<p>^^ lol not happening.</p>
<p>And legacy at Tufts?? Unheard of</p>
<p>tufts initially divides applications by geography, which can make dividing into smaller and smaller categories more interesting since you don’t have as many of one group from one part of the country as you would from another.</p>
<p>also, i don’t believe tufts recruits athletes. im sure that athletics helps, but only in the sense that a) athletics takes alot of time and b) it makes you an interesting person and thus more appealing in assembling who to admit.</p>
<p>^^ What are you talking about? I know for a fact that the football team recruits ~25 players every year. I know people who submitted “********” last minute applications and got the acceptance letters within a week.</p>
<p>Also I’m speculating here, but I’m almost positive that non-recruited-athletes are not pre-sorted into piles, URM or not. Judging by the articles I’ve read I would guess the first sorting come after the adcoms have preliminary looked through the applications and separated them into “Probably yes” “Maybe” and “Probably no”.</p>
<p>BalletGirl-
Your posts on this board suggest that you are a thoughtful, articulate and, as has been noted, “feisty” person. But it often seems that for some reason you, a Dartmouth student, have some axe to grind with Tufts, including with respect to your almost prosecutorial-sounding demand for “transparency” from Dan - even though as a Dartmouth student you would appear to have no “investment” in the Tufts admission process. As the saying goes, “what’s up with that?”</p>
<p>I am not sure if this would be the right place to post this. But I found some interesting articles and videos on how the college admission work and I thought it would give us some insight on how the college admissions really work. It’s kind of old still… it’s on college admission. I apologize in advance if this is not the right place to post… Here is the link----
[frontline:</a> secrets of the sat](<a href=“http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/]frontline:”>http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/)</p>
<p>You asked “Dan” the following questions:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>please tell us the median 25-75% SAT/ACT scores for URMs, athletes and legacies by category. </p></li>
<li><p>Please also provide us the median 25-75% SAT/ACT scores for all students not deemed to be an URM, a recruited athlete or a legacy.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I would also like to see these numbers. It appears that unhooked applicants must have very high scores to compensate for the lower scores of the “hooked” applicants in order for average SAT’s in most schools to be as high as they are. Colleges and college guides should make this clear at the onset. An untrained eye, as mine was a year ago, misunderstood what was expected of unhooked applicants. Honesty on the part of the university would be interesting here. Maybe Dan will post the stats, and my assumptions will be proven wrong. Nothing would make me happier regarding the college application process.</p>
<p>And one more thing - Since data suggests that SAT scores fairly accurately predict a student’s academic performance for the first year at college, does Tufts have data on how student’s with lower end “contextualized” sat’s do in their first year at Tufts? Second year? Graduation rate?</p>
<p>
As detail addresses, D3 schools can and do recruit athletes. At Tufts, coaches are able to give a certain number of athletes a certain degree of admissions boost, both of which I believe depends on the sport.</p>
<p>And as for non-recruited athletes, I assume it helps just as much as any other (or multiple) EC would. However, I think there is a place somewhere on the application to indicate what sports you may have done in high school, and I believe admissions (or somebody else) does compile lists including both recruited and non-recruited athletes which are made available to the coaches of the respective sports.</p>
<p>I’ve done admissions travel for the last two years in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, and I can tell you that even within the affluent communities, the admissions process is viewed in a wholly different way from what I’m used to seeing in the the majority of suburbs. When I visit Montana at the end of October, most of even the higher achieving students still haven’t thought about where they will apply and almost no one applies ED. The culture around college applications is so different from what you would find on the North End of Chicago, or Bethesda in Maryland, or Shaker Heights in Ohio. The wonderful, amazing, brilliant kids that live in Bozeman, MT (for instance) just don’t think about it as much. You’ll find differences in a rural area in Upstate New York, or an urban areas in Dallas, or a suburban community in Indianapolis that send 90% of its students to state schools. The culture changes, and so the context of the application changes. Many students fall into a mix of categories: recent immigrant in an independent school with good counseling or a recent transplant to Sun Valley, Idaho. There are always shades of gray, and we don’t view our applicants in discrete pools because (and I know this cliche) there aren’t a lot of discrete people. Obviously, this is not a universal truth and there are many exceptions everywhere, but it’s my job to understand and recognize that cultural shift when I’m reading the applications and evaluate appropriately. Trusting the SAT to universally reflect ability across all groups of people without difference or distinction is dissonant with my professional, personal, and educational experience with standardized testing.</p>
