some of them had scored well enough for us, but thought that their scores were too low. disadvantaged students generally can’t afford savvy advising on what scores are good enough for us.
I want to highlight this comment from @MITChris because there has been disagreement among experts and nonexperts alike about where the threshold should be, strategically, for submitting scores to a TO school, and which score ranges to use - admitted vs enrolled. I don’t know if he can expand on this, but it seems to me that if the scores are used as a threshold to determine ability to do the work, somewhere at or maybe even a bit under the enrolled 25th percentile would have been worth sending. Perhaps MIT is a special case, considering its exceptionally high student score ranges and likely tiny difference between admitted and enrolled ranges, but I have long suspected the TO score submission strategy should be similar for most other top schools. Just thinking out loud…
IMO, (I actually live in a low income area and my kids attend schools were more than 90% of the kids qualify for free lunch) the kids will be less likely to apply to schools like MIT if their SAT scores are not as high.
I think the better way to attract top underprivileged kids is to expand programs like Questbridge and start the focus on college and preparation in 9th grade. The kids need a lot of guidance well before they start filling out an application.
This is not obvious at all. My speculation would be that they were able to enroll the same type of kids in the past- but that it took significantly more time, effort, and resources without standardized test scores. They likely saw NO decline in math ability, but expended three times the resources to get there. Why do that if you can use SAT scores to compare, and don’t need to have your regional adcom’s calling guidance counselors to ask "Is your college prep Calc class comparable to AB, BC, or neither? " or to have to do a deep dive on Placid Lake Community College to figure out if their DE math track is rigorous, or just convenient for the HS kids in Placid Lake who don’t want to have to show up for an 8 am class at the HS but can do DE at community college at 3 pm.
We are a QB partner and do a lot of work with them. We also work with many CBOs that try to help advise students earlier on in high school. You are correct to identify the systematic challenges.
Personally, I would like to see more states go the route of making the SAT/ACT their 11th grade assessment exam. Research has shown that kind of universal testing does a lot to increase college-going rates among low-income students, see e.g. ACT/SAT for all: A cheap, effective way to narrow income gaps in college
This decision had nothing to do with the Class of 2025, whom we don’t even have outcomes for yet (MIT being graded pass/no record your first term, and ABC/no record your second). Nor would I expect it to, because we held an extremely high standard for all of our 2025s/2026s, regardless of whether or not they submitted SAT/ACT. The gap, as the blog post says, is in students who would be able to meet that standard if they took/sent their scores to us, but not otherwise, based on their structural disadvantage.
The unquoted portion of my earlier post addressed the first issue stating:
“I suppose a student might not be aware that their score is high enough to be a great asset to their application. If this was a major issue, I’d expect could be largely improved by more detailed guidelines about who should submit scores on the website”
Regarding some students choosing to not take the SAT/ACT at all because all of the schools they apply to are optional/blind, I suspect that this group is typically not one for which test scores are likely to be a relative strong point in their application, nor it is a group that is likely to spend a lot of time prepping for the test. I’d be surprised if requiring this group to submit tests instead of making it an optional choice increases their chance of being admitted to MIT on average. It might instead increase chance of not applying to MIT and instead limit applications to only colleges that do require them to chance their plans of not taking SAT/ACT.
Note that I am not saying that test optional/required is good or bad. I am only saying that I don’t think switching from test optional to test required increase chance of disadvantaged students being admitted on average. I agree that by several measures test required or test blind is more equitable than optional.
Scarily accurate. The only thing I’d add is that even in these cases, it’s sometimes not enough info even after you do all that calling, because we might not have the long-term data to support “okay, well this specific way of teaching DE calc sets you up for 18.01, but this other way doesn’t.”
Everyone in our office is extremely aware of the challenges/limitations of the test; I think what guides us here is that we are also extremely aware of the challenges and limitations of everything else, including what kind of remedial work it is possible for MIT to provide, as currently configured.
Earlier in my career, I used to be more of the mindset “but what about these students we could take a risk on?” Now, I question that mindset as being an instance of a savior complex: presuming that a student needs MIT to ‘save them’ from their situation, or to reach their full potential. For most students, this is not true, and I think our denied student blog series has shown this (Denied by MIT, Now [X] | MIT Admissions), to say nothing of That CC Thread (Homeless, didn't get in through the waitlist, have no where else to go, need advice - #75 by thisisthais). Us ‘taking a risk’ on them really means taking a risk with them: their happiness, their sense of self-efficacy, their educational trajectory. Of course, all admissions decisions are in some sense a risk: the future is unknowable. But we think it’s really important we are very careful in how we weigh those risks, and not too parochial in terms of assuming a student ‘needs’ MIT to succeed (because they usually don’t).
Yes, if the college does what MIT says it does, which is basically use it as a pass/fail measure, but not otherwise use it (i.e. either you fail and get rejected, or you pass and it no longer matters, but everything else does).
On the other hand, what other highly selective colleges state or previously stated that they use SAT/ACT scores in this manner? If the college does not say that, how can an applicant know that an SAT/ACT score around the 25th percentile for the college will not be a disadvantage in the admission competition?
“it” being the tests == not quite/solely pass/fail because we do look at other things beyond the SAT/ACT to establish academic preparation, but it is correct to say (as we do) that the standard of academic preparation is itself effectively pass/fail, i.e., we do not prefer someone with a 1600 over someone with a 1500 assuming the balance of academic preparation (including all factors, not just tests) is equivalent.
Perhaps a desired effect, if it reduces the volume of applications from those who were unable to do better than 600 on SAT math but did not have to reveal that under test-optional.
One would think that student isn’t applying to MIT because the student doesn’t want to struggle.
I envision a student that does well in his HS math class, is taking Calc senior yr and scored a 650-720 on the SAT math applying TO to a school like MIT. They like STEM and do well at school but they aren’t at the top of the applicant profile and would probably require some resources to keep up at a school like MIT.
I only have a sophomore so I’m a bit out of the loop. However, I have heard of test center cancelations this year. My D’s public school plans to administer the SAT and is holding practice sessions.
For us, it is much less about the # of applications, and more who is applying. We would certainly want to make sure that this policy change doesn’t create such a barrier that we cannot enroll our desired class, an empirical assessment that changes over time (see: requiring the subject tests for many years, before we dropped them permanently in 2020 before the pandemic).
I am sad to see how many people on e.g. Twitter are saying this is a deliberate move to reduce app #s, especially those who said it’s part of our desire to “remain a country club” (which is…a very very odd metaphor, if you’ve ever experienced MIT)
(I know you know this, skieurope, just posting for overall)
