<p>One could say that a reputable admission office would not allow the BIAS of one of its readers to violate the STATED POLICY of the office. This is something that a dean or director of admissions should not accept. </p>
<p>On the other hand, the bias becomes more understandable if the office claims to want to see all scores. Of course, the question (again) remains if the adcoms really see all the scores without having to make a considerable effort to dig deeper in the file. Considering the oft-repeated claims that adcoms spent only a few minutes on a file and have to read the full application, several essays, transcripts that tend to be arcane, AP/IB results, the stories of adcoms truly analyzing the number and timing of standardized test scores become more farfetched in these days of 20,000 to 30,000 applications. </p>
<p>This said, I do believe that the number of tests could --in theory-- provide the clincher between two candidates who extremely similar applications. </p>
<p>Sadly enough, the colleges do know, and we can only speculate about what happens! ;)</p>
<p>Exactly! The response of many admissions offices to the availability of score choice has been very illuminating. I used to take the colleges at their word- i.e, that they only care about your best subscores. But the degree of indignation with which some adcoms have reacted to score choice tells me that at least some of them do indeed, care about the number of times you took the test.</p>
<p>vp, you are remember correctly, I reported another year that one admissions officer (I think it was that Yale one again!) said she might, and I emphasize MIGHT wonder about an applicant who took the SAT five times that they didn’t have something better to do on a Saturday morning. But my impression then was that if the application was then full of nice EC’s, great recommendations etc. They wouldn’t worry about it. It’s kind of like when the credit card companies call you about unusual purchases. It’s a red flag, but not necessarily going to harm you.</p>
<p>I realize that is a hair-splitting difference, but I think that the indignation stems more from having lost a bit of control about the information they COULD see. </p>
<p>Fwiw, did you ever hear a whisper of indignation about the ACT’s score choice? That loophole has existed for a long time, and if there was one small silver lining in the SAT Score Choice boondoggle, it’s that some colleges will now also pretend to require all tests scores to be submitted. Now we can hope the schools will also close that silly loopholes of allowing the ACT to replace Subject Tests. </p>
<p>Oh well, there is indeed a lot of grey in discussions such as this one!</p>
<p>I have asked this before, so forgive the repetition, but:
do we have any sense if CB will identify students who use score choice? How will the colleges know if all scores are submitted or not. What will the penalty be for the student who uses score choice for a school that demands all scores? Also, how does this apply to the subject tests?</p>
<p>Somewhere on the CB website I remember reading that they will not tell the recipient college whether the scores received are ALL the scores or SOME of the scores. But I do not recommend circumventing the requirements of the colleges you are applying to. It is not worth it.</p>
<p>Accepting CR of 200 is consistent with any SAT policy. All private schools and most public ones reserve the right to offer admission to any applicant (or non-applicant!) regardless of SAT details.</p>
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<p>Information sessions are unreliable on this matter, because either the question is not asked as precisely as in the CB survey, or the admissions reps are trying to emphasize the more basic general point to a lay audience — that the school calculates SAT scores based on the highest results even when other scores are available to them. </p>
<p>Barnard told the College Board that they require all scores, which is not surprising considering that Columbia was one of the schools mentioned in the “colleges opting out of score choice” publicity.</p>
<p>I agree with vicarious’ points. Given their reaction to score choice, the colleges cannot be trusted on their statements regarding how they evaluate SAT scores.</p>
<p>I get that they want to superscore for ranking purposes. Why not let me choose which scores they do that with? Since it doesn’t cost extra to provide them with several scores, if students are told that several scores are to their advantage, why not trust them to send those scores? It is pretty obvious, which ones to send and which to withhold.</p>
<p>Clearly, what the colleges do not want is score suppression. (and as mentioned, the lack of control). I think that those colleges who want to see ALL the scores, must hold lower scores on some tests or repeated testing against some applicants.</p>
<p>Since the student is paying for the testing and the scores, it should be his choice which scores to disclose.</p>
<p>siserune, there was no difference in what they told us and what they told the College Board, but they talked at length about why they would prefer (or in the case of Barnard require) to see all the scores. They said they want all the scores so they have higher scores to report to US News and they say it generally makes applicants look better. Will an occasional less good score influence the committee? Perhaps, but perhaps they’ll realize that sometimes a kid has a headache, or the dog died or there was a noisy room. There are all sorts of reasons why even a kid who normally scores well might end up with less than optimum scores.</p>
<p>There’s also a big difference between surmising that for a typical applicant with a typical SAT transcript, it doesn’t hurt to take another SAT, and what we saw in CC for the last couple years: self-professed experts making authoritative statements to the effect that “it can never matter”, “take it ten times if you want to”, “colleges don’t care how often you take it” — and posting dozens of FAQs saying this. Given what is now known, would you offer that as advice to high school students? Or would you prefer something a bit closer to reality?</p>
