How much to worry/prep for SAT/ACT in a test-optional world?

Applying to College
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D25 is most interested in: UW, U of Oregon, Oregon State, U of Colorado Boulder.

I’ve added/suggested: UC Davis, Wash U St Louis, Vanderbilt (financial stretch, need merit).

D25 has amazing rigor and UW 4.0 (I believe weighted is 4.7). 5 AP classes this year, planned 12 total. The rest are honors or dual where available. ECs show variety and focus. Lots of clubs, a Varsity sport, one leadership position, volunteers during the summer.

Her PSAT was a 1250. She’s super disappointed but also hadn’t prepared at all. Very responsible kid but I think she’s stretched pretty thin and prioritized which I applaud.

So the question is, before SAT/ACT - how much does it matter? Since she can skip sending scores if they aren’t amazing, should she even focus her time on it?

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No one knows, but more and more I believe that TO os not TO for all. I don’t think its an auto disqualification, but I think a TO unhook applicant is more rare than colleges make it out to be.

Regardless, she should not be discouraged. My D scored a 1290 on the PSAT and a 1500+ on the SAT with basic prep (official practice tests).

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I would actually encourage her putting the time into it, especially if you’re going for merit. Many schools will prefer to see a complete academic picture (that includes test scores) to give out merit, especially at the very competitive schools. A test isn’t necessary but remember, the “test-optional” statistics are inflated from sports and legacy – so, though it isn’t confirmed, I like to think that the admit rate for unhooked test optional students is actually a bit lower at most schools. On top of that, it just provides reassurance to the admissions team from an academic readiness standpoint.

Don’t sweat it too much – I’m not saying you should go out and hire a tutor or anything – But I would suggest basic preparation like Khan Academy and official practice tests. And don’t be discouraged about the PSAT – getting a lower score than expected is pretty normal for someone who hasn’t seen a test like that before.

One more thing – have her take a diagnostic practice SAT and ACT test to see which test is better for her. Students often find they prefer one test over the other.

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Also, why not shoot for the stars? Your daughter is clearly both smart and a hard worker. If she can pull off a super high score, it could improve her chances and maybe the scope of schools she applies to!

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It matters a lot but not at the UCs and UW. The UCs are test blind and at UW the file reader is not given the score unless you are marginal and it’s a 31. ACT.

You need every hook for WUSTL and Vandy. You might get in TO but having a good score can only help.

CU Boulder may be major dependent.

One should bust tail.

If it doesn’t work out, then you don’t have to use.

Or just know you are likely disadvantaging yourself as more than half submit etc.

If you don’t submit a test the assumption is because your score is too low. We are past the - in covid no one is offering it time.

But kids still do get in and if there’s no chance of a 1500+, then it’s ok to shelve it.

If you don’t get in - it’s why you have safeties !!

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There is a lot of conversation right now about how for some colleges that might be reaches based on your grades alone–and for some colleges, as to unhooked applicants they are reaches for almost everyone–high test scores may be a lot more important than “optional” would imply.

That very much does not mean kids aren’t getting into great colleges with only great grades and no test scores. It just means they may need to reassess a bit what really counts as a reasonable application list, and recalibrate somewhat what would count as good results for someone who has high grades but not a high test score.

Personally, I don’t think that is a big deal, because I don’t think more selective = better is a generally valid equation. But still, I think it is an emerging reality that in practice a high test score may give a high grade applicant a few more options.

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For additional perspectives on your question, including the experiences of a few different students, see this thread: To Submit or Not to Submit test scores - lessons for class of '24 - Applying to College - College Confidential Forums

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One of my kids had a not so great psat. Did a lot of self prep, got a 36 act. Within reach for someone like your child.

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Neither Vanderbilt nor WashU has yet extended their test optional policy beyond the class of 2024.

They may, but as others have said even schools who continue to be technically test optional are openly using language that indicates they really want to see test scores. Boston College, Duke, and Yale come to mind (check out the Dartmouth admissions podcast where the Yale admissions person discusses it).

There are others in this same boat. Cornell is testing different test policies across its colleges, for instance, to determine which works best for their goals.

Text optional is something she can keep in her back pocket, but she should prep and test as if she plans to use her scores.

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For what it is worth, for this class year (24) the message from our very experienced and informed college counselors was it made sense to try out an early diagnostic of each test, then prep for your better test and see how you did on a second test. Some people could then do a third of that test if they felt like they could do even better. Some people would also get a test score that served their purposes in that test, or possibly even the diagnostic test. And finally some people would have learned test taking really wasn’t their thing.

