@ucbalumnus Students can get many free tools to prep online and fee waivers are available.
That does not substitute for either higher/lower general quality of education in one’s high school (e.g. good algebra and geometry instruction is highly valuable on the SAT math section; someone in a school with poor algebra and geometry instruction needs to do a lot more to “catch up”), or the existence of embedded test preparation in one’s high school (e.g. back when the SAT verbal section was mostly vocabulary, some high school English teachers would give weekly lists of vocabulary words that students had to learn and were quizzed on).
McGill - they require you to take all available AP credit. You enter as a “1” I think they call it vs. a “0”.
My point was not that APs are worthless. My point is that they are taken often for the wrong reason and that a college can easily compare a kid with an UW4.0, 3.8, etc. from a school with few or 0 APs with a kid with an UW4.0, 3.8 etc at a school with lots of APs.
Collleges do it all the time right now. Even among publics. There are two publics next to each other where I am from. One is well-known to be a stronger school, and it sends more kids to better schools, even if their GPA are equal.
It’s just not that hard for Adcoms to get a sense of a kid’s ability without ACT, SAT or even AP. It’s not that SAT, ACT or AP are bad. If kids want to take them, fine. It’s the societal pressure and money and time spent using them as a metric of competition. I happen to think most of our kids would be better off without the one-off dead-end pressure of ACT/SAT.
AP I’m more mixed about. To the extent it reflects genuine interest, excellence or even desire to increase college course options, I’m all for it. To the extent it’s about GPA goosing, it’s a waste.
In recent years, ~60% of test optional applicants at Ithaca have been White, and ~65% of test optional admits have been White. This suggests the primary reason diversity is increasing is more URMs applying. rather than strong preference to admitting URMs through the program and not other ethnicities.
Asian students are considered underrepresented minorities at Ithaca, Bowdoin, and in general other test optional LACs. The Ithaca study implied they hoped to increase ethic diversity by increasing “African-American, Latino/a, Asian and Native American” enrollment. A comparison of these minority groups in 2012, just before the test optional change and in 2016 are below. Asian, African, and Latino all had significant increases, although Asian did not increase to the extent of the ethic groups associated with lower average test scores.
Asian: 3% → 4%
African-American: 4% → 6%
Latino/a: 6% → 8%
Native American: ~0% → ~0%
Success can be defined in many ways. Most Americans define success in terms of personal accomplishments and/or personal relationships. Colleges with ~75% 6-year graduation rate, like Ithaca, are instead often focused on things like chance of graduating. By this latter metric, several studies have found GPA is a stronger predictor than scores, and going test optional usually has little impact on graduation rate.
@ucbalumnus I never said it did. I was merely making the point that there are tools available at school, on line etc to aid in prepping. You don’t have to pay Kaplan or Princeton Review.
@CaliDad2020 Again, you dismiss those that don’t have the option to be at the “better” high school. Not everyone has the luxury of being in the best school district or a private school. There has to be a means for those kids to get into the better universities you cite in your example. Standardized tests provide that.
A few questions, since you seem to have access to stats:
You would “bet the farm” that test scores will be “best single predictor of success” but we’ve seen any number of studies that suggest they are not, or at least not significantly more effective than GPA. Do you have other studies? (apologies if you’ve posted them elsewhere. I haven’t checked.)
Given the huge cost of standardized tests, how much more effective than GPA would they need to be to be worth the $$ and time investment?
How many students who achieve a high GPA do you believe would not reach a minimum SAT/ACT threshold? And what would that SAT/ACT threshold be and could it be tested more easily and cheaply (and in a manner less likely to be jobbed?)
uh, I think I pretty explicitly wrote that to the extent it helps a kid who otherwise wouldn’t get on the radar it’s great.
But that doesn’t make it useful to the other 90% or whatever of the student applicants.
There really is very little reason for a kid from Stuyvesant or Andover or Freemont or La Jolla to take an SAT or ACT. It is a “bridge to nowhere” taken only for the test’s sake. (At least APs are educational.) They waste money and hours and are likely superfluous to most student and colleges decision making process.
Perhaps all schools should be test optional: Only if you think your particular situation warrants it would you be encouraged to take it (of course this won’t work. If word gets out one kid take the SAT or ACT parents will be enrolling their kids all over again.)
I know I am waging a quixotic battle and there are much greater ills in the world, but the ACT/SAT have become an educational ponzi scheme that do little for 95% of the students taking them that other, more useful exercises couldn’t do just as well, less expensively and with less abject waste of Saturday mornings.
^^^ And yet almost every University in every other country uses standardized tests as the largest factor in admission. Who has the best methodology- the US (small focus on standardized tests) or the rest of the world (Huge focus on standardized tests in admission)?
Canada universities do not require domestic applicants to submit external standardized tests, but that is due to greater high school course standardization. UK based systems look like standardized testing is embedded in high school courses. Places where everything is standardized test based look like places with highly variable and unreliable high schools.
But also, aren’t standardized tests in other countries commonly more content based (like SAT subject and AP tests), rather than trying to measure aptitude or some such?
@CaliDad2020 Honestly, I am not sure what world you live in.
