Explanation of Percentiles

I disagree with post #19 regarding the “usually…”. There are far more students in the lower fourth than there are athletes et al. at many schools. For example, an entering freshman class of 6,000 at UW-Madison will have 1500 in the lowest 25%. Many “legacies” (having a parent who went there…) will be above that ranking. Not all athletes will fall into that category (think of basketball players with a 4.0 as college seniors or going on to medical school- recent/my era).

Schools admit students they feel can succeed. Someone has to be at the bottom and motivated to do well.

Remember the average SAT score- for a test taken by college hopefuls, not all HS students- is 500. Therefore any score above 600 is good even if it is low for some colleges. Likewise I believe the middle ACT score is 20 (although 22 for some upper Midwest states that have the highest averages).

Students with top test scores but low grades relative to those scores may be denied admission because they have not shown they know how to study to achieve high grades, and will not have as firm a foundation/knowledge and skills base as others. The student with top grades and not quite as stellar test scores has shown s/he can do the work.

So, some schools where 75% of the students have higher test scores could be on the radar and could be an excellent choice.

^ Agree or not, I am just listing some examples of students admitted with lower stat due to other factors. Don’t be naively thinking anyone with the stat below the 25th percentile have the same chance. You are picking a school with a class size of 6000 as counter argument which is not really true for a school with less than 2000 class size. The number of athlete recruit is much more significant. Obviously not all athlete recruits (or legacies) would have lower stat, it is just other factors (or hooks) that can make up the difference with a weaker score. Again, I did mention there are other hooks and factors besides recruit and legacy such as URM, first gen, and schools that are less competitive or do not rely on the test score for admission (arts, music, theater, or nursing). All those numbers add up.

The smaller schools also tend to have more holistic admission practices. Test scores are less important to them than other factors. The other factors that accounts for admission of the bottom score range could be anything. It could be a “hook” but it could also be anything else that make the given student stand out and appeal to the admissions department.

The problem is that students (and parents) who focus a lot of attention on SAT scores are often putting energy into the least significant part of the application process, from the college’s perspective. This is particularly true at many smaller, highly selective colleges because of the narrowing of the score range. The ad coms know that a student with a 1300 SAT or 28 ACT is intellectually capable of doing the work. The students high school transcript, LOR’s, and records of EC’s give a lot better indication as to what the student will actually bring to the college.

The schools indicate how much importance they place on test scores in the Common Data Set – and my experience over the years has been that the schools tend to be pretty transparent in indicating which factors are most important to them. If they test scores are “Very Important” … then test scores probably ARE very important to them. But many schools rank test scores as being less important to them. They are looking at other factors first.

Remember that many colleges have various admission buckets of different selectivity. The most common example would be more or less selective majors or divisions. Other examples include the auto-admit versus non-auto-admit pools at UT Austin – overall admission rate and 25th-75th percentile stats for the entire school are not very useful, since auto-admit applicants have a 100% admission rate (but not necessarily to their majors), and probably include many of the low test score applicants, while all others should consider the school a reach. Recruited athletes and other “big hook” applicants are also in (smaller) less selective admission buckets.

Besides auto admission, the in state applicant pool of any public university would skew the stat too. Even UMich that has near 50% class from OOS shows a lower admission stat for in state applicants.

What about the students with high test scores and less than stellar grades? Our S18 has SAT scores that put him well within the middle 50% at Fordham, but we consider it a reach because he’s a B student.

For a college with a holistic or otherwise opaque admission process, make the reach/match/safety assessment based on the lower (relative to the college’s range) of the grades/rank/rigor of high school course work and test scores. (In some cases, known policies prioritizing one over the other can adjust this assessment.)

If the college has some sort of known formula combining grades/rank/rigor of high school course work and test scores, or some sort of automatic admission criteria, then it should be less difficult to account for “unbalanced” stats when making reach/match/safety assessments.

My kid with lowish math scores (still in th 600s) got into a lot of places where his math score was in the bottom 25%ile. There were enough stellar things on the application that made up for it. He wasn’t a legacy, an athlete or anything else out of the ordinary. He did have an unusually activity and wrote engaging and funny essays. His teacher recommendations were probably stellar.

