Looking at selectivity from the bottom up

College Search & Selection
41

<p>What is marvelous about this data is that it gives hope to those students who don’t have 30s or 700s. Highly selective colleges do not bar the door to excellent students who just don’t do Standardized tests well. One does not need rocket scientist scores to get into top schools; the probability is small, but not zero.</p>

<p>And it presents one more reason to kick DD Guidance Counselor in the shins. She has always wanted (since age seven) to be an engineer. But she can’t break a 650 on the math SAT. GC says that no engineering school will look at her without a 700. Wrong! I pulled the American Society of Engineering Education stats for engineering majors only (which tends to be higher then that for the general population). The following is the 2008 engineer major SAT 25% range data for selected engineering schools. Keep in mind the 25% (a solid 1/4)of the student body has Math SAT scores BELOW this number:</p>

<p>school, upper (25%) bound of 1/4 of students</p>

<p>Olin 740 (not much hope there)
MIT 720
Cornell 720</p>

<p>1/4 of engineering students have less then 700 on Math Sat</p>

<p>Webb 670
RPI 660</p>

<p>1/4 of engineering Students have less the 650 on Math SAT
WPI 630
U. Rochester 620
Stevens 620
URI (engineering average 670, gen ed 500 - 590)
Rowan 640
Rose-Hulman 620
Case Western 620
VirTech 630
RIT 610
Northeastern 610 (2007 data)
Missouri S&T ACT 25% bound 26</p>

<p>1/4 of engineering Students have less the 600 on Math SAT
Colorado Sch. of Mines 600
U of Minn - TC 580
Clarkson 580
Drexel 570
Kettering 570</p>

<p>From glancing at the original post’s numbers showing small but significant numbers of students with less than 700 Math score, combined with this list of excellent engineering schools with 1/4 of students well below that metric, one can deduct that excellent colleges are open to a wide variety of students and are not as selective as everybody makes out.</p>

42

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Harvey Mudd only began accepting ACT scores for the past two admissions seasons, so few students actually submit ACT.</p>

43

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<p>Yes, but how many of those actually graduated from those schools with an engineering degree?</p>

44

<p>Haha i’m part of the 11% at princetonThere has been studies done on the test score thing. they’re all shown no difference in the overall success rate during college and after graduation between the lower scores and higher scores. not every smart guy goes on to be successful and not every person who doesn’t seem good enough in the eyes of the all knowing SAT go on to fail. yet it’s sad to see the number of people who actual care about test scores. no one should ever hold themselves back from enrolling or applying to a good school just because their scores seem low. i don’t know what else can be said. it’s just a stupid way to think. don’t encourage kids to forgo their dreams</p>

45

<p>“Isn’t spending your free time on a forum about school sad too?”</p>

<p>the comparison between hawkette and myself breaks down for 2 reasons</p>

<p>1) I’m actually applying to college in the fall. Thus, for me, college is important and worth discussing. </p>

<p>2) I don’t repeatedly make elaborate/pointless ranking threads.</p>

46

<p>But when you look at a list like this, [Top</a> 500 Ranked Universities for Highest SAT 75th Percentile Scores](<a href=“USA University College Directory - U.S. University Directory - State Universities and College Rankings”>Top 500 Ranked Colleges - Highest SAT 75th Percentile Scores), <a href=“USA University College Directory - U.S. University Directory - State Universities and College Rankings”>USA University College Directory - U.S. University Directory - State Universities and College Rankings; how do you make sense of the somewhat different picture it presents? Do you need additional brackets? (% below 500, % below 700?)</p>

47

<p>^that’s outdated, definitely outdated…</p>

48

<p>What’s wrong with Hawkette doing research like this? Are you suggesting she should be censored? I found this an interesting post and appreciate the time she puts into this board. </p>

<p>This information can shed light on how selective a college really is. The points about a school not being challenging with sub-30 ACT’s isn’t the point. If a student is a top performer they may want to consider a college which doesn’t accept many sub-30 ACT’s because they may have a better chance of admission. Consider AA, athletes, legacies as part of the equation.</p>

49

<p>I agree that Hawkette’s research is useful in presenting a different way to gauge selectivity and I really apologize if I am missing the point here. But my point in #46above is that I wonder if it is not also useful to note that the SAT scores of students in some schools cluster more tightly around a narrower upper range than at others - and its useful to see where that range is (by noting additionally the % of students who score between 700 and 800). There is disparity in the ranges of schools with a relatively similar number of students scoring above 600 on an SAT test - math or critical reading. As an example, take the following schools that all rank as very selective based on the % of students who score below 600 - for the most part there is consistency in the two measures, but the outliers make it seem important to note both measures - there is a lot of territory between 600 and 699:</p>

