Which is why Pre/Elementary school should be where are the people worried about college equality put their energy instead. You want to fix higher level education? You have to fix early education first.
Yes, our private MS kids had a leg up starting at their HS. They knew how to write and they were used to applying math concepts to word problems. Not to mention knowing how make good use of office hours and their advisors to advocate for themselves.
Amplifying this 1,000x!
I wish I weren’t cynical and could believe they were looking out for kids’ best interests, but the school likely benefits most from this practice. An AO can’t unsee the score, and when decisions are often made on such razor thin margins, it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t be influenced.
So true. Effective self-advocacy is a critical life skill.
Another important part of “social capital” which is often missed in discussions about disadvantaged kids.
Kids go out of their way to avoid adults in many low performing schools. Adults are there to punish, to single out, to suspend, to ask you to rat out a friend. Learning how to use those adult relationships to your advantage is a critical skill.
I may be naive, but I actually believe these colleges when they say they typically don’t discuss test scores again after the initial academic screening.
Interestingly, the Harvard litigation, the Yale Admissions Podcast, and other sources all suggest it is really not so much a matter of thin margins as a matter of combinatorics. They internally rate different things, but then they give an overall rating which is not necessarily just an average of the individual ratings. And then they discuss the ones with good overall ratings and decide who to admit. And for many successful applicants, it is not so much a matter of getting some marginal advantage on anything, it is just that they were good enough in a long list of ways, and overall the readers/committee liked them.
Now, good enough for these colleges is a pretty high bar. Like, we’ve been discussing how good enough academically for Yale may, for most unhooked applicants, require a really high test score and near-perfect grades in high rigor courses. Other colleges less selective than Yale may sometimes not require a really high test score, however.
And even at a Harvard or Yale, the mathematical model appears to work something like this–if you can be like top 30% among applicants academically, top 40% among those applicants in activities, you are already down to 12%. And then like 20% of those are also considered special enough in terms of personal/fit factors, and now you have like a 2.4% admit rate for unhooked applicants. At a college with maybe more like a 10% admit rate for unhooked applicants, it could be like 50%, 50%, and 40%.
These numbers don’t depend on any one rating being particularly strict (beyond what it took to cut the pool down by a good whack). The issue is more that few applicants actually rate that high in all those ways, particularly not the personal/fit one.
So again, I actually believe these colleges when they say if you get past that 30%, 50%, or whatever academic screen, then it is on to other stuff. Because at that point, they are mostly just looking at different things entirely to determine who actually gets admitted.
Which does you no good if you don’t make it into that group in the first place, of course.
I understand the idea you are getting at, but those numbers are way off. The standard deviation of the SAT is slightly more than 200. So a Camden kid who scores 200 points above their high school’s mean is not doing anything that unusual, is still getting a very low score, and is nowhere near a selective school’s 25/75.
I would be careful in assuming that all of the schools will still be test optional next year. A lot of colleges are still playing it year by year.
That makes a lot of sense.
Haverford is special. From what I can tell, the care that they give their applicants is unmatched.
Just helped a family and help chiise colleges that were good fits /affordable. Her GPA is lower then your daughters and didn’t submit sat due to low scores. This week she was accepted to 3 colleges and two of them honors programs. So I think picking the correct college first is the way to go. Everything else will fall into place.
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