<p>The admissions process is not about rewarding students for their scores or their grades or their EX. It’s about finding amazing students and people and building an intentional community. Testing is just one of many tools for us to do that, and is never the sole reason any applicant is admitted or denied. </p>
<p>
I am 100% OK with that, but be sure to remember that context goes both ways. Attending a higher achieving school means we become more flexible with things like class rank. That kid from rural Alabama with testing that is lower in the pool but high in his area? If he doesn’t have the powerhouse grades to back up the strength that his testing implies (in context), he won’t be competitive. </p>
<p>I appreciate the civility and care with which our board approaches this topic, but I’d like to clarify something about my presence on these boards. I post here to provide a candid perspective on the Tufts process in the belief that understanding how an admissions process works will let community members approach their applications with greater enthusiasm and confidence. What I will not do is answer posts demanding intricate statistical information that are directed specifically at me rather than the CC community as a whole. If you would like to have a larger conversation around the purpose and value of racial diversity, athletic recruitment, or legacy connections I’m willing to participate in another thread.</p>
<p>quick bump because i don’t see this thread on the Tufts board anymore.</p>
<p>Lots of “Chance Me” threads are floating around, so I thought I’d resurrect this old (and slightly controversial) thread on the subject of testing. I welcome a renewed conversation, should anyone have thoughts/opinions/questions on the matter.</p>
<p>Does this mean that you look at test scores relative to the demographics of the applicant’s high school? I tried to dial down the SAT madness that exists in my daughter’s high school…she studied on her own, no high-priced test prep, only tested twice…with that, she still scored in 2200’s. Will you assume that because of our high school demographics, she was involved in the SAT madness, and therefore de-value her scores? Her weighted GPA is 4.33, also without high-priced tutors. Will this be looked at in a similar way?</p>
<p>To an extent, high SES is a proxy for higher standardized test scores, including the SAT. And better neighborhoods also have better schools that better prepare kids academically. Classes with close to 40 kids can’t have effective discussions, nor can the teacher assign much writing due to the time it takes to grade and give feedback to 200 students. Those high SAT scores plus good grades can lead to some sweet merit aid that my kid will never see. (I know nothing about Tufts at all, however.)</p>
<p>SleeplessNJmom - for your conclusion to be true, then SAT madness would need to equal higher scores. </p>
<p>Studying on her own and taking it twice is completely reasonable and is not in any way a disadvantage. Studies show, actually, that the ‘madness’ and anxiety around the testing tends to suppress scores more than it helps them.</p>
<p>What we would assume for <em>most</em> applicants coming from that sort of school is that students are aware and familiar with the SATs when they take the exam and that most students have probably prepped for the SAT. In the case of your daughter, these would be accurate assumptions.</p>
<p>Again, I’ll say: more stress does not equal higher scores, and you shouldn’t be second guessing your daughter because everyone else in her school is crazy and she decided to be sane.</p>
<p>Dan, do you know if any other colleges practice this sort of thing? It’s the first time I have heard about it, and while I’m not entirely convinced of the merits of it yet, I would definitely be interested to know if Tufts is one of many schools that practice this/the vanguard/the last practitioner.</p>
<p>We’re absolutely not the only ones.</p>
<p>Indulge me in a thought experiment to illustrate the importance of looking at more than the raw scores.</p>
<p>We’re going to create two students.</p>
<p>The first: An American-born child of American-born parents. This student has grown up his entire life in the United States, and like most Americans has attended an English speaking high school his entire life - in face, the only language he speaks is English.</p>
