<p>Question: My daughter has applied to six different colleges and she has received five rejection letters. She scored very low on her SAT scores, and this maybe the reason why she has not gotten a letter of admission. My daughter is a bright student with good grades. What should we do next? It’s so disappointing, [...]</p>
<p>Well if grades are good, maybe you could go talk to the schools Office of Admissions. Perhaps they can do something about it. As for me I didnt do to good on my test scores so before school started in the fall, I have to start a program in the summer that is basically like summer school in order to attend that school.
Also perhaps a community college will be a good idea. Here she will then be able to transfer and colleges will no longer look at her SAT scores, but her grades at the school.</p>
<p>There might be a disconnect for the student to have applied to schools where the SAT scores aren’t in the same ballpark as those of other students. GPA only tells one story about an applicant. Unless the student has a particular something the college wants - a hook of some kind - then it is easy for them to say no. </p>
<p>Generally a good rule of thumb is to look at the middle SAT or ACT range of scores. Is the applicant there? If they are in the upper 25% of all applicants, they have a great chance of admission. In the middle 50%? a good chance of admission. In the lower 25%, a poor chance being admitted to the university. </p>
<p>I’m surprised no one has suggested SAT optional schools for your daughter. You can find a list at <a href=“http://www.fairtest.org”>www.fairtest.org</a>. </p>
<p>ReadyToRoll … if you read the entire “Ask the Dean” Q&A at the start of the post, you will see that test-optional schools WERE suggested, but this–unfortunately–was by me (“The Dean”) after the student had already submitted her applications and received her bad news. </p>
<p>While it’s easy to wonder why students with very low test scores apply to colleges where the median test results are much higher, I think that we can often blame the college folks for this common mistake. Students and parents are commonly told by college officials that course selection and GPA trump test scores at decision time. While IN THEORY this may be true, in REALITY, many applicant pools include students with extremely similar courses and grades, so the test scores become a critical tiebreaker. But it’s easy to see how students can be misled into downgrading the importance of tests.</p>
<p>Absolutely true, Sally. Tests are indeed often the tie breaker in these situations. </p>
<p>And I do believe that colleges are definitely not good anout letting applicants know ths information. </p>
<p>I also think (although I’m sure schools deny this) that a case where someone has a very high GPA but low test scores sends a red-flag that perhaps their HS was not all that rigorous with grading.</p>
<p>College officials try to have a sense of the rigor of their applicants’ high schools. But, inevitably, there are some high schools they know well and others that they know less well. So, depending on where the candidate goes to school, the admission folks may recognize that a high GPA is hard to come by … or not at all. However, there are certainly students at rigorous high schools who have great grades and not-so-hot test scores. (Bad test results often do not equal easy classes, though sometimes this can be true, of course.) And a lot of research suggests that it’s the grades and not the tests that provide the best predictor of college performance. (And other studies even insist that it’s NEITHER grades nor tests but personality.)</p>
<p>How about applying to Test Optional Schools with rolling admissions. It is not too late for that. However, she may not get as much scholarship as those that do use a first come first serve approach to rewarding aids.</p>
<p>If the student has consistently had low scores on standardized tests (relative to in-class performance), three things worth evaluating (among others) are: test-taking strategies, test-induced anxieties, learning differences along the processing/dyslexia line. Each of those has a different work-around, and each of those can affect performance once in college, so taking the time and effort now to sort out the issue is a good thing.</p>
<p>If the scores are low on the SAT, and the student has never tried the ACT, taking that exam instead could make a big difference. Some students just do better on one or the other.</p>
In a former day this would have been ok. Now everything is about testing. Relax, failure is not a lifetime sentence. First prep w/ a Kaplan or Princeton Review course. Then try the ACT & apply to a new list.