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<p>CC has some very vocal denialists who refuse to concede (in the face of admissions officers’ written statements) that the latter types of situations are a possibility, until and unless Harvard provides a sworn affidavit that this has happened and been the sole cause of a rejection for a large number of applicants. </p>
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<p>That’s a bad analogy, because there is no direct comparability of clubs or positions, but admissions can assess the difference between a 680 and a 600 math SAT on test dates a few months apart. Does it make a big difference if your SAT total is 2400 (one sitting) or 2400 (highest-scored from three tests) or 2280? Maybe not, but potentially yes in a few cases. Does that mean we should put out FAQs that “no college differentiates between SAT scores from 760 to 800”, or other misleading statements on the same subject?</p>
<p>The beef, in the Clara Peller sense, was that if college X admitted a student with a 200 somewhere on the SAT report, that fact doesn’t say anything about whether college X looks only at highest scores. All it tells you is that having an anomaly doesn’t <em>necessarily</em> exclude an applicant.</p>
<p>Why would anyone “concede” to what amounts to nothing more than idle speculation about “situations that could be a possibility.” Aren’t you one of the very vocal denialists who refuse to consider the EVIDENCE that students with as many as FIVE SAT trials have been accepted by Harvard. I provided you with the source of the story … where is your written statement that students have been denied BECAUSE of the fact they took the SAT “too many” times?</p>
<p>The reality is extremely simple. Except for the people responsible for admissions, none of really knows WHY a student was accepted nor … rejected. Your claim that a student has been rejected for the sole reason of having too many SAT trials is preposterous, and I seriously doubt that an admission officer would provide a written statement confirming such a reason for a rejection.</p>
<p>Another reality is that people love to twist comments about taking the SAT as “many times as you want” into ridiculous proposals such as taking it 10 times. Such hyperbole is far different from the suggestion that a test taker should take it as many times it takes to reach his or her potential. Further, what seems to be less understood is that there is NO need to take the SAT an “obscene” number of times if a student decides to take advantage of an adequate preparation. Students should not view taking the SAT multiples times as a practice, but as an end to a reasonable preparation. </p>
<p>At the end, no single truth exists. For the overwhelming majority of students, taking the SAT once or twice is all that is needed. For a small number of students, it is appropriate to take it a few more times. Again, there is a HUGE difference recommending to take the SAT many times and recognizing that there is little to no evidence to do so!</p>
<p>Maybe because some current admissions officers state it in black and white in CC and in other published sources, and some past admissions officers say the same.</p>
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<p>If I or anyone else denied that Harvard can and does accept students with 5 or 7 or 15 SATs, please show us the posting. I did point out that Harvard accepting a five-time SAT taker is completely consistent with Harvard reserving, and occasionally exercising, the right to make (positive or negative) inferences from the whole of the SAT report. When presented with a survey question specific enough to clarify the matter, Harvard told CB that they do not have the policy of operating as though the non-highest scores don’t exist.</p>
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<p>Which is why the demand for examples of students rejected <em>because</em> of too many SAT is denialism. But wait – an example was in fact posted in CC, and the leading denialist then hounded the poster demanding still more proof of the “anecdotal” assertion by the pseudonymous CC user. The anecdotal level of evidence was OK, however, for anonymous users saying they knew people who got in with 5 SATs to Harvard (i.e. the denialists hailed those postings as revelatory).</p>
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<p>Show us where I claimed that. What I pointed out is that demands for examples of rejected students (solely due to excessive SAT!) were clear denialism, since evidence of that strength is impossible to come by, and the issue was never outright rejection but potential adverse impact. </p>
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<p>10 times and the other remarks are either direct quotations or very close to that (not changing the meaning) from tokenadult’s many postings on this subject.</p>
Barnard’s admission policies are totally unrelated to Columbia’s, and their policies toward test submission have not always been historically consistent. </p>
<p>As to why they might want all scores there is more information to be gained from a sequence of tests than just score alone.</p>
<p>^Point taken as to SAT’s, but as to admissions in general, an understanding of correlation will tell you that Columbia’s admissions also exerts causality on Barnard’s, without any need for official coordination.</p>
<p>??? I can’t even make sense of your sentence, but my point is Barnard has a different policy than Columbia with respect to SAT II’s, so there is no reason to suppose that it would consult with or be influenced by Columbia with regard to reporting options for the SAT I.</p>
<p>Again, Columbia & Barnard have entirely separate admissions departments. There is no “correlation” whatsoever between the two of them… I honestly don’t have a clue as to what you might have been trying to say in any case.</p>