<p>Does anyone know what a competitive score on the new SAT would be for
student applying as an athlete to selective/very selective schools. Student
is a strong player in a very competitive division but plays on a weak team.</p>
<p>The question isn't the team, it's whether the school wants the player. I went to a talk on this recently and had my eyes opened. For most sports, it's not about the school team but about the year round traveling team where the college coaches see the kid. It seems that many know by the kid's soph year whether they want the kid! </p>
<p>But to answer the question, for an outstanding athlete at an ivy it was about 1200 on the old SATs. New translation I'm not sure of, the simplistic translation would be 1800.</p>
<p>Definitely understand the point that a school must want the player. So if
say an 1800 is a competitive score, what sort of an advantage would a score
of 2100 be?</p>
<p>It would really help the coach help you!</p>
1 Like
<p>DD met an athlete when she toured one of the top 3 publics- he had 3.0 GPA & 1100 SAT!</p>
<p>The higher your score, the more in line with the schools non-athlete scores, the better package you present.</p>
<p>D attends Dartmouth and had friends who are athletes. They get very few"free' passes regarding class attending and are expected to hold their own. Casey, has a son, a baseball payer who had over 1500 on his SAT's.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Athletes and students with 800 SAT scores also gain admission at a disproportionately high rate, Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg said. Rates are also higher for students with exceptional essays and above-4.0 GPAs. With so many people applying for admission at one of the top 10 schools in the country, it takes a combination of many factors to get that thick envelope come April.</p>
<p>On the other hand, roughly 40 percent of applicants are given some sort of extra attention -- minorities, legacies or athletes. This year, 24 percent of applicants were students of color, 3 percent legacies, and roughly 13 to 17 percent were athletes, based on estimates. This 40 percent of the applicants has a combined admit rate nearly double the overall level.</p>
<p>Athletic admissions statistics are not released by the admissions office. Some speculate that athletes -- particularly those for big sports -- are given the highest preference of all. This does not appear to be the case at Dartmouth, although athletes do benefit from having a lobbyist in their coach. Coaches submit ranked lists of their recruited athletes to the admissions office. The admissions office then reviews the applications, taking into account the applicant's athletic talent and coach's recommendation.</p>
<p>"Athletic talent works in the same way other kinds of talent do. The only difference is it's a much more organized and structured recruiting process and that's a function of the NCAA and the Ivy League rules," Furstenberg said. "They tell us who they want, but there are no guaranteed number of slots."</p>
<p>But even with the ability to submit a list, some coaches expressed frustration with how little say they really have.</p>
<p>"How much clout do I have? Minimal," men's swimming coach Jim Wilson said. "If you look at my SAT scores and compare to the average SAT scores, my kids may be getting in with a 1450 instead of a 1460."</p>
<p>Wilson did, however, speculate that some of the "higher-profile sports like football may be getting a little more help."</p>
<p>Coaches are given little feedback from the admissions office before submitting their lists, according to Wilson. "I'm shooting blind," he said, adding that other schools, even in the Ivy League, are actually more lenient with athletic admissions.</p>
<p>"Some schools will say 'if he has this GPA and this SAT score were going to let him in.' Our admissions doesn't do that," Wilson said.</p>
<p>Michele Hernandez '89, who worked in the Dartmouth admissions office in the mid-1990s and is currently a private college counselor, concurred.</p>
<p>"Dartmouth actually has higher standards for athletes than most schools," she said. "Many athletes that are walking straight into Harvard couldn't get into Dartmouth."</p>
<p>While athletic talent can bolster an application, it does not replace other criteria for admission, according to Furstenberg. If coaches do not find well qualified applicants to put on their list, they risk not getting enough players that year.</p>
<p>"If the coaches say we need nine soccer players this year, but we only think six of them are qualified, that's what they get," he said. "All of the decisions are made here; the only person at the institution who can admit someone is me."</p>
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[/quote]
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<p>For the non-revenue sports, a 1200 would be low but depending on how much of an impact player the coach views the kid to be, a possibility. 1300 is "safer" for the lesser sports. 1400 really makes it easier for the coach to help the student with admissions.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info Sybbie. MOWC - so that would be a 2100 on the new SAT?</p>
<p>Williams has detailed their athletic admissions in published reports. They put a bit more emphasis on recruited athletes as a percentage of the class than most schools, but their overall system is pretty typical.</p>
<p>Williams uses an academic scale of 1 being the top, 9 being the bottom. Academic 1s and 2s are essentially automatic admits. An academic 3s and 4s would be midpack, defining the 25th to 75th percentile stats. </p>
<p>Williams has three categories of recruited athletes:</p>
<p>a) The coaches are allowed to select 66
"low band" recruited athletes. By "low-band", they mean below average for Williams, dipping as low as an academic 6 or maybe 7 (figure 1200 SATs as a rough number, but there are some down in the 1100 range) up to just slighly below average (maybe an academic 4). As long as the group of 66 meets an agreed up distribution (so many really below average, so many sorta below average, and so many just a little below average), the coaches have sole discretion to choose these 66 students. The really low-band admits from this group go overwhelmingly to the football and hockey teams. Many sports get at most one of these 66, sometimes none.</p>
