Have you considered having her undergo psycho educational testing to determine how her anxiety will impact her ability to learn in college? There are accommodations that can be made at most colleges, as not to restrict her to just schools with fewer timed tests. Plus it may be a good idea for her to learn the best way to handle timed test-related stress, as it is likely to be a part of her life going forward (in school as well as deadlines at work).
With a small sample set, Naviance may not be helpful. The difficulty with predicting the admissions outcome of test optional schools is that there is a great deal of variation among applicants. A 3.3 GPA from an applicant at a school known for its rigor and who has taken the most difficult courses offered will be considered much differently than a 3.3 GPA student from a less challenging environment.
Try coming up with a geographic area and a budget to start limiting the number of schools. Categorize schools by safety (more than 50% accepted and her GPA is at least at the 75th percentile of accepted students), match (35% to 50%+ accepted and 50th to 75th percentile for GPA) and reach (below 35% accepted and 25th to 50th percentile for GPA). Then look at majors of interest and cut schools which do not offer them. I would then differentiate your list based upon the core requirements of each school. Some have as many as 1/3 required classes, with little or no substitutions allowed. Others allow a much less narrow path or fewer requisite courses.
We found that focusing on school size and whether public or private to be far less important than focusing on the curriculum and unique learning opportunities offered by each school.
In my earlier post, I mentioned that Sarah Lawarence’s CDS marks 3 criteria as more important than grades – essays, recommendations, and rigor. I also gave some quotes from admissions offers showing them following their CDS including rejecting a high GPA applicant because she had weak essays and did not seem interested/knowledgeable of the school (a common behavior towards safeties); while accepting a low GPA applicant who had never received an A in high school, but had great essays and LORs. Scattergrams show only a loose correlation between acceptances and GPA at Sarah Lawrence, with some rejected applicants having GPAs as high as 4.0. Assuming Sarah Lawrence is a safety because you have a GPA above 3.4 is a very bad idea. You should not assume all colleges with high admit rates primarily base their admission decisions on GPA, particularly at colleges that tell you they place greater emphasis on other criteria.
OK, so all this makes sense, but I have to ask again…how do you know what a safety is? I agree with Data10 that going purely on the numbers is not helpful, so what should I be looking at? I do not want to be here next year with a child who got in nowhere. I’m not looking for high flying schools here, just a relatively academic, test optional school for my daughter to consider as a safety. I was thinking Bennington or Hampshire. Any thoughts?
Many test optional LACs deemphasize stat portions of the application, which can make them unreliable as a safety. For example, you mentioned Hampshire. Hampshire’s CDS marks the most important criteria for admission as LORs and character/personal qualities, rather than anything related to stats. And scattergrams show a good portion of higher GPA / low test score applicants being rejected, so it seems unreliable as a safety.
You can find some more reliable safeties that have guaranteed admission for 3.2+/3.3+ GPAs, regardless of test score. However, they tend to be publics, and if out of state, often directional state type publics. I get the impression that your daughter is instead looking for private LACs. If you cannot find a guaranteed admission college that your daughter wants to attend, you could instead choose less selective LACs with a high probability of admission. You might use Naviance to estimate how admissions decisions often go for persons from your HS, although there may be too small a sample size, if the college is not near by. If Naviance is not possible, you could also estimate which is high chance of admission by using national scattergrams, looking at what the college says they base admission decision on their website and CDS, looking at various stats like percent of applicants accepted, etc.
I have the same questions as you, Queen’s Mom. In fact, I started a similar thread a few months ago and did not receive satisfactory answers, unfortunately. I share momof2eagles’s suspicions: that the test optional choice is designed for a certain class of students, namely economically and educationally disadvantaged kids. The idea is to reach out to them and make it easier for them to apply. Therefore, my concern is what reception admissions will give a middle class, non-URM from a decent school who opts not to submit scores. Frankly, if a kid has good or great scores he will send them, so I don’t see how admissions won’t assume the student has crappy scores and that is why she is not submitting. And in most cases, they’d be correct, no? And then they’ll reject him or her UNLESS s/he brings a super phenomenal something else to the table.
Also, I am not so sure the option is designed for athletes either, momof2eagles. D approached a coach of a test optional school and directly questioned him about the test optional possibility and whether it was only for first generation or low-SES students. He replied “no,” the option was for everyone and not just underprivileged applicants, but then he told her he wanted her to take the SAT and submit it anyway because that “would give her the most options.” Well, in my estimation that likely will mean she will not get in to that particular college, so I have no idea what use test optional will be for my D.
