It is easier on the high schools to have one place to batch transcripts through. We were excited that a few smaller state schools added the common app option this year. There was one school that still wanted mid years mailed on paper…
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This is mainly a problem with schools perceived to be “top 30.”
Kids with perfect stats and strong ECs get routinely rejected from these schools because something in the holistic assessment meant that someone else got the slot. Maybe someone else’s essay resonated more with the regional AO, or someone else filled a demographic box the university was trying to fill.
Kids aren’t stupid. Applying to dozens of schools is simple game theory to maximize your odds of getting in to a top program when decisions seem semi-random. There are tons of examples of kids rejected at 7 other top schools who got in to Harvard.
If your admissions dept is overwhelmed, then hire more admissions officers. It’s a good problem to have.
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I attended an elite college prep school, applying to college in the early 90s. Back then, it was common for us to apply to 5-8 colleges. Eight college applications was a lot, I’d say most of us applied to 5-6.
Fast forward to today - I have an 11th grader, and over the last several years, as I began reading college admissions info, I’ve been stunned (dismayed, really) to see it utterly normalized for kids to apply to over 20 schools. To “shotgun” applications.
There will always be a subset of folks who are fixated on rank; there really is not a way to eliminate that hype. But I do wonder if limiting the number of applications per student wouldn’t go a long way towards quelling the spiraling number of applications that students are sending out, feeling that if they don’t keep applying they’re somehow doing this all wrong.
In my perfect world, kids could send out three Early Decision applications. That way there does remain the ability to compare aid packages (so ED could be more readily used by families who aren’t full pay, and the colleges offers will reflect that) but the number of applications is constrained and kids can focus on selecting and applying to just three schools.
I don’t know how to effect change in the real world on this, it’s not my expertise, but I do despair at the extraordinary number of applications kids are sending out, and the pressure they’re feeling to do so.
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Colleges can just come up with a few very specific essay topics for supplemental materials. If every school did this, people would self-select.
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That’s just for the SAT/ACT, the typical Cal Tech applicant will have other standardized tests scores they submit - APs for Calc and Stats, PSAT, AMC scores which Cal Tech is definitely interested in. As ucbalumnus as pointed out most, if not all, their applicants had 800 in Math and over 700 in verbal that it wasn’t really useful for them.
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For some reason, it appears you have assumed that students who do not submit this type of testing because of dropped requirements have, or would have, performed the same or similarly. Moreover, we don’t know what the applicant profile was in prior years.
What do you mean by would have performed, wrt admissions or ability to handle Cal Tech? Test blind hasn’t been around for long so there wouldn’t be data on how non-submitters handled the coursework.
We definitely know the accepted student profile from previous years - 25/75 was 1530-1570, Math was 790/800, Verbal was 740/760 according to their 2019/2020 CDS. Typically the applicant profile is higher, but for Cal Tech, there’s not much room to go.
I thought this was interesting:
our ability to accurately predict student academic success at MIT02 Our research shows this predictive validity holds even when you control for socioeconomic factors that correlate with testing. It also shows that good grades in high school do not themselves necessarily translate to academic success at MIT if you cannot account for testing. Of course, we can never be fully certain how any given applicant will do: we’re predicting the development of people, not the movement of planets, and people always surprise you. However, our research does help us establish bands of confidence that hold true in the aggregate, while allowing us, as admissions officers, to exercise individual contextual discretion in each case. The word ‘significantly’ in this bullet point is accurate both statistically and idiomatically.is significantly improved by considering standardized testing — especially in mathematics — alongside other factors
some standardized exams besides the SAT/ACT can help us evaluate readiness, but access to these other exams is generally more socioeconomically restricted03 relative to the SAT/ACT
as a result, not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education,04 relative to having them, given these other inequalities
I believe Caltech won’t extend its three-year moratorium on testing either. It went test blind two years ago because it didn’t think it was fair to treat different applicants differently if some could submit test scores while others couldn’t (Caltech’s overriding philosophy is that no one should take unfair advantage of anyone else). Even though test scores play a very marginal role, they still serve as a useful confirmation and help speed up processing of applications.
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For Caltech, something like the SAT may be more like a way to screen out some unsuitable applicants (if you can only get 600 on SAT math, you are not going to survive Caltech math) and cause some unsuitable applicants to think twice before applying and wasting everyone’s time. But that still leaves applicants with 800 math and high-700s-to-800 EBRW scores to use other means of distinguishing between.