<p>b) The next group consists of 30-something admits who are roughly average for Williams (say academic 3s and 4s). Again, the coaches have pretty much exclusive power to designate the students receiving these "slots". </p>
<p>c) The final group is another 70 or so students who would likely get into Williams based on their academics alone, but who are tagged by the coaches as being likely to play varsity sports for four years. Not withstanding what they may tell these recruits, the coaches don't lift a finger to give these applicants a boost in the admissions office. Instead, they take their chances that these kids will get admittted anyway, prefering to use their "slots" on kids who may not. These varstity athletes are selected by the adcoms. It is in this group where varsity athletics is just another EC that may or may not trump an oboe player.</p>
<p>So basically, out of class of 528, you have 170 varsity athletes, identified by the athletic recruiting process. 66 of these are below average academically, but high impact athletically and get a huge boost in admissions. 30-some are average academically and get a "tip" from the athletic department over other equally average applicants. Finally, 70 more are above average academically, neither needing nor receiving any particular boost from the athletic department.</p>
<p>The same categories exist at all elite colleges: HYPSM, the Ivies, Swarthmore, you name it. The numbers, the absolute cut-off points on the low end of the academic scale, and the degree to which coaches have exclusive power to select students vary by degree from college to college. But, the basic approach I've outlined above is pretty much universal.</p>
<p>So to answer the specfic question, it depends on the student's sport and how much of an impact he or she is expected to make. Squash player, swimmer, or cross-country runner? Figure you better have average or above academics because you probably won't get much, if any, boost. 305 pound dominating left tackle? Or, prolific ice hockey scorer? Brush up on your reading and writing and you'll probably be OK.</p>
<p>This is for elite colleges. Shift the scale downwards at major Div I schools. At most of the universities you see playing bowl games on New Year's Day, the average SATs for the football team is somewhere in the 800 to 900 range and the absolute cutoff under NCAA regs is down in the 700 range. The last I saw, the U of Miami's football team had average combined SATs of around 805. Yes, you read that right. Combined. Average.</p>
<p>I wonder what the averages are at Stanford, Duke, Vandy, etc. All Div. 1.</p>
<p>How do you think schools will treat the new SAT. Will a previous 1400 now be a 2100? Interestedad, at Williams would a 2100 on the new SAT be good for an
athlete?</p>
<p>The schools will care about the new SAT but according to the NCAA website, the new writing essay component is being disregarded by the NCAA for eligibility for both DI and DII schools. The academic index the NCAA uses is changing this year and next to incorporate different core required courses to meet their academic subject eligibility. It will be increasing. They use a formula to assign an eligibility index number based on SAT scores and the student's gpa based on ONLY their eligible classes. Honors and AP classes are weighted on the index.</p>
<p>The questions and answers below are from the NCAA website:</p>
<p>Will the NCAA require a writing test as part of its initial-eligibility requirements?</p>
<p>The NCAA had determined that the writing component should not be required at the present time. The NCAA has noted the importance of reviewing research related to the impact of the writing component.</p>
<p>How will the NCAA Initial-Eligibility Clearinghouse use the scores on the new SAT?</p>
<p>Because the critical reading and math sections will still be scored on a 200-800 point scale, the clearinghouse will still combine those two sections for the combined score. The writing section will not be used. The clearinghouse will use scores from the new SAT in combination with scores from the current SAT for the combined score. </p>
<p>What about ACT?</p>
<p>ACT is also adding a writing component, but the ACT writing component is optional. The scores on the ACT will remain the same.</p>
<p>Both my DD and DS had very different SAT scores and it depended on the schools' needs and wants if their SAT score was important. In DD's case the ivy that wanted her, really needed an athlete in her particular sport so the SAT was not even discussed. But at other schools (2) it was more important. On the whole however, her other 9 schools it was not even mentioned. DS who plays football, the score was only mentioned because it was high. But it really made no difference to the coaches who needed a lineman. It has played somewhat of a role (slight) has far as scholarship money but only at a few schools. Not for getting in, but for getting more money.</p>
<p>Hope this helps.</p>
<p>Kat</p>
<p>Here's another data point from a 2000 Amherst College report on athletics and admissions. Amherst uses a 5 point scale for academics in admissions with 1 being the top academic score, 5 the lowest.</p>
<p>According to the article in "The Amherst Student" newspaper about the report:</p>
<p>"Since 1995, 28.7 percent of the highly-rated athletes who have been admitted to Amherst had academic ratings of four, according to the report."</p>
<p>"[The] report defines an academic four as one who finishes in the top 20 percent of his high school class, has a mostly B record, submits "modest" essays, takes a below-average program in relation to the rest of the pool and has a combined SAT score of 1150+."</p>
<p>Interesteddad, how many of the 28.7% Amherst athletes do you think are playing football, hockey and basketball. Most?</p>
<p>On the Stanford, Duke, Vandy question:</p>
<p>There is extensive data available in the Rice University athletics report:</p>
<p>Rice has among the highest NCAA Div I academic standards, perhaps second only to Stanford. You can use these numbers as representative of the very top Div 1 academic schools inc. Stanford and Duke.</p>
<p>The average SATs at Rice in 2003:</p>
<p>1447 -- non athletes
1103 -- male athletes
1187 -- female athletes</p>
<p>1152 -- male baseball
1082 -- male football
1034 -- male basketball
1211 -- male athletes (not baseball, football, basketball)</p>
<p>1236 -- female swimming
1158 -- female volleyball
1102 -- female basketball
1216 -- female athletes (not swimming, volleyball, basketball)</p>
<p>19% of Rice's male athletes had SATs below 1000.