@lastone03 Ok. I’m not in need of agreement. But I really don’t understand the desire for more kids to spend more money to sit for more “bridge to nowhere” tests so that tutors and testing agencies can make more money. (although, as I said, I don’t mind some struggling academics getting some tutoring money out of wealthy parents. That’s a trickle-down I can support.)
As @Data10 has been posting there is a lot of evidence out there that SATs and ACTs are marginally useful at best, yet we spend how much per year in kid’s time and money on them? And they are simply a “dead end” test with 0 “carry over” utility.
I don’t get why kids actual, you know, academic work, can’t speak for itself in terms of their actual, you know, academic ability.
Many employers manage to hire people and pay them loads of money based only on GPA, interview, maybe a job-specific test. And it seems employers manage to figure out this excessively demanding task that we think professional adcoms with staff and budget and years of data can’t. Ok.
@ucbalumnus not sure if that was regarding my neices situation but she was not a “domestic” applicant.
McGill has very specific minimum metrics for test scores (more along the lines of @SatchelSF suggestion.)
I don’t know how much the top of your score matters, but for US applicants each major and/or school at McGill has specific minimums: Either a minimum AP or a minimum SAT with subject scores.
They usually take students with higher than the posted minimum but rarely if ever take students with lower.
Canadian HS usually have a 100 pt. system and McGill and other Can. universities have pretty specific ranges for those GPAs for various majors/schools as well.
For fun, went into Naviance just to check out a scattergram for Ithaca College. Ithaca is an interesting case example because it is a regional college that the very fastest horses are not applying to. It is a school for the next group of horses. And, lo, 300 data points in there. Do you think Admissions knows the high school? Of course they do. So, how does Admissions at Ithaca College actually make decisions? Only two red Xs on whole grid, both with very low GPAs. Two other dots were waitlisted. So that’s 296/300 admitted. No fancy stats model was needed to come up with that outcome.
@Titan431 do not count yourself out at Ithaca College with that SAT score.
In terms of outcome - I’d bet there is not a huge difference at the end of the day. I will say that the US system is much more flexible than most Euro systems. I’ve known a lot of kids who have not gotten the test scores they need to pursue the careers they wish (particularly medicine and law) and are weeded out much earlier than US kids would be. Is that a good thing or bad. depends.
In terms of mental health - I’d be the US system of multiple data points is better for kids/students. More opportunity to fix flaws.
In terms of costs - I don’t know how expensive the various systems are around the world.
But the US also has many more education options than just about anywhere in the world - and the majority of US college students are not in traditional 4 year programs anyway. We are talking about a small-ish subset here
It was not in reference to her. But the fact that they require standardized tests for international (US) applicants but not domestic (Canadian) applicants suggests that they trust the consistency of high schools in Canada more than they do for high schools in the US.
“I don’t get why kids actual, you know, academic work, can’t speak for itself in terms of their actual, you know, academic ability.”
Because a 4.0 doesn’t mean you have great academic ability and a 2.0 doesn’t mean you have none.
“Many employers manage to hire people and pay them loads of money based only on GPA, interview, maybe a job-specific test. And it seems employers manage to figure out this excessively demanding task that we think professional adcoms with staff and budget and years of data can’t. Ok.”
Well there’s a lot of turnover in the first year of employment when employers realize they made a mistake or the employee thinks they made a mistake. It’s not like employers have a great system to hire grads. And they assume that when they recruit at a certain college, the college has weeded out kids based on…gpa and test scores. And consulting firms and investment banks want to know the GMAT score of the candidate in addition to GPA at the business school.
I attended a HS in upstate NY, so it also has hundreds of data points for Ithaca. Their Naviance also shows the vast majority of applicants accepted, but the specific rejections look holistic. For example, the applicant with the second highest combined stats was rejected – ~97/100 GPA (top 1%) and 33 ACT, while all four of the min 18 ACT applicants were accepted. However, there was a strong correlation with GPA. The vast majority were accepted with GPA above 85/100, and the vast majority were rejected with GPA below 85/100
And have a better knowledge of the Can HSs overall. McGill, for instance, has different admit numbers for Quebec and then Canada in general. (and different tuition rates.)
Many Euro colleges (you no doubt know) have similar standards for US apps, but tend to tie them to APs. Some require 5 x 5, some less. This is generally because the Euro “HS” tends to be longer/more intensive and European kids have to pass exams in most countries to get placed.
The interesting thing about McGill is outside the “usual suspect” countries where standardized or exit tests are expected: French bacc scores, Chinese HAIKAO (and explicitly NOT SAT unless they don’t sit for Haikao), A levels etc. Everyone else if they don’t sit A-levels, Class X, Bacc etc just send HS transcripts and english proficiency exam. No standardized tests.
But they figure it out somehow as they graduate kids from 150 different countries each year.
“I don’t get why kids actual, you know, academic work, can’t speak for itself in terms of their actual, you know, academic ability.”
I’ll by pass your snark and make it clear, yet again, that not all GPA’s are created equally. You seem to hyper focus on elite high schools which do not represent the majoity of high schools in this country. You’re clearly living in (at best) the 10% world. I’m thinking of those that excel in the other 90%.