I don’t think the test optional school are so nefarious as some think. But yes, if your kid is only interested in schools that don’t place a high priority on stats you can’t use stats to judge a safety. I think selectivity is a help - school that are accepting over 60% of their applicants are unlikely to turn down someone who is a pretty strong student. But if you are really concerned apply to some pretty safe schools EA or rolling admissions - they may not have all of what you want (because LACs seem to be in love with ED and often don’t offer EA) - but at least you’ll have choices in April. Some public schools may have honors colleges or other sorts of programs that would make them feel more like what the OP’s daughter is looking for.
I will discuss my experience working with some Low income URM students applying to SAT optional schools. I don’t know anyone who was accepted with a 3.3 GPA ; in fact while they may get a wink I not submitting scores the overall GPA and recommendation letters , graded papers and interviews are more important.
Almost every low income student I know who has been accepted to an SAT optional school had between a 3.7 - 4.0 GPA on a 4.0 scale taking the most rigorous courses. While the school is SAT optional if regents grades, Ap scores, SAT scores or other state exam scores are on the transcript, they are not ignored and considered part of the school record. students with high GPAs who were not accepted had a disconnect in their regents scores (in fact I advised the student to submit her 1170 cr/math because she probably would have been admitted
Which students test optional schools benefit is highly specific. It is also probable the rejection rate is higher for those that don’t submit due to low scores because the correlation to grades and course load is usually pretty good. I do know from one school that applicants that did not submit test scores actually had pretty good scores but the feeling was that they didn’t add much to the application.
It is pretty clear females choose the option more often, which is why acceptance rates for females are lower at many liberal arts colleges, so the benefits diminish as more students use the option.
The first schools to go test optional have always been known to be somewhat independent in thinking and the movement actually started with the professors.
Personally I would like to see all standardized tests disappear from college admissions.
What do you mean by your first sentence, BatesParents2019? By the way, I should have given kudos to you in my above post, since you did offer me some helpful information on this topic.
Just to clarify a bit, my daughter is not low income, she is not an URM, she is not an athlete (at least not in the “recruited” sense). She has good extracurriculars. Her recommendations will be amazing and she interviews amazingly well. She also writes like an angel. She is just a round peg who adamantly and vociferously refuses to be put in a square hole.
There are many reasons schools decide to go test-optional; I don’t think attracting the “economically and educationally disadvantaged” is prominent among them, though at some schools that might be one factor. Perhaps the most basic reason is that standardized test scores just aren’t a very good predictor of success in college, and many people, including many educational professionals, believe they’re over-emphasized in the college admissions process, and become a pernicious influence. They create a false veneer of objectivity; small differences are magnified beyond all reason, and they become a crutch that admissions officers rely on rather than looking at the whole picture, when in fact the differences in success rates between kids who score, say. a 1250 CR + M and those who score 1320 CR + M are pretty trivial. Even the College Board makes modest claims about the SAT: that SAT scores combined with high school grades are a slightly better predictor of first-year college grades than HS grades alone. Think about that: that’s a really weak claim. Second, some schools have gone test-optional to boost the size of their admissions pool. I assume this is not just so they can reject more applicants, though there may be some of that. I think it more likely they think they can find some “diamonds in the rough,” good students who just don’t test well but can thrive if given the chance. They can’t find those people if they’re deterred from even applying by test scores that don’t appear to be competitive. Third, I think some schools have gone test-optional for a more cynical reason: they think if they go test-optional, only the applicants with high test scores will submit them, their SAT/ACT medians will go up, they’ll look more “selective,” and it may boost their US News rankings, which is something they all care about even though they think the US News rankings are bunk–but it’s popular bunk that a lot of people look to in making judgments about where to apply.
That said, I think there’s some truth to what you say about adcoms’ assumptions. In fact, an admissions officer at a rather prestigious test-optional school just flat out told us, “If an applicant elects not to submit test scores, we pretty much need to assume the test scores aren’t very strong; otherwise, why wouldn’t they submit them? But that’s not necessarily fatal to the application. Test scores are just one data point, and not necessarily the most important one in our holistic review. But if we don’t have test scores, there needs to be some real strength in the rest of the application for that applicant to be competitive for admission.” “Real strength” doesn’t sound like quite as high a bar as “super phenomenal,” and this admissions officer seemed to be saying a decision not to submit test scores doesn’t automatically create a presumption of rejection absent something phenomenal. But the general thrust of your comment and his are the same: adcoms need to assume an applicant would submit test scores if they were competitive, therefore electing not to submit them creates as assumption they’re not competitive and the rest of the application needs to be quite strong to warrant admission.
For those who suspect the motives of test-optional schools, Wake Forest has some terrific blog posts on why they decided to go test-optional and what the outcomes have been. Wake was one of the first prominent schools to drop standardized testing requirements: http://rethinkingadmissions.wfu.edu/q_and_a.php
If you look at the Colleges that Change Lives schools (all test optional) and the schools at www.fairtest.org, I find it hard to believe these are schools looking to manipulate their numbers. I believe many of these schools see it as a mission to reach out everyone, including the kids who don’t do well on standardized tests. Wake Forest has all kinds of stats showing GPA to be a much better predictor of success. These schools are looking to admit kids who are going to graduate.