<p>The second: A student in Thailand, born to Thai-parents, attending a Thai school. Thai is the language in the school, it is the only language his parents speak, and outside of an hour of English class every day and what he teaches himself using books, movies, and music, this student’s entire life is conducted in Thai. </p>
<p>Both of these students have a 650 on the Reading section of the SAT. </p>
<p>Which of these students has the more impressive test score?</p>
<p>These are extremes, but they illustrate the factors that an applicant’s life that can alter how we think of the testing. The child of parents with graduate degrees in law has different linguistic exposure than one who is the child of parents who never graduated high school. Things are almost never quite this binary in nature, but the scale that exists is relevant to our understanding and relevant to allowing us to recognize potential and ability without being slaves to the raw numbers the Collegeboard sends to us.</p>
<p>Thanks for the insight, Dan. I was concerned that the assumption of familiarity and prepping for SAT’s in our area would lead to an expectation of higher scores by admissions officers, therefore de-valuing an applicant’s raw scores.<br>
As an aside, I am not second guessing my daughter…it’s the other way around, LOL. I refused to let her get caught up in the wave of SAT insanity surrounding her. She’ll be happy to hear your response.</p>
<p>We, too, come from the land of hyper-SAT prepping and hyper-tutoring, in general–sadly, a lot of already-competent and overextended kids are tutored throughout their four years of high school. My child briefly fretted that Tufts might not understand that her grades and SATs were a product of her own work, not being held up by tutors for her high school career.</p>
<p>My child had average PSATs (190-something) and got over 2300 on the SAT, taking it once. In the intravening years, she declined the SAT tutoring (we offered it half-heartedly, feeling that it ratcheted up stress and was such a time-robber), expressing that she was unwilling to give up her participation in sports, piano, ceramics and painting, being with family, and “having a life.” She has also told us that if she needs tutoring to stay in the more accelerated classes, then she doesn’t belong there.</p>
<p>What my child did do was to go through successive SAT books, in their entirety, with some unprecedented discipline; that plus aging neurologically, for a few additional years (she is younger by a year+ than a lot of her SAT-taking, grade peers), becoming a more critical reader, and having additional and rigorous math seemed to buoy her scores. Her subject scores (SAT II scores) were always very high, but i think that is because those tests are more curriculum-based. She pretty much said that by the end of 11th grade, she had had all the SAT II math on which she was tested, so no tutoring would have made a difference in her case.</p>
<p>Just wondering if my daughter would have made such a large leap on her SAT without going through multiple practice tests and/or if the kids who get very high standardized test scores, via tutoring, might have done well, anyway. Many studies show standardized test-taking to be an endemic skill. I, myself, in the mid-80s, did not do SAT prep and got a 1600 on the SAT, after a late night out and jaywalking ticket, the night before, and going forward things like the MCAT and GREs were “easy” for me. </p>
<p>Mostly, I am glad that Tufts is the sort of place that has the abstraction, imagination, and humanity to entertain that a non-straight A student or an applicant with lower test scores might still have it in him or her to be the next poet laureate or award-winning playwright. Such a sensibility is yet one more thing that sets Tufts apart from other colleges.</p>
<p><<<again, i’ll=“” say:=“” more=“” stress=“” does=“” not=“” equal=“” higher=“” scores,=“” and=“” you=“” shouldn’t=“” be=“” second=“” guessing=“” your=“” daughter=“” because=“” everyone=“” else=“” in=“” her=“” school=“” is=“” crazy=“” she=“” decided=“” to=“” sane.=“”>>></again,></p>
<p>Stress kicks out cortisol, a confirmed memory “dampener”.</p>
<p>Dan,</p>
<p>Two questions:</p>
<p>If one parent completed college and the other did not, how is this considered in terms of first gen college applicant?</p>
<p>Is it frowned upon to retake the SAT a third time? As you mentioned in your earlier posts about Montana and the culture where college apps were not taken as seriously until senior year, my child did not take the SAT that seriously when he took it during his junior year, and was sick during one of the times he took it. He seems more serious now, and plans to actually study the prep guide, so may improve his scores. But I’ve heard that admissions officers think it looks “desperate” or “obsessive” to retake it a third time.</p>
<p>Thank you in advance.</p>