UCLA acceptance rate in 1980: 74%
“It’s also more common to take the SAT & ACT multiple times. That, along with the universal practice of superscoring,”
This. I graduated HS in 1986 in New York. Nobody took the ACT in our neck of the woods. You took the SAT Spring of 11th grade. If you didn’t like your score, you took it again fall of 12th grade. Two chances was all you got and no superscore. There was test prep, even private tutors, but not at the same level as today. High scores were much rarer. My sister scored in the low 1500’s and was accepted by Harvard and Yale with no hooks. She’d be the first one to tell you that she would have no chance of getting into those schools today.
Back in the 1980s, more students took their first and only SAT or ACT in fall of 12th grade.
However, in that linked UCLA thread, they claim that students could apply to only one UC. I remember around that time that it was three campuses at most, but some who got shut out were offered admission to other campuses that had space (e.g. apply to UCB, get admitted to UCI).
I have found that a lot of people do not even bother to have a look at the most recent Class Profile on the school websites, or take time to look at the school’s Common Data Set related to admissions stats. Those things are very useful! I have a friend who has a junior daughter, and on her list are nothing but Ivies. The attitude is “my kid is a top student and is a solid athlete, so of course she will be admitted to at least a couple of them”. (Kid is at a public school not known for rigor or advanced academic offerings). I have given up trying to reason with her. When she started to get testy I decided to preserve our relationship by learning to just smile and nod.
But I’m already planning to be away on a vacation – and unreachable-- when Ivy Day comes around next year. I don’t want to deal with the fallout.
I graduated CA high school in 1986 and students only took the SAT and little prep other than spending a few weeks with practice tests. No one took the test more than twice but the top students generally went to the state flagships UCB and UCLA, though I do remember one kid going to Stanford on a soccer scholarship. Very few (less than 5 kids out of 400) were applying to the Ivies.
My school only offered 8 AP classes and the top kids took maybe 4 or 5 AP classes. To get in to say San Diego State or Long Beach State, you only needed a 2.5 GPA and a heart beat. I’m sure the acceptance rate was around 90+%. I was shocked when two years ago a close friend told me it was getting very competitive at these state schools with acceptance rates at 30% and an average GPA of 3.7. Shocking…
It’s so true @lookingforward - there was a lot more self-selection going on back in the 70s and 80s. Most of us never even dreamed of applying to Harvard or Yale, even if we were great students. A 1560 SAT score back then was really incredible. My kid buckled down for a few months and got a 1560 - he’s smart, but he’s not 1560 SAT in 1987 smart! Lol. You just couldn’t study your way to a perfect score back then - you had to be very intuitive in Math and incredibly well-read.
Grade inflation is also a factor. Back when I was in school, a couple people got As and most people got Bs. Now everyone is an A student. It’s ridiculous.
Not so much self-selection as non-consideration back then. I.e. the difference between:
“I did not apply to Harvard because I looked at it and decided that it was not a good fit for me.”
and
“I did not apply to Harvard because I did not consider any college except my state flagship, local state university, and local community college.”
The latter was probably much more common in decades past.
Well, I guess it varied depending on where you lived, but there were plenty of kids who applied to Ivy level and top LAC at my HS (public - Long Island, NY) back in the mid 80’s. I didn’t, because they were out of my league, but the top students all did. The difference was, back then, kids actually got into these schools. From my class, the val went to Yale and the sal went to MIT. Another kid in the top 10 also went to Yale, and I remember other kids going to Brown, Cornell, Williams, and Columbia. I remember three kids went to Georgetown, one to Tufts, a couple went to Emory and one to Georgia Tech. A little further down the food chain, kids went to solid schools like Hamilton, Colgate, Lafayette, Lehigh, BC, BU and others. And these were just the schools that kids went to, the list of acceptances probably contained a lot of other top schools. This was just my class (about 275 students). You would never see those kind of results at a similar school today.
I remember the verbal part of the SAT mostly centered around vocabulary. IT was HARD. If you look at the concordance charts a 600 back then would be 730ish today. The math I believe is similar. I got a 580 verbal and 710 math. Was rejected MIT, but waitlisted Penn and got into CMU. Back then Lehigh was a safety!!!. You only applied to a few colleges. my HS offered NO AP classes, and only 2 honors, history and English. I did have pretty good EC’s with decent leadership, but did not invent anything , create a non profit, or anything else to stand out.
^ Word analogies. I was never good at that.