Test optional enables schools to accept highly talented applicants without hurting their rankings. These accepted students may be low-income or high-income. There probably are many diverse reasons why schools want otherwise outstanding students who do not do particularly well on the SAT/ACT.
By the way, I don’t think all the CTCL schools are test optional yet (Wooster wasn’t, as of last year), but most if not all have a reputation for accepting a wide range of student abilities and offering nurturing environments for those students.
My assumption about the type of student targeted by the test optional policy cane from the word “access” used repeatedly in the info sessions of the test optional schools we visited. Many went on to say things like “we realize some students can’t afford test prep classes” etc.
@TheGFG What I meant was the kid with a legitimate high GPA, great EC’s, special talents that for whatever reason scored below average for that school on the SAT or ACT.
The kid from a good high school that took hard classes like calculus, chemistry and physics, the kid that took an extra real class instead of a fluff elective.
So the transcript and GPA where its obvious the test score is not indicative. The schools have good data on the high schools and they know real GPAs from the fluffy ones.
^ Exactly. These schools want strong students who would otherwise be deterred from applying by the idea that their standardized test scores are so low as to disqualify them.
I know others have pointed this out before but it bears repeating. The first schools to go test-optional did it before the USNWR rankings even existed. I’m always bemused when people assert that schools have dropped testing only for Machiavellian reasons, as if the DOA at these schools is saying “Sure, we’ll take less qualified students and damage our reputations among faculty at other colleges and HS counselors as well as lower our graduation rate (which together account for 50% of the USNWR rankings), as long as it improves our score on the 8% of the rating affected by standardized test scores.”
I’m following this thread closely, thanks to OP for starting it!
I wish the test optional schools would just have applicants submit scores and then determine their cut offs themselves. Playing this game where students need to determine whether their scores are good enough or not only caters to the rankers. My D16 is looking at all of the standard LACs. Her ECs are really great (guessing essays and recs will be too) and GPA (IB diploma) is solid. Her ACT comp (1st try, no prep) was 26 and her SAT (1st try, no prep, whooping cough!) was 1850ish (CR+M+W). So, does she submit the scores to Wesleyan, Mount Holyoke, Bard, Lewis & Clark or not? There is no way to know.
The main value of standardized testing is to provide a common measure across the wide variation in high schools, presumably also offering some deterrent against excessive high school grade inflation or dumbing down of high school courses (though those still occur). However, some colleges may see that value more in terms of the assessing high schools, not the individual applicants. I.e. a high school where 4.0 students present 1100 SAT CR+M scores on average is likely to be a weaker or more grade-inflated one than one where 4.0 students present 1500 SAT CR+M scores on average.
If most colleges still require standardized tests, then a test optional college can “free ride” on the deterrent effect. To assess high school quality, the college should be able to track high school performance of that high school’s graduates to how well they perform in that college.
With respect to the original question of this thread, it depends on the college. Some colleges are test optional or test score does not matter for applicants who reach an automatic admission threshold based on GPA or class rank. These can be safeties if the applicant meets that threshold and the colleges are affordable. Others have automatic admission or scholarship thresholds that include test scores, but are such that the applicant meets them even with test scores that are not that high (e.g. http://www.truman.edu/admission-cost/cost-aid/scholarships/automatic-scholarships/ ).
But other colleges heavily consider subjective criteria, so relying on stats (GPA or rank when not submitting test scores) to assess whether a college can be a reach, match, or safety may not be all that accurate.
@PNWedwonk - You note the the ACT and SAT scores for your daughter were “no prep”. In the context of your post, you apparently deem the scores themselves to be disappointing.
This is not the first time on CC I’ve seen folks note that test scores are “no prep”, as if that’s a bonus factor that should somehow boost the scores to some degree.
Admissions officers don’t know whether a given kid who got a 26 on their ACT did so with weeks of prep, a few hours the weekend before, or none at all. I’m not advocating that all kids spend 3 months doing test prep, but I also get a sense that some think that maybe there’s something a little more virtuous or something about going into the ACT or SAT cold.
Kids aspiring to good scores should PREP!!!
To some reasonable extent…
At least sit down and take a practice test and get a feel for the structure and timing, and some idea of where their live score is likely to end up.
You don’t get a gold star for failure to prep.
(Sorry PNWedwonk - I don’t want to pick on you excessively, it’s just a small point that bugs me. And for all I know you wanted your daughter to prep and she resisted or whatever. Just making a general point.)