<p>qialah – Northern New York has seasons, but during the academic year you’ll likely experience only two – fall and winter. Yes, the North Country experiences a version of what the natives call “Spring,” but it is really just fall without leaves and more mud. SLU is a quality school, however, and if you are into winter sports it can be a nice school to attend. Not TOO far from Montreal, either, which is a great city.</p>
<p>Hudson:
My nephew went to Hamilton and wound up on the curling team which won the NCAA championship this year. Or something like the NCAA championship. D likes to ski, but her experience with winter is limited to happy vacations at snowy resorts. Perhaps we really need to visit in the winter. So much for ED…</p>
<p>After getting my last kid into college it is very apparent that tests scores are not that important. It is all about what the college is looking for at that particular time. You can have perfect test scores and not get into your first choice schools. Tests do not describe a whole child. </p>
<p>If our kid does not get into a school we blame it on test scores and essays etc. When they do get in, it is a fluke.</p>
<p>It is hard to say what colleges are looking for from week to week and year to year. There are thousands of great schools in this nation. They will go to one of them and they will be fine.</p>
<p>** 2collegewego:**</p>
<p>thanks for the info. We looked at RIT during spring break. He liked the campus but didn’t like the choices he had for mech eng. It’s on his “maybe” list.</p>
<p>Have any of you considered the possibility that your kids simply aren’t that smart? Maybe the test scores don’t correlate because of grade inflation and the subjective grading processes of many high schools. </p>
<p>In truth, every smart kid I know who actually put time and effort into the SAT did rather well. Many smart kids put no effort into the SAT and still scored well.</p>
<p>The only smart kids who didn’t do spectacularly set low expectations for themselves and didn’t really care about studying. On the contrary, a ton of dumb kids with inflated perceptions of their intelligence took the exams multiple times with tutors and aids only to be crushed time and time again.</p>
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<p>hmm…been looking in the mirror lately, have we?</p>
<p>LOL Queen MOM…WOW Mario…
It’s a proven fact that there are many brilliant, hard working kids out there that have very high IQ’s, that simply do not test well…In fact, I think good grades are many times a better indication of a “college readiness” than 1 test in a 4 hour period of time.</p>
<p>^ While I happen to agree with you that high test scores != high IQ, where is the proof for your assertion? My personal opinion is that good grades do better indicate college readiness, but not for reasons connected to IQ–rather because it correlates with a strong work ethic, which is very important in college. One can be extremely hard-working with straight As and not necessarily have a high IQ, just as one can have a high IQ and still score poorly on the SAT.</p>
<p>I totally agree with you…that is my point…these standardized test are not the best barrometer of whether a student will do well in college… there are alot of brilliant people who do not ever finish college due to a poor work ethic etc, but they might have scored a 36 on thier ACT…
I also know of some kids at my daughter’s HS that are in the top 10% of thier class, one in particular with an off the charts IQ, but made a 24 on his ACT…his mom says that he has extreme test anxiety…he didn’t do any better on the SAT.</p>
<p>SATs or ACTs are NOT a measure of IQ. There’s a correlation table here:
[IQ</a> Scores - AssessmentPsychology.com](<a href=“http://www.assessmentpsychology.com/iq.htm]IQ”>IQ Scores - AssessmentPsychology.com)</p>
<p>But take that with a grain of salt. I know my daughter’s full scale WISC, and she has a +10 point higher IQ than her test scores would suggest (or to put it another way, her Math/CR SAT scores in 2 sittings were 180 points less than her IQ would predict). </p>
<p>But that chart is based on the old SAT – when the SAT was revised they took out the analogies from the section formerly called “verbal” (now CR) – the analogies were the closest thing in that section to an IQ-type question. (and also the part that my daughter did the best on). They also increased the difficulty level of the math so that it would cover a higher level - but in so doing they made it more dependent on learned information rather than on inherent mathematical ability - so that also probably throws off the chart.</p>
<p>In any case, if you look at the SAT & ACT scores and the corresponding percentiles, you will realize pretty quickly that it is skewed up from the numbers the testing agencies put out for percentiles. (example: 1100 SAT = 93rd percentile = IQ in Superior range ~121 on the WAIS or WISC).</p>