I don’t know if that message will be tweaked going forward, but I think the basic logic is still really solid. Even if you do not start off great, you probably won’t really know what you are capable of until you have picked your best test for that second effort. But if you don’t feel like you made adequate progress by that point, then it might well start making sense to focus on other things and just plan your list around being test optional.

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There are a few ways to look at this. For my kids, (graduated HS '21 and '23), both chose TO, and have no regrets. I am a big fan of TO for strong students whose GPA’s and AP test scores accurately reflect their abilities, and who would have to put in time to prep in order to score high enough to add to their application.
My kids were not interested in prepping for test just for a score. It did not feel like a good use of time, when they had heavy academic loads and leadership positions in EC’s they loved, and honestly, I agreed with them. We have always tried to emphasize the satisfaction of learning and doing well, over focusing on the grades, and test prep for a score did not seem to offer satisfaction. The college admissions process is stressful, and it was hard enough to find balance without focusing on the tests.
Both my kids ended up at highly selective schools, with great FA packages, both had great safety options, and neither wishes that they had spent more time prepping for tests.
I think it depends on priorities and what you think you may accomplish with the test score you hope to get with preparation, and how much stress it might cause.

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My kids took each test 3 times because we are not eligible for FA so merit was needed. Dd19’s scholarship was pretty heavily based on her ACT score, and based on dd21 and ds21’s offers (and others), it appears it still matters even though it’s TO.

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Your priorities makes sense in the context of your kids’ high school graduation years. Moving forward, though, the approach may not work as universally because of a renewed emphasis on test scores.

In the Dartmouth podcast, the individual from Yale admissions said that they are finding that test scores are the single best indicator of performance at Yale. When the University of Pittsburgh met with college counselors last year, they said that they are finding that test submitting students are outperforming test optional ones.

My 2022 applied everywhere TO with great success, but those results wouldn’t necessarily be replicated this year or when the OP is asking for next year. We have to be careful about not assuming that the 2021-2023 admissions cycles will be the norm moving forward.

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Wow. Single best indicator of performance in college. Just, wow. That flies right in the face of the “test scores only indicate how well one can take a standardized test” mantra. To me, that’s not surprising, since I don’t think that SAT/ACT scores are just an indication of how well one takes a standardized test - they most definitely are an indication of mastery of the material. Sure, there are people who have mastered the material, but are slow deliberate workers who didn’t try to get extended time, and in their cases, a low test score is not indicative of lack of mastery of the material. But for most people with low test scores, it indicates that they have not mastered the material. A low test score for someone with a high GPA from a low-standards high school where you get an A for attendance, behavior, and handing in homework, is a good indicator that they’re not ready for a high standards college, and would be better off starting at a college which can meet them at their level of preparedness.

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Not just that. Tests can indicate a mixture of innate intelligence, preparation, work ethic, commitment, and the ability to test well under stress and pressure. A solid combination of these traits are critical to college success. And realistically, you need at least 3 out of those 5 to get that 1500+ that those “elite” schools want to see. It might not be a universal indicator, but I believe in general, it’s better than a lot of other options out there.

The unfortunate reality is that no matter what the policy on testing is, someone’s going to be disadvantaged.

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I think there is an important distinction to be noted here – – your children were test optional for the SAT/ACT. Yet, they submitted AP scores. When colleges are trying to compare across curricula and schools, standardized test scores can be helpful. The AP tests are standardized and subject based, and this can be helpful for that exact same reason. I wonder how many of the students at the most selective schools that did not submit SAT/ACT (as shown on the common data set) submitted AP tests (not shown on the common data set)?

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If your daughter is planning to major in business or engineering at CU Boulder, then she should submit a test score. Admissions to Leeds and CEAS especially is very competitive. Achieving a score within the middle 50% for CU Boulder seems doable for your child and a solid score can only help her application.

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It doesn’t surprise me. As I have pointed out before, the tests indicate preparedness, not inherent ability. Even if you were smart you cannot succeed at a college level class if you weren’t taught the fundamentals before you get there. IMO that’s why we have seen STEM focused universities like MIT and GTech be quick to drop TO.

Our boarding school has found the same - without tests they were unable to evaluate Math preparedness. Students are coming in with giant gaps in their knowledge and are struggling. I just heard that at our former (small) private MS there are only 3 students in Honors Math, others can’t keep up and drop out because they don’t fully know their multiplication tables. The pandemic created big holes in the usual progression.

ETA - I think you were getting at the same point.

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I mean, not really, if you understand the issues beyond the surface level.

Usually when college admissions people say something like that about standardized tests, what they are implicitly comparing them to is something like raw HS GPAs. Raw HS GPAs can in fact be weak predictors because of the lack of standardization. So, many selective colleges have to do a lot of work to do what I would call “normalizing” transcripts, and the inputs into that process usually include the transcript, school reports, possibly counselor letter, possibly regional AO experience, possibly internal tracking data, possibly in fact test scores . . . .

