<p>Your first posting was clear as to SAT policies being unrelated; point taken. For admission in general, such as the distribution of accepted SAT scores, Barnard is necessarily driven by Columbia to a certain extent, with or without official coordination. Correlation and causality was a reference to the canard that you like to spring in (too) many of these threads.</p>
<p>I can’t see how the information provided by the CB would actually alter a student’s approach to test taking, given that students apply to more than one school and these schools all have different stated policies.</p>
<p>For example, let’s say you want to go to HYPS. Stanford and Yale require all scores, Harvard considers the highest but also other scores and Princeton considers only the highest score. How can you strategize with these different policies?</p>
<p>Most of the students applying to the most selective colleges have taken the SAT or ACT more than once. The last thing students need to worry about is whether or not taking it 2 or 3 times is going to affect their chances at schools like HYPS. </p>
<p>Given all the reverse engineering that goes on in forums like this one, I would be surprised that no one has ‘discovered’ a trend that taking the test multiple times affects admissions to highly selective schools, if such a practice actually exists. In addition, given all the ‘expose’ type articles on the ‘dirty secrets of college admissions’, I have yet to hear the story that some adcom dinged a student who had 2200+ on the SAT because he or she took it more than X number of times.</p>
<p>It’s not just the reasoning test, though. The other part of the equation is that score choice allows you to select which, if any, of the subject test scores you wish to disclose.
There are considerable differences in the requirements for these, with some applicants asked to submit up to 6 (Georgetown for homeschoolers, e.g.). Again, who knows how each of the subject tests are evaluated. A student may well be penalized for having an off day on a subject test or having covered different material in his curriculum for that subject.</p>
<p>I had no idea this discussion would get so heated, or I would have steered clear of it!!</p>
<p>But now that I have participated, I would like to ask just one simple question:</p>
<p>Why would a college require that you submit all your scores when they say that they will only consider your highest subscores?</p>
<p>Note: I don’t have such strong feelings about this issue as some people here! I do believe that this is not a very big issue, or at least it shouldn’t be. I used to take the colleges at their word when they said that they superscored, but I became incredulous when I saw their reaction to score choice. Many of the statements clearly indicate that they want to be able to tell how many attempts it took to get at that score.</p>
<p>Lets assume the colleges actually do use the SAT-I scores the way some here have described : that a low level clerical employee simply identifies the highest subscores and transfers them over to a spreadsheet of some sort. It would be a trivial matter for College Board to offer students an option to simply send the highest superscore to colleges. Wouldn’t that save some money and improve accuracy for these colleges? I mean why go through 20,000-30,000 score reports and rely on a human being to identify the highest subscores? How would colleges react to this being incorporated as a form of score choice? I can just picture the apoplectic attacks that admissions deans would have.</p>
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<p>It may be worthwhile to ask a few colleges that. Stanford’s stated rationale, if I remember correctly, is that a student who took the test several times would be more likely to be a high-income student, and low-income students should be on a level playing field with those. To that, bluebayou made the astute comment in another thread that if Stanford starts to require reporting all scores, as it appears to do now, the low-income student who took the ACT twice now has to pay twice as much to report his scores. I’ve already asked one former Stanford admission officer about that, and she was rather chagrined at the inconsistency of Stanford’s rationale. But the thing to do is to ask. In any event, it would be consistent to say, “We regard each student’s highest subscores as making up the student’s true SAT score for purposes of acting on an admission file, while also taking care to give a boost to low-income applicants.” If a student is a low-income applicant (and in the world of elite college admissions, any income at the median United States household income level and lower is “low-income” from the point of view of the colleges), then the student had best make that clear on the face of the application file. </p>
<p>Ask your favorite question at the next college information session in your town. </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/650085-spring-2009-college-fairs-info-sessions.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/650085-spring-2009-college-fairs-info-sessions.html</a> </p>
<p>I also suggest sending emails to college admission offices of interest, and asking very specific, focused questions about whatever aspect of this issue is unclear to you. I note for the record that Dartmouth’s recent answer to me by email (replying to a question I posed to Dartmouth after reading another CC thread) is completely consistent with how Dartmouth answered the College Board survey.</p>
<p>^^ Agreed. Dartmouth is consistent. Yale and Stanford are inconsistent.</p>
<p>Reading the Stanford rationale, it would seem that a high-income student would be better off paying for tutoring <em>before</em> the first SAT test is taken. I bet the test prep companies are thrilled.</p>
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<p>mathmom, is that paragraph, especially the highlighted part, your recollection of what Barnard said, or your comments in light of what they said?</p>
<p>Someone asked on here a while back why the colleges can even dictate what scores the student sends. After all, the student pays to take the exams and to send out the scores. The scores are the property of the student and I would expect that there is - or should be - some legal protection for privacy extended to the student.</p>
