scores over 2100. (41 had A+ unweighted GPAs, though, and the median scores of that group were mid-low 600s.) A Wyoming rancher with mid-700s would be plenty extraordinary.</p>
<p>(I am not one of those who thinks that 700 vs. 800 doesn’t matter. I am one of those who thinks that you have to stand pat on a 740 or so, unless you have a specific reason to think that you can easily do better – like you skipped a page of the test.)</p>
<p>It also makes me think that how much the standardized tests matter may vary from applicant to applicant. (Of course it does.) If the faculty and college counselor at Exeter or Stuyvesant or Harvard-Westlake say, “This is the best kid in our class,” his or her SATs are basically irrelevant (and ditto if they communicate lack of enthusiasm for the applicant). But the valedictorian from Bumfork ID absolutely needs high SATs to be competitive. And the likelihood of an athletic recruit being recruited is going to be affected by his or her SAT scores, since that gets tracked.</p>
<p>It’s also worth noting that, while we keep talking about SATs here, colleges are also looking at SAT IIs, APs, and some IB SL tests, all of which are also pretty comparable. Harvard as much as says that they consider SAT IIs and APs more important than SAT Is or ACTs.</p>
<p>“It also makes me think that how much the standardized tests matter may vary from applicant to applicant. (Of course it does.) If the faculty and college counselor at Exeter or Stuyvesant or Harvard-Westlake say, “This is the best kid in our class,” his or her SATs are basically irrelevant (and ditto if they communicate lack of enthusiasm for the applicant). But the valedictorian from Bumfork ID absolutely needs high SATs to be competitive. And the likelihood of an athletic recruit being recruited is going to be affected by his or her SAT scores, since that gets tracked.”</p>
<p>Yes! Depending on the totality of the app, the SAT’s themselves are not necessarily the same % of the kid’s app.</p>
<p>Wow there are a lot of opinions about this, so I will add a few thoughts:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>How much SAT and ACT scores matter varies significantly by school. Each school has their own process and weightings to different components of the application. </p></li>
<li><p>Some schools like Ivies and MIT and Stanford have very high numbers of applicants with high SAT scores, and also achieve high yields. These schools can put a more modest premium on test scores. In contrast, schools who act as safety schools for Ivies, often have higher average test scores than Ivies. This is likely to be because they put a higher weight on test scores which inflates the apparent strength of their student body in the ratings. </p></li>
<li><p>The question of whether a 700 is really very different from an 800 seems to depend on a couple of additional factors. 1: It would seem to be less significant on one test than if it is on all three parts of the reasoning test and on two additional subject tests. It is much more significant when you compare a 3,500 score over all 5 tests with a 4,000 or 3,900 over all 5 tests.</p></li>
<li><p>Additionally, more modest differences are more meaningful with superscoring because it is more clear that the student had multiple opportunities to improve their score and could not. Missing 10 questions more than another student is less significant without superscoring because the differences may be explained by randomness of the exact questions selected.</p></li>
<li><p>When a college shows that applicants with a 750 + scores have 18% acceptance rates, compared to 11% of students with 700 scores, that is a 60% increase not a 7% increase as has been implied. Some portion is undoubtedly due to positive correlations with other factors, so it does not make sense to claim that the entire rate increase is related to SAT scores. However, it equally does not make sense to claim that the higher scores do not matter at all. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>Finally, I think the smartest thing I have heard an Adcom say regarding this issue is that SAT scores count “Less than most people think, but more than we will admit.” That is almost certainly true. </p>
<p>"but once in the gate with a sufficiently high test score, a slightly higher test score isn’t going to be enough to tip the balance either. " I’m not convinced the data completely support the idea that once past a certain threshold, the score doesn’t matter. For instance at Princeton, the admission rate for students scoring 2300+ is almost double that of students scoring 2100-2290, and yet they even admit some scoring in the 1500’s. Where’s the threshold? Where’s the complete lack of dependence on test scores at any level over the threshold?</p>
<p>“people can read their essays, which are actual, unmediated performance.” You’re joking, right? How can you say this when we all know there are families paying thousands of dollars to adult experts to “help” their kids write the essays? </p>
<p>@mathyone “Where is the complete lack of dependence on test scores?”</p>
<p>People argue for what they want to believe and not what the data show. In this case, they will say that there is a positive correlation between test scores and other relevant factors that explains the success of people with higher scores.</p>
<p>I don’t doubt that there is some truth there, but still, higher scores are helpful. In the end, top schools need to at least maintain their SAT range. To do that they have to admit more students with high scores. </p>
<p>It is possible that a few do not differentiate above some threshold, but I have no doubt that most do based on the data I see. </p>
<p>The real issue is that people with threshold level scores tend to argue that higher scores do not matter, and people with 2300+ scores tend to argue the opposite. Regardless of the evidence.</p>
<p>I can’t find this anymore, but MIT admissions officers have definitely said that it won’t help to retake if you’re already above 700 in all sections. At the very least, this blog post addresses the correlation versus causation issue- <a href=“The Difficulty With Data | MIT Admissions”>http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/the-difficulty-with-data</a>.</p>
<p>@shravas Well, this blog post clearly says that MIT does not prefer higher SAT scores. However, actions speak louder than words. if that were true, they would not bother to ask for SAT scores at all. Back in reality, Well, they not only do require them but also require a math and a science SAT subject test. That further suggests that they do care about SAT scores or just have a sick sense of humor. </p>
<p>Nah. Maybe it needs another read.<br>
I was going to quote this as representative, but the whole link is good.</p>
<p>"…and that problem is this: sometimes, you don’t have all of the data, either because it is unavailable to you, or because something can’t be captured. And then, if you try to build a model based on these incomplete data, you are liable to draw conclusions consistent with the data but descriptively incorrect."</p>
<p>And, if the scores do not matter over a certain threshold, why do some schools want to see all the scores? Why don’t they just ask for the highest so they can check off the same box they use for everyone?</p>
<p>" if you try to build a model based on these incomplete data, you are liable to draw conclusions consistent with the data but descriptively incorrect."</p>
<p>Virtually all models have incomplete and imperfect Data. That is why they are models. If he thinks you should not build models with less than perfect data, then he should tell the MIT faculty. That would put most of them out of jobs.</p>