So even if normalized transcripts are an important part of a college’s internal academic rating, that isn’t really a “single” indicator, and for that matter might not even be entirely separated from test scores.

Meanwhile, I am not aware of anyone seriously arguing that there is no subject matter understanding required to do well on the SAT/ACT. Indeed, they would not be learnable tests if that was not true, and they clearly are learnable to some extent.

The nuanced version of the common criticism is that at least for some people, they are also time-pressured tests. And time-pressure tests then test for rate of work and not just subject matter understanding. But they can do both.

However, the SAT/ACT need to scale to certain percentiles. And yet–at least prior to becoming more adaptive–they were limited in how far they could go in terms of subject matter understanding. So, at the highest score levels, rate of work starts to dominate who gets the highest scores among people who have all pretty much mastered the, for them, rather low-level subject matter understanding required.

But still, if you don’t get a high score, that could be for one of two reasons–you could have the subject matter understanding but a slow rate of work, or you could have a fast-enough rate of work but lack some subject matter understanding.

OK, so Yale is looking at all this and saying it wants high scores to help confirm sufficient subject matter ability, particularly in Math it seems, although that could have been just an example.

That doesn’t mean they are rejecting the observation that some people might not get high scores despite adequate subject matter ability due to slow rate of work. Instead, it is consistent with Yale not always being able to tell the difference.

So with things like this, I think you have to be looking at conditional probabilities. I am sure what you wrote is true of test-takers generally. I am not at all sure it is true of test-takers with, say, near-perfect grades in rigorous college-prep classes.

But again, it doesn’t have to be “most” to explain Yale’s preference.

Like, suppose (totally hypothetically) Yale was finding that among people who met their grade/transcript standards, 75% with low test scores also did well in their classes, and then 85% of such people with high test scores also did well in their classes.

Assuming for simplicity that there were no other factors, Yale would rationally fill up their entire admit class with people with both high grades/rigor and high test scores if they could. Because 85% is better than 75%, so why not?

Now I described this as a hypothetical, but I am actually very confident something like this is going on. And the reason I am confident about this is that after looking at a bunch of SCOIR data for our HS, it became clear to me that it was really only a small handful of colleges that seemed to have strict high test minimums for our unhooked applicants. I actually don’t have Yale data, but you could see this in the Harvard, Stanford, and MIT data, so OK, I think that is good confirmation.

But as soon as I started looking at other Ivies and Ivy+ colleges, more people were getting admitted with very high grades and somewhat lower test scores (which may or may not have actually been submitted–we do not appear to be tracking this). Even just a slight step below those few Ivy+ colleges, and many more people without high test scores were being admitted with high grades.

So what this implies to me is the following. A few colleges like Yale can fill up on just mostly the hypothetical 85% folks (meaning both really high grades and really high test scores), but then literally those people start running out. Which we know–there are only so many high test scores at all, and then only so many of them will also have really high grades, and so only so many colleges can actually fill up with such applicants.

And then other colleges have no choice but to start hedging their bets. So some kids with not the highest grades/rigor but high test scores. Some kids with not the highest test scores but high grades/rigor. In other words, they have to start admitting more and more of those hypothetical 75% kids, because there just aren’t enough of the 85% kids to go around.

So, OK, Yale and a couple of its peers can insist on having it all. But very quickly, colleges are going to have to start making some choices, and I can see in the data they are sometimes choosing high grades/rigor but maybe not the highest test scores (if they even see the test scores).

But also sometimes the opposite. So, if you are a high grades/rigor kid who can also get a really high test score, that is good. It gives you a much better shot at Yale (I think), and at least a somewhat better shot at the next couple of levels of selectivity too.

But, if you can’t get a really high test score–your odds at Yale may be very slight (unhooked), but I think you still could have a fighting chance in those next couple levels. And at a certain (still very selective) point you are going to be very likely for admittance and it won’t really matter at all.

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By the way, just to throw in another interesting tidbit–I attended a live info session for Haverford, and at least what I heard them say is they had adopted an internal policy where if your test score wasn’t helpful, they would just eliminate it from consideration and it would be as if you had applied test optional. The stated point of the policy was to take the stress off kids in terms of whether or not to submit by making it impossible to hurt yourself by submitting.

But of course this isn’t inconsistent with them wanting to see high test scores if possible. Indeed, now hearing what the Yale AO was saying, if anything it seems consistent with Haverford just wanting to see more tests submitted, because maybe sometimes lower-than-normal-for-Haverford test scores actually will help some people.

But . . . probably not your typical unhooked, common sort of applicant to these colleges.

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