<p>I don’t place much stock in IQ tests either – I think IQ tests were bad science when they started, and remain bad science. Tests like the WISC are really useful for diagnostic purposes to evaluate an individual’s overall learning style and needs – i.e., patterns of strengths and weaknesses – but the idea of assigning a number to it based on an arbitrary test is both silly and outmoded in terms of current understanding of brain function & cognition. In other words, if I suspected that a kid had a learning disability - I’d want that WISC – but to assume that the full scale is a measure of how “smart” the kid is is simply a value judgment based on a one-dimensional, linear view of intelligence, and the false assumption that someone who is “smart” in one respect will be equally “smart” in others.</p>
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<p>For populations, test scores are very much a measure of IQ: wherever both IQ and test scores are measured for groups, differences on one measure are reflected in differences on the other. That includes grouping by gender, race, economics, geography, or other natural categories. This is not to say that you can deterministically calculate one measure as a function of the other.</p>
<p>For individuals, <em>of course</em> small differences in test scores or IQ can discorrelate or be inconsequential. The tests are a crude measure and don’t claim to be anything more than that. Even so, large IQ or test score differences between individuals tend to correlate highly with performance differences, almost to the point of determinism (as it concerns “who does better”, not “exactly how much better do they perform”). This is about as much as one could ask for short of administering exhaustive batteries of tests covering everything under the sun… which would turn out not to provide all that much more information than IQ, for most of those tested.</p>
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<p>That’s true of any measure (GPA and class rank come to mind). However, IQ, like the more informal notion of “smart”, does seem to be special in that it correlates with almost all other cognitive metrics, but the correlation of these other metrics with each other is weaker than their correlation with IQ. In other words, somebody who has a much higher IQ than another is likely to have advantages in many other respects, but large differences in musical, cooking or sales ability don’t translate nearly as often (as IQ) into advantages in unrelated domains. In this sense, IQ is a reasonably successful attempt to distill something objective and universal, and is about as good a crude measure as one could expect given the technology that it uses.</p>
<p>there is NO way 1100 = 93 %ile</p>
<p>93%ile = ~1400 at least seeing that wiki lists 88 %ile as 1380, and the next percentile 97, as 1420.</p>
<p>I can show you the percentiles for the ACT. A 24 converts roughly to an 1100 on the SAT/ACT conversion charts. An ACT score of 24 is about the 75%, so mario I agree with you.</p>
<p>[ACT</a> Score Information: National Ranks for Test Scores and Composite Score](<a href=“ACT Test Scores | ACT Scoring | ACT”>ACT Test Scores | ACT Scoring | ACT)</p>
<p>Someone else probably has the exact percentiles for the SAT. My guess is an 1100 will be close to the 75%.</p>
<p>My D fits this thread - 3.9 unweighted GPA, 29 on the ACT, hasn’t taken the SAT and probably won’t because although she got in the low 70s on CR and W, that 48 on math does not bode well. She’s going to retake the ACT, this time with preparation, but might skip the SAT because so many colleges don’t really look at the writing section.</p>
<p>We’re going with targeted tutoring and hoping that she can pull that to the 31-32 the colleges she’s looking at want for merit aid.</p>
<p>Califa, one of my daughters got a low math score also on the SAT but (oddly to me) said she liked it better than the ACT. The science section brought down her score a lot and she is taking it again in June, reluctantly. She was laughing today that although her sister did much better on the SAT overall, she did a bit higher on the CR. She got letters from Brown and Cornell today saying the usual, “based on your great abilities”…and she joked they must appreciate her literary skills over math. : P
I’m hoping June brings some uplift in the test scores for them and everyone taking them, but if not, they will try again in the Fall and then gear their applications accordingly.</p>
<p>My D got letters from Brown, Dartmouth, Chicago, and Johns Hopkins, which she has little to any chance of getting in… unless the low math scores don’t count against them that much. Oh well, she refuses to go anywhere cold anyway (of course I am trying to talk her out of making climate a top criterion). She likes the ACT better because she says she cannot bear the thought of more than one math section. I wonder if we can trust the colleges to use the best score if they submit both ACT and SAT?</p>
<p>It might help your daughter to think of the science section as something like a reading comprehension test in science… good luck to all who are testing again! D hasn’t done any prep (again) so we’ll wait until fall and hope for the best.</p>
<p>To be honest califa, my daughters haven’t really prepped for the ACT this time at all, except reviewing math a bit, but I paid for it months ago and they will take it, at least it’s score-choice.