@mstomper I think you have to be cautious with low(ish) grades and high SAT scores. Though it may depend on how those grades are distributed. As an example, my younger son’s weighted GPA was around 97 and the unweighted one around 93. It got bumped up by 8 orchestra courses for which he got grades of 98 or 99. He never got above a B in Latin (which I think got a lot of forgiveness) and he had a number of B’s in math and science courses. (OTOH one of his recommendations was from a math teacher who said he had the best mathematically thinking in his pre-calc class even though he often ran out of time on tests.) He did not shirk from taking the hard science APs like Bio and Physics C and took Calc BC as a senior as well. His real love though was history and he took 3 AP history classes. Our approach was to have him apply to two safe colleges and use EA when he could. When he got into one of the reachiest colleges on his list EA, he didn’t even have to apply to one of his safeties. He did apply to the other one because he liked it so much and he had not yet visited the EA college. If your kid has some safeties he likes, I think you can afford to go for more reaches. It can also make a difference what sort of school your kid attends - a B from an academic magnet is not going to be the same as the B from a regular high school.

  1. There's a somewhat important mistake being made by many in this thread. If a college says it's 75th percentile for a test is 750 and its 25th percentile is 650, that does not mean -- as has been said several times -- that 25% of the enrolled students had scores "below" 650. What it means is that if there are 1,000 enrolled students the 751st-best score among them was 650. There could have been 200 kids with 650s, and at the extremes they could have been tied for 552nd place or 751st place, or anywhere in between. The point is, given the compression of scores among enrolled students, the percentage of kids with lower scores is likely to be a lot smaller than 25%. And same thing on the upper end -- if your score equals the 75th percentile figure given, that does not mean your score is better than that of 75% of enrolled students. You may only be in the top 33% or 40% of enrolled students.
  2. CDS numbers are always based on enrolled students, although some colleges also provide data on applicants and students admitted, whether or not they enroll. Systematically:

(a) Many more people apply with scores that are towards the lower end of the range than towards the higher end of the range. With exceptions so few and so ambiguous as to be meaningless, the higher one’s scores (or grades), the better one’s chance for admission. But “better” is nothing like a guarantee at the most selective colleges, just as “worse” is not at all a guarantee of rejection.

(b) The pool of admitted students has higher scores than the pool of enrolled students. Generally, students with higher scores have more options, so they are less likely to enroll if admitted, while students at the low end of the range may not have other high-quality acceptances. The difference is less pronounced than I might otherwise think, however. For any particular SAT test, the 75-25 lines for the accepted class are usually 10-20 points higher than for the enrolled class. So if you are looking at a college and your scores are right at the 75th percentile level, that means you would probably be “only” in the top 30-33% of admitted students. And the bottom 25% of enrolled students represents a lot less than a quarter of the students accepted.

© While @wis75 is completely correct that Wisconsin (and many others) does not have enough low-scoring legacies and athletes et. to fill the bottom 25% of the class, it’s different at highly selective colleges like HYPS or good LACs. They do have enough special cases to fill those spots, or close to it. Which means that if you are looking at one of those colleges, the bottom 25% is almost meaningless if you are not a special case. (However, “special case” extends a lot farther than star athletes and children of billionaires, to include people with other special talents. I don’t know what Emma Watson’s SAT scores were, but if they happened to be somewhat subpar I doubt that mattered to any of the colleges to which she was applying.)

Agree with @JHS and other posters who point out the implications of the 25-75 vary greatly with the school when assessing your own/child’s prospects for a particular school (reach, match, safety and the gradations in between). As you go from big state U (perhaps with auto admits) to highly selective holistic admissions schools, I suspect as you get towards the 25% and lower (putting aside the athletic recruits and super donor cases), you will see more admits that are very spikey (could be spikey STEM, literature/writing, social science, art, music, etc…) at a high level with other areas below, maybe well below, average. I think a big mistake that some applicants make is that they assume that their “spikes” are higher than in fact they are, especially when they believe EC’s are going to make up for mediocre grades and/or test scores, and they end up applying to too many reaches and not enough matches and safeties. Applicants should shoot high, but be realistic about the range of what are truly safety and matches. EA and rolling admissions are a great tool to get real feedback on the strength of the application.

I actually once made a mistake several years ago by looking at the mid 50 score range and overall admission rate to call a public university a low match/safety for someone asking for chances. It turned out that school accept mostly in state students and by auto admission that the mid 50 range is meaningless to OOS applicants and even in state students outside of the auto admission pool. So one have to study a lot on each school instead of just looking at the numbers.