The vocabulary based SAT verbal section questions were easy if you knew the words, hard if you did not. Basically, the more your English vocabulary overlapped with the words used, the better you did. Perhaps that was intended to be a proxy for how much you read the kinds of things that the get the words from, but there were (even back then) prep books with lists of supposed “SAT words”, as well as high school English teachers giving lists of vocabulary words every week to be quizzed on later, presumably to help boost the students’ SAT scores.
I had one of those SAT word prep books. For years, I said there were words in there I had only come across in that book. How else would Ihave learned a podiatrist is also a chiropodist?
@ucbalumnus It’s interesting, my D20 does not read for pleasure/fun AT ALL and we thought she would struggle on those sections on the ACT but scored 35E, 34R. I have a feeling if she had to take the old 1980’s SAT, the vocabulary/word analogies would have been her downfall!
I had been vaguely following admissions articles in the NY Times and other publications for a while before my oldest (now a college senior) got to the point of applying so I knew everything was a lot more competitive than when I was looking but I still thought her 35 ACT score would open a few more doors than it did (I wasn’t too surprised that she got turned down at Pomona and UC Berkeley but I’m still salty about the waitlist at Davis 
). Where I didn’t get the memo was that GPA was MORE important than test scores (I always assumed otherwise since test scores are more standardized nationally). Anyway, it all worked out for her and I learned to stop stressing too much about top-name schools anyway for my younger kids (remind me that I said that a year from now when #2’s results are coming in). But also for #2 despite the fact that she’s naturally a good tester without much prep we went ahead and had her do a prep class before taking the PSAT and SAT this fall.
DS, a sophomore, has attended a math club for several years. Over the last three years, the top kids at the math club have all been very successful in their college acceptances. In fact, they have all ended up at Stanford, MIT, CMU, Duke, etc.
DS is of the same caliber as the graduates I mentioned and we are nervous that he will be the first to not have the same results. So many horror stories on CC.
It does seem like test scores are overemphasized in importance on these forums because of greater standardization, but high school record is generally more important, based on analysis of what colleges say they consider in their CDSes:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/2131779-what-colleges-use-in-admissions-according-to-cds-listings.html
Of course, at the most selective colleges, it is necessary to have high school record and test scores both be at the top of the range, but that is not sufficient to gain admission.
We have to get off the College Confidential parallel universe. From the College Board in 2018
A 1560 =
Out of the 2.13 million test-takers, 5149 scored the same or higher than you.
1560=35 on ACT.
Do the math. The odds of that score are the like getting stuck by lightening levels.
It seems perhaps it’s the same 10000 students and their parents here on CC for the most part.
And add the superscored numbers. Ok another 10k. Maybe? Doesn’t move the statistical needle. 99 percentile is what it is. Cross referencing is silly. They only compete in this bracket. And 99 perctile means higher than the other 98 percent competing in real time. Who cares what it translated to 40 years ago. It doesn’t change the comparable data against their peers. 1560 is ridiculously great.
Actually moving from a 1560 to 1600 only changes your profile from 79.1 to 79.8 probability at your match schools.
It’s not easy to get that score. Fact.
Twice as many kids are fighting for the same amount of spots. See the UCLA 74% admit rate in 1980. And the 30 and 40 percent levels at Ivy’s back then.
We didn’t need to prep. Why bother. Didn’t need to fight like this to get into the schools we did.
It’s not lowered testing standards. Standards are much much higher. Much higher. How many parents did the ECs and volunteering and research like today. It’s nearly a base level requirement. It used to be an outlier. Yes there is grade inflation. But there are hundreds of thousands of students spending hours studying and studying til late st night now. Thst happened rarely in the past. Why? Because we didn’t have to and competition breeds this intensity.
You played a sport and worked at a gas station. And Ole Miss et al was a home run.
The good old days of hard tests and walking to school in feet of snow both ways.
We have in fact, become our parents.
University of Mississippi is still not hard to get into. Its web site says that Mississippi residents who meet NCAA minimum requirements will be admitted (do not have to be athletes). Note that this also suggests that University of Mississippi does not lower its admission standards for recruited athletes (at least those who are Mississippi residents), since lower admission standards would make those athletes academically ineligible by NCAA rules.
http://admissions.olemiss.edu/apply/freshman/
@ucbalumnus You are really smart. That simple and unimportant analogy is what you found compelling to copy and paste?
Please insert a better example but it had nothing to do with my post. Literally nothing.
And it all matters in holistic. Count on it, if applying to the top schools. A flaw in some minor category is enough, in its own right, to cast doubt.
People need to get off stats, stats, and more stats in trying to understand a holistic process.