I know my daughters don’t want cold either or be further than 4-5 hours away. I know Brown is way out of their reach, but I wonder why they send the same “get info” letters and I wonder why only 1 of my daughters got one…“maybe” her high CR score meant something and one more application fee couldn’t hurt.
Our neighbors were grad students from Brown and they said they do have a more holistic approach than most. They give chances to students with low scores but other promising aspects.</p>
<p>Debrums, the reason my D is waiting until fall is that she has done absolutely no prep. She went in cold last time, and if anything the math will go down without some pretty intensive math prep. She hates even the idea of test prep (her idea of test prep is cramming for an AP test thenight before) so I’m trying to find her a tutor just for the math and maybe science.</p>
<p>I’ve wondered too why D gets mail from schools that are reaches… maybe it’s fairly random. It seems sort of strange that your D with the lower overall score but higher CR got mail from Brown. But I read something here that some colleges are looking for a well-rounded class rather than a class full of well rounded students, so they might find kids with high scores in any area interesting. It’s good that some elite schools don’t rule out kids because of low scores… some very smart kids just don’t test well, especially if they have test anxiety, which many do because these tests are so high stakes.</p>
<p>My twins took the last one cold too, well one did, the other did a few partial test preps. I think twin 1 wanted to see how she did cold. She absolutely hates to study for those kinds of tests and did a crash AP cram also. (she felt she did okay, we will see) Twin 2 doesn’t think she will do better on the math at all with the June ACT, but like I said, I did pay for it, so I told her to take it and see how it goes. She is planning on studying over the summer and taking the ACT in Sept.and the SAT in Oct. There is a program through her school that helps with SAT math over the summer and she is going to take that for a few weeks.</p>
<p>I read about a young lady on this site that got into Brown that had a 1300 I think and they took her and of course there was Cedric Jennings, who came from the DC projects and he was accepted with a 980 SAT years ago. He graduated with a B+ average. My neighbors from Brown said that there are many ways to be smart and if you aren’t in certain majors, weak areas can be worked around. My daughter’s friend got into Yale with an 1800 last year, smart girl, great grades, AP scores, took 1 course at Yale, but couldn’t do SAT tests well and had a lot of anxiety with them. So you never know, although she only applied there with a teacher’s prodding, most of her schools were less prestigious.
My D’s sound a lot like yours, I hope they both find the motivation to hunker down a bit and have a pleasant surprise in the Fall.</p>
<p>Debrums, what year are your girls going to be in the fall? Mine’s going to be a ssnior, so she has to make the most of summer test prep. She doesn’t think she’ll do any better on the math, and hates it, but she’ll have to try. At least (by non-cc standards anyway) a 29 isn’t bad, but for merit aid she needs to do better. Her AP’s (so far - we’ll see about this year’s) are good (two 5’s and a 4) so maybe that will help.</p>
<p>It’s good to hear about those kids who got into great schools with less than stellar test scores! Let’s hope something wonderful happens for our kids too.</p>