<p>siserune, they did NOT say that at all. I have never, ever heard an admissions officer admit that they are in any way influenced by the lower scores. (In four years of going to these college nights with different admissions officers.) That’s my comment. Admissions officers are human and like juries I suspect they don’t always ignore the testimony even when they are told to. </p>
<p>My feeling is that you should either send all the scores, or at least those scores that result in the highest superscore. I’m going to give the admissions committee the benefit of the doubt and assume they do what they assure me repeatedly that they do and not that I’ve been lied to repeatedly.</p>
<p>Just asking so as to clarify whether Barnard is adding to the public record of elite-school admissions officers indicating (at least some) differences that can arise in consideration of singe- versus multiple-score SAT transcripts.</p>
<p>Ah, for the olden days when I was in high school – where it was EMBARRASSING to take the SAT’s or ACT’s more than once (unless you had taken ill during the test) – because that’s only what the slackers and stupid people did!! LOL.</p>
<p>The colleges are going to see all of the scores anyways. Whether the official stance is to look only at the highest scores or not, there is a psychological impact in seeing the other scores. For the most selective schools, that can be an issue since any little nuance can be used as as a reason to reject. With so many applicants, admissions is a misnomer for such schools’ offices. They need to reject far more than they accept and most of the applicants are good candidates.</p>
<p>The example of the 2200, 2300, 2280, and 2350 hypothetical test taker caught my attention because D recently scored 2300 on a first sitting with almost no prep. So after my initial reaction of suprise and pleasure, my next response was “Wow, I wonder what score you could have gotten if you had studied?” She had no interest in a re-take and that decision was confirmed as a good one when she received her paper score report. D read to me the College Board provided projections for improvement on a re-take in each of her sections, and the CB statistical prediction was that her scores in each would go down in a re-take. So I figured since CB has a vested interest in kids re-taking, the odds must really not be good her scores would go up. As an adcom, I’d wonder why, after a 2300 which was such a modest improvement on the first sitting, the student was not content and thought he would be the one to beat the odds on a re-take. And I’d also wonder how involved he was in EC’s that he could fit in that many test dates, because he’d have been likely to repeat that re-take pattern with SAT II’s also. How many posts have we seen on CC where parents wonder whether their student should take the SAT if it means missing a band trip or other important EC event. For the type of kid who’s looking at elite schools, free weekends are hard to come by!</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I’m with you. It was high-stakes testing in the old days.</p>
<p>This is a good issue to ask about at college information sessions. </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/650085-spring-2009-college-fairs-info-sessions.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/650085-spring-2009-college-fairs-info-sessions.html</a> </p>
<p>See if your own hypothesis of how college admission officers think is confirmed by an admission officer answer to a live question or not.</p>
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<p>Sure there’s privacy. You don’t have to send them any of your scores if you don’t want to. Just as there’s privacy with your HS transcript; you’re under no obligation to have it sent if you’d rather not, even if they request it. But the colleges are under no obligation to accept you, either; they’re perfectly within their rights to deem your application incomplete because it’s lacking the information they requested, information they think they need to make an informed judgment about the applicant’s qualifications and “fit.” So the applicant is simply rejected out of hand.</p>
<p>Same when it comes time to apply for a job. The employer asks you to provide a college transcript and work history. You decide not to provide this information, citing your right of privacy. Fine, they don’t get to see the transcript without your permission. But you don’t get the job. Or you apply for a mortgage and the lender wants to see your bank accounts, credit history, and tax returns. Right of privacy? You bet; but if you don’t supply the requested information, you won’t get the mortgage. Simple as that. You have a right of privacy but it doesn’t confer on you a power to dictate to colleges (or employers, or mortgage lenders) what information they get to use in deciding whether to accept you as their student (or employee, or borrower). It’s a voluntary exchange; if you apply for a benefit they’re not legally obligated to give you, they may ask you to voluntarily provide certain private information that they’d have no legal right to obtain without your consent. If you don’t like that bargain, don’t apply.</p>
<p>Okay, found this thread on my own and I have a question:</p>
<p>For those schools that use “single highest test date” and we have both SAT and ACT scores, do we just submit both and let the college figure out which they consider to be better? (I don’t want an input person to make any mistakes so if it’s better for us to figure it out here and only submit one set of scores, then maybe we should do that?)</p>
<p>If a student is applying to an
engineering program that requires:
- Sat 2 or ACT results and
also
2.math 2 and 1 science subject test 2</p>
<p>and this college does not honor score choice, is this student required to submit
sat 1 test results although they performed much stronger on act test.</p>
<p>Balancingact, there’s no single answer to this - read the college websites carefully and decide what they are saying. Sometimes they are written so fuzzily it’s hard to tell. In most cases I think you can send ACT and only the SAT subject tests. But some (for example Yale) make it clear that if you send anything from the college board you have to send it all.</p>
<p>If you really want to know you can call them.</p>
<p>^^ really?</p>
<p>We thought the ACT w writing plus SAT2s was enough–
and would be fine without the SAT1…</p>