Hello CC,
So I was wondering, do highly selective colleges automatically reject those with lower SAT/ACT scores? Like does the computer filter them out?
I guess I’m basically asking if they narrow down their applicant pool by isolating those students with the highest stats in order to make their job easier. Ivies and high-caliber schools claim that they don’t have a required SAT/ACT score, but is this really true? I’m just curious.
I’d say it probably is. If you got a 36 act then you probably go in a different pool that someone who got a 28. But for ivy leagues and other selective schools a 36 or something in that area doesn’t get you as far as it would at less selective schools
I doubt they explicitly run a filter program and don’t bother looking at those below a cutoff. However when an adcom picks up an app they have an idea in mind of what a strong/weak applicant looks like and the first place they are going to look is at grades & scores. It only takes a few minutes to go thru each app, and they may know after 10 seconds the candidate is likely a deny.
But you paid your $75 or whatever, so you are entitled to (and get) a reading.
I suspect they do. Computers are supremely designed for this exact same thing. Why in the world would the Dean of admissions at Harvard want his staff spending any time at all on a person who applied with a 900 SAT score and a 2.0 WGPA? The guy only sent in his application to say he applied to Harvard. He cannot seriously expect to get in.
I believe they do have a filter system in place to weed out the ones they know will just not make the cut.
UCLA got 102K applications this year. They might read them all because it is a state school. But a private school that does not have to answer to outside people would find a way to more effectively review those 102K applications.
It is likely that none of know for certain.
Maybe not for a 28 but an 18 would not get much attention at HYPSM.
You can check the scatter plots to see which scores and GPAs got in and which were rejected. At the most selective schools, most of the Accepted dots are in the upper-right quadrant, but you do see a few outliers – a 23 ACT, a 3.1 GPA, etc. It happens. But those kids almost certainly have a huge hook or multiple hooks: URM female hoping to study Mechanical Engineering and first-gen, famous person or child of famous person, recruited athlete, child of $millions donator, etc. For non-hooked applicants, I think some reasonable minimum goals for elite (say, 20 most selective U’s and 15 most selective LACs) school admissions are the following:
The higher, the better. I’m thinking if you are unhooked and you achieve those stats, you’ll make it past the “not academically qualified” hurdle. For HYPSM, Caltech and Chicago maybe the hurdle is a bit higher. Vanderbilt and WUSTL too, recently.
You can check those scatterplot graphs to see if those are reasonably accurate.
They do read them all, although it may not be exactly what you think. Paid outside readers at UCLA (and I suspect many other high-demand colleges) go thru all the apps and rate them. It’s not quite the scene some imagine from college movies, of adcoms sitting around a big table with stacks of apps in front of them and hotly debating them.
Want to be a UCLA reader? Apply here: https://www.admission.ucla.edu/prospectivereader/
Nobody can know for sure, but I expect students with obvious academic weaknesses–like, below the school’s acceptable range–do not get much of a read, if any at all.