8% of Rice's femal athletes had SATs below 1000.</p>
<p>96 of Rice's 301 male athletes are football players.</p>
<p>For the Ivy League, figure somewhere between Rice's standards and Amherst/Williams standards. Harvard will definitely take some athletes that Williams and Amherst will not. However, the Ivy League mandated distribution is more stringent than the big-time NCAA programs like Rice, Stanford, and Duke.</p>
<p>Mind you, the average (or the median) means that half had LOWER scores than that, usually by a standard deviation or more.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Interesteddad, how many of the 28.7% Amherst athletes do you think are playing football, hockey and basketball. Most?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Virtually all of the "lowest-band" athletic recruits at a place like Amherst would be on one of those three. Football generally consumes more than half. Not many rocket scientist/ice hockey players either -- the recruiting base only comes from a handful of states. About the only time you'd see a "low-band" slot allocated to another sport would be a situation where you have a nationally ranked player who could single-handedly turn, for example, a tennis team into a championship caliber squad. The intent is always to spread these "low-band" slots around "once the football program gets better", but that never happens. There's no such thing as a "low-band" squash player. I don't know about California, but not too many Massachusetts public high schools have squash teams!</p>
<p>That's what killed football at Swat. It just became a black-hole for the available below-average admissions slots. What really killed Div III football was specialization at the high school level. It used to be that you could get 50 guys and figure out what positions to play them at. Maybe you didn't have an ideal left tackle, but neither did your opponent. Now, you can't compete unless you've got a left tackle with four years of specialized experience at that position and so on a so forth. The pool of left tackles with the academic qualifications to get into a Swarthmore or an Amherst is infintesimally small. Multiply the need for specialized recruiting at every position and you can just throw your academic standards out the window.</p>
<p>In report after report from all of these colleges, they bemoan the segregation that occurs among "certain" athletics teams from the campus community as a whole and the negative impact that has on college life, both socially and academically. Well, duh! If the average SATs at Rice are 1447 and the average SATs of your 96 football players is 1082, how in the world could you expect that group of students to just "fit right in"? They don't fit in. How could you expect them to not feel estrangement? How could you expect the other students to view them as academic peers? </p>
<p>This issue becomes seriously problematic a school the size of Swarthmore or Amherst where the football team alone is nearly 10% of your male student population. 1 out 10 guys segregated from the campus culture right out of the blocks, in every freshman dorm, in every class, in every social setting, is a pretty significant detriment to a cohesive community. But, football is the "third rail of higher education" so guys like Morty Shapiro try to put band-aids on problem with "new alcohol policies" and housing lottery regulations to prevent de facto segregation, none of which works because it's not addressing the fundamental problem of the admissions office trying pound round pegs into square holes.</p>
<p>The difference between these athletes and the rest of the student body is pretty amazing.</p>
<p>Do Williams and Amherst use athlete SAT scores in their published stats?</p>
<p>That is a good question. There are schools that rationalize that their athletic recruits are "not typical" so they do not include them in their reported SATs. However, I believe that Swarthmore, Amherst, and Williams do include them.</p>
<p>Here's a verbal SAT breakdown for this year's freshman class (last year for Amherst):</p>
<p>700-800: Swat 69%, Williams 59%, Amherst 64%
600-699: Swat 26%, Williams 32%, Amherst 29%
500-599: Swat 5%, Williams 9%, Amherst 7%</p>
<p>Given that Amherst and Williams have lower acceptance rates than Swat, similar percentages of URMs, and slightly wealthier student bodies, I strongly suspect that those differences primarily reflect the differences in low-band athletic admits. That progression roughly corresponds to the emphasis placed on athletics at the three essentially identical schools. </p>
<p>Williams and Amherst have cut back on their low-band athletic admits slightly since things got really out of hand in the mid-1990s and their respective Presidents said, "enough is a enough, folks, we aren't the U. of Miami." Shapiro at Williams was talking a lot of heat from the alumni over the perceived over-emphasis on athletics. </p>
<p>Swarthmore cut back after dropping football following the 2000 season, although using some of the low-band slots for other teams has started to help bolster some of their other teams. Their men's tennis team is ranked #15 nationally in Div III, giving the #2 ranked powerhouse Williams team a close match last week 4-3. Not too bad for a geek school.</p>
<p>Lowband verbal SAT scores can also reflect a focus on economic and cultural diversity plus international admits, which are admissions objectives for Williams (and most LACs) and generally agreed to be a good thing.</p>