<p>Math Scores:</p>

<p>% below 600, School, % above 699
5% , Stanford, 66%
5% , U Penn, 70%
5% , Emory, 61%
5% , Vanderbilt, 67%
5% , Tufts, 62%
5% , Georgia Tech, 47%
5% , Vassar, 43%
6% , Duke, 68%
7% , Dartmouth, 67%
7% , Cornell, 64%
7% , Brown, 66%
7% , Hamilton, 44%
8% , Johns Hopkins 60%
8% , Carnegie Mellon, 66%
8% , Colby, 38%
9% , Georgetown, 56%
9% , USC, 50%
9% , Brandeis, 43%
9% , Amherst, 60%
9% , Williams, 60%
9% , Swarthmore, 59%
9% , Carleton, 53%
9% , Claremont McKenna, 55%</p>

<p>An example of Critical Reading Scores:</p>

<p>5% , Northwestern, 60%
5% , Pomona, 76%
5% , Vassar, 57%
6% , Columbia, 64%
6% , Tufts, 62%
6% , Amherst, 63%
7% , U Penn, 52%
7% , Emory, 45%
7% , Williams, 64%
7% , Bowdoin, 54%
8% , Stanford, 57%
8% , Duke, 60%
8% , Notre Dame, 50%
8% , Carleton, 56%
8% , Claremont McK, 52%
8% , Hamilton, 44%
9% , U Chicago, 63%
9% , Dartmouth, 65%
9% , Vanderbilt, 47%
9% , Wellesley, 48%</p>

50

<p>Once again, SAT/ACT numbers for any college are almost meaningless unless you know what the scores were for the applicants as well. A college that bases its admissions decisions solely on SAT scores could have a higher average SAT score than one that takes many things into account, even though the second school could accept only high scorers and thereby have a higher average SAT score if it wanted to.</p>

51

<p>ohmadre,
I think I have the data you are looking for (% of 500+, 600+, 700+ for all tests), but didn’t want to crowd the thread with too much information. Tell me more of what you are looking for and I’ll try to create and present it. For example, I could probably create a cluster calculation that would assign a certain score for achievement in each bucket (sort of like how USNWR creates buckets for class sizes of <20, 20-50, 50+). One important consideration is how you would weight the various measurements for CR, Math and ACT. What do you think?</p>

52

<p>I don’t really actually know Hawkette. Assuming, as Benjaminx does not, that knowing the information you first provided gives you at least part of the picture of relative selectivity, I thought knowing the upper and lower clusters will really help clarify it . In my post 49 above I did give unweighted 700+ information for those schools which have very few students below 600 (not seeing it instructive schools at that level to look at the 500+ information). I think that helps to give a better sense of selectivity to note that, for example, while UChicago’s 2008 class is comprised of a slightly greater % students with CR scores below 600 than Emory or Hamilton, a very good portion of its student body scored higher than the student body at each of those schools. While the combined info does not outright say that a student with a CR score of 601 will have a more difficult time being admitted to UChicago than to Hamilton, it surely suggests it and is probably accurate. Even if its an unreliable measure of selectivity, the added information at least better tells an applicant where he/she would fall within the the Class of 2008. It occurs to me that if you did break this information into more clusters, it might yield results which start to resemble selectivity as suggested by just looking at median scores and the 25th/75th percentile scores - I am not sure though, and am not really asking you to go to that effort.</p>

53

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<p>Exactly. Why should I care if my school has theater majors who don’t excel on the math portion of the ACT’s? How does that affect the quality of my math major? Answer: not at all – just like my lack of acting ability doesn’t affect the caliber of the theater program and education.</p>

54

<p>^Um, that would mean they are not intelligent people. If I am shelling out 50k per year for college, then I don’t want to be surrounded by nimrods.</p>

55

<p>^ You plan on spending time with every member of your school?</p>

56

<p>its funny that tufts has such a low percentage of people who score poorly on the SAT, yet the university itself gets almost no respect</p>

57

<p>Blame the “prestige” factor, and the USNWR.</p>

58

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<p>No, it just means that their gifts lie elsewhere – such as in dance or art or acting. And that they enrich the college community in different ways. Well, perhaps you’re not the type who appreciates beauty and art, I don’t know. But that doesn’t make them “not intelligent people.” I daresay you can’t act or draw or dance.</p>

59

<p>^ Being narrow-minded about intelligence hardly implies that “you can’t act or draw or dance.”</p>

60

<p>If the OP could act or draw or dance, he might understand that there are different types of intelligence, and not getting a 30 on a math ACT doesn’t mean someone’s “not intelligent.” Or a “nimrod.”</p>