I think that’s kind of the point. While it may seem on this site – and particularly in this thread – that everyone is applying to Yale, in reality most of the high school seniors of America are not. I do wonder if my S21 would have at least gotten a waitlist at Rice (vs. a rejection) if he had been able to take and submit scores. They took only 20% of their class TO. He couldn’t take the test. It was the pandemic, and we live in an area where the test was simply not being administered (and it did not seem reasonable to us to have to travel outside the state for a test). For awhile afterwards I really regretted him not having a score to submit. But two years on I changed my mind and decided his sister really didn’t need to bother with the stress. I think schools will get better at evaluating applicants, and I’ll be surprised if colleges other than the tippy-top schools go back to requiring it. It feels okay to me to put it back on the student to have to decide if they care enough about getting into one of those schools (or applying to one of those scholarships) to be motivated enough to focus on the test.
Given that significantly less than half of first-years enrolled at Columbia College and Barnard College had submitted scores, applying test-optional certainly is a feasible option.
Whether it’s individually the best choice depends on how strong the rest of the application (GPA, class rank, Nobel prize,…) fares (stands out), vs. what the scores are. Depending on the overall application, I would seriously ponder submitting a 35 ACT or >1500 SAT…
Most as in more than 50% in CA, yes for now. For class of 23’, when they were testing there was some uncertainty as to what UCs and States would eventually do in the long run. For my daugther who is class of 25’, I think it will be significantly higher.
For students applying primarily to the UCs that makes sense. In reference to another poster referring to Yale applicants, it is possible that many of them have both easy access to the SAT and do not find it particularly stressful.
Regarding UCLA’s undergraduate gender distribution (60% female)…
UCLA is prohibited from considering gender in admission (Proposition 209), so it is not surprising that its undergraduate gender distribution reflects the overall undergraduate gender distribution. The private colleges you are referring to are under no such restriction, and it is commonly said that most coed colleges prefer approximately equal numbers of women and men for marketing purposes.
If you are referring to the list posted by @Data10, you are misreading the data.
That said, students would be well advised to look closely at the various school requirements regarding TO as there are variations.
I defer to @Data10. As I read, of admittees for Fall 2021 at Yale, start with 100%, then subtract the number submitting SAT, then subtract the number submitting ACT. The remaining 9% apparently submitted neither. I do not think they were concerned with those submitting both but maybe they were.
I don’t understand, nor do I care, why this is a big deal. But neither of my kids are going to apply to or attend Columbia.
As discussed extensively earlier in the thread, some students submitted both SAT and ACT, so the actual percentage who were admitted without scores is expected to be more than 100% - % submitting SAT - % submitting ACT, but exactly how much more is unknown. For example, suppose 8% of students submitted both SAT and ACT, then it would suggest 11+8 = 19% of class was admitted without scores.
However, even if we did precisely know the percentage admitted without scores, that is not enough information to estimate whether applying without scores is hurting/helping. To evaluate that you’d need to know how many well qualified persons applied with and without scores. That said, we can see that different Ivies seem to have admitted different percentages of test optional admits, which may suggest different colleges places a greater weight on scores. You mentioned Yale, and this thread is about Columbia, so I’ll compare these two colleges, using 2021 CDS.
Columbia General Studies – 26% SAT / 17% ACT: 100 - 26 - 17 = 57%
Columbia College – 44% SAT / 29% ACT – 100 - 44 - 29 = 27%
Yale – 54% SAT / 35% ACT – 100 - 54 -35 = 11%
Thank you. Yes, I think it is clear different colleges treated TO differently during covid.
| SAT | ACT | SAT+ACT | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 76.50% | 44.60% | 121.10% |
| 2019 | 75.00% | 48.00% | 123.00% |
| 2020 | 77.00% | 42.00% | 119.00% |
| 2021 | 70.00% | 34.00% | 104.00% |
(my post below revised, as I had quoted improperly! Apologies to @Data10 )
I would take that as clue, that adding the two figures and subtracting them from 100 is arithmetically possible, but contextually not particularly meaningful, considering that the above calculation could go negative. (Kinda like calculating the quotient of a region’s zip code over its area code 
).
Debating such a value, or other figures derived/implied/guessed from that, is not likely to increase clarity.
Deleted (in response to edited post above)
right. Presumably, roughly the same percentage of people submitted both scores, regardless of whether they were applying to Columbia or Yale. So the difference in colleges is still valid, right?
I don’t know! And I don’t know that anyone can presume that with any level of confidence.
Given that the share of TO enrollments (= CDS data) can vary substantially between colleges, I personally would not bet that the students who ultimately enrolled in college X are substantially similar in behavior (with respect to both or only one test taken) to students who (instead?) enrolled in college Y.
One could just as easily presume that those who ultimately chose Y over X might have a distinctly different profile than those who enrolled in X?
Maybe students choosing Y over X were predominantly the type who aced one test, and never bothered to take the other, while more students enrolling in X felt it was necessary to take both?
Too much speculation for my taste to be informative.
True. But 3 schools with a lot of cross-applicants, HYP, had relatively similar numbers-9, 11 and 15, quite different than other schools.
Half of the classes of HYP are EA, and the EA yield is 95% plus, and therefore those half are not cross applicants. Discriminating applicants won’t apply to all anyway even in RD.
While the EA yield is very high, some fraction of them still apply to other colleges but ultimately choose the EA school. It was actually pretty common at our local public high school.
At our school kids defer to each other (friends) :-). It is considered poor form. The thought is that if I got into P early, but really wanted to go to H, I am arrogant enough to think that I could have gotten into H as EA in the first place if I wanted to. Unless I am looking for FA – that is legit.
I think there is different behavior on this at private vs public schools.
My S24 has accommodations, which are not available at every test site. We live in San Francisco, and you would think you could take the test in SF, but no, he’s had to go an hour or more away to get a test site, and that’s only because I signed up way in advance that I got something that close. And each time they change the site to something farther away a few weeks before the test. We’re lucky that he has a car and drives himself, doesn’t have a weekend job that requires him to be there, or family obligations, etc. This is still a very real problem and a lawsuit regarding access is waiting to happen.