Anecdotally, the kids from poor urban schools with strong scores do very, very well at the Ivy I interview for.
I know you got this quote from their summary, but it was poorly written as those two correlations cannot be directly compared because income distributions vary by school district. Because the distribution of incomes within a school district are generally narrower than across the nation as a whole, you would expect lower correlations for GPA within a school than with SAT scores across the nation.
To make it comparable, they would need to calculate the correlation between SAT and income within each school.
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My kids got very strong scores. And it was the least impressive thing about them because they shined in several ECs, including both doing research at top-5 universities while in high school. But we live in an area where such universities exist, and my kids benefited from having an informed parent who knew how to seek out these opportunities that most people don’t know about. They also benefited from us having the money for earlier ECs that challenged them intellectually beyond what our (admittedly excellent) local public school system could, so they could thrive in these research opportunities.
In summary, my kids would have done fine in the admissions process even without test scores. But in large part that’s because they “chose their parents wisely”. Whereas a kid from Arkansas who didn’t choose as wisely won’t have similar opportunities.
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Jon Boeckenstedt discusses the tests-benefit-disadvantaged-students issue in this post, trope #2
Point 2: The “Diamond in the Rough” (DITR) theory. This heart-warming approach posits that there are low-income and/or first-generation, and/or students of color out there who will be disadvantaged if tests go away, because the tests help them get identified as bright. And of course, this is not completely wrong, but it’s only true because a) some college admissions officers don’t know much about tests, and b) they do know that people ask them about average test scores all the time, again (here comes the absurdity) even though they vary so strongly with wealth . If you get the impression of a dog chasing its tail, you wouldn’t be wrong.
Much more on the issue on the full post.
ETA: there are thousands of college access orgs working to help low income students thru the college process. If you have time to post on CC, you might have time to help out a student at one of these orgs. More volunteers= more students identified and helped.
I think MIT admissions officers know plenty about the tests. More than this author, in fact.
Again, MIT stands alone and their process is not like any other school’s. Including their closest peer CalTech which is test blind.
Other Ivies have not announced their policy. Questbridge continues to encourage submittal of scores. I expect for politcal reasons we will see lots of test optional ( to give cover to admissions of certain applicants) with most UMC applicants submitting high scores
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I like the vast majority of your comments, and I know you like Joe Boeckenstedt, but I can’t read him. He has no background in statistics and it shows up repeatedly, particularly in mistaking correlation for causation. He also doesn’t seem to understand that correlations can be corrected for using techniques as simple as regression, although there certainly other ways to do that as well, often with even better results.
So when the academics at MIT and University of California explicitly say that scoring significantly higher than others in a poorly performing school system is meaningful, I believe them.
Please send me a PM about this. I am interested.
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Harvard is TO thru 2030, I don’t have time to go pull the rest.
I feel like this thread is heading towards some of the usual pro-test vs anti-test arguments that we see on CC.
What I see in the original post, though, is more of a complaint about the confusing “test optional” situation becoming permanent, not about whether tests are useful in college admissions.
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Practically speaking, the TO policy only affects a small privileged SES. What it does do,however, is increase the opacity and unpredictability of the process for all applicants, which can raise the stress level in high school.
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I absolutely believe them too. And I also believe CalTech AOs when they explain why they went test blind, and Harvey Mudd on why they went test optional and on and on.
It will be interesting to see what happens to URM enrollment at MIT now that they are test required again. Many of the highly rejectives have enrolled more URMs now that they are test optional, which also doesn’t support that testing helps find URMs (but it’s complicated I know).
Will send you a PM about college access orgs.
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Based on the stats I’ve seen, all demos except white students have increased enrollments since TO-- not just URM enrollment.
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Overall college enrollment is down. You can see the trend by race at select highly rejective schools in post #16 above.
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It’s also taken the pressure off many of the limited income URM students I work with, many of whom are recruited athletes. No need for them to waste time prepping for or taking the tests either, which is a good thing. Some do take the test because they are targeting schools that require scores, and some take it again mid-to-late senior year if they are going to a school where they can get more merit money with a higher score (but that set of schools is declining).
I agree that TO has increased unpredictability of the admissions process. I expect the number of schools that ultimately become test blind with increase, and I also expect more schools will go back to requiring tests (maybe NC, SC, TX publics as possibilities).
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The whole issue of recruited athletes is a different problem. In my ideal world, colleges would not admit those with a elementary grade level in reading regardless of how well they throw a ball. But that is just my opinion. I guess TO does make it easier for athletes with limited academic ability to attend anywhere. Some see that as good.
I would rather just pay them and acknowledge that they are not students really.
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Definitely true.
I hear you, but really this level of athlete is only in the Power 5 conferences, most of which are not highly rejective schools. Everywhere else they generally aren’t going pro (of course there are exceptions).
And this level of athlete is only relevant for men’s football and basketball, right? The tennis, squash, water polo and crew teams will still present semi-decent scores
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I meant athletes that would be ‘paid’ in college whatever the sport, which I don’t disagree could make sense. Many athletes of all sports are applying TO, including the many international recruits which are prevalent in squash and tennis, for example.
After 3 kids, and numerous nieces and nephews go through the application process, I’ve become a complete cynic about college admissions. Everything from schools deciding to use common application to get kids to apply easier, resulting in some previously non rejective schools getting 70,000 applications at $75 per head, (over 5mill in rev per year) to the ambiguity of how much the school will cost yes, our advertised price per year is 74,000, but nobody ever has to pay that (until you run a NPC that says you can afford over 100,000 a year in tuition) it just seems broken. I’m sure if you are reviewing tens of thousands of applications, you are not reading essays, LOR and extra curricular, you’re trying to triage, figure out what your yield will be based on the fact that every kid you accept probably has 10 other acceptances because schools tell them to apply early action and then defer pretty much everyone until March.
No idea how to fix it, I think it would be much better if admissions were more holistic and transparent. Then terms like reach, target and safety would actually mean something and parents weren’t spending money on applications and kids weren’t just applying everywhere because in a pool of 50,000, no matter what your GPA or SAT score is most kids are getting rejected. This has always been the case with Elite/Ivy schools, you know they are always a reach, so don’t count on an admit, but it’s now seeped down the chain because there is rampant over applying, rampant grade inflation and rampant test prep. It seems more like an industry than a non profit educational experience
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