@Creekland My son also attends a highly ranked public school where more than 10% of the student population earns NMF or commended status. Most of the high scorers at our high school do take a prep class and/or take the exam multiple times.
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Here’s our family. Top 2%
Me: 1980’s, low SES. I think I was in the top 98%.
Kids: High SES public, Top BS ( but they tested 99% in 7th grade for JHU programs before boarding school so I’d say high SES public).
Schools are in MA which is highly rated for education. I’m not sure if that matters or not.
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Yes I realize that her prep compared to decades ago is excessive, but in this era, negligible. With everyone else she knew taking summer long prep courses, she felt the need to be minimally “prepared”. It didn’t really matter in the end… she would have still scored the same with zero prep.
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I don’t know about others’ experiences, but the qualifying exams for my PhD program (easily one of the best in the world in my field) were not like this. Rather, they involved synthesis of new and existing information to produce unique solutions to problems. Yeah, they required the knowledge I’d developed in my coursework to that point, but only in the trivial sense that you need to have background in a subject to do advanced work in it.
Either way, they were qualitatively very different from anything a standardized exam could have covered.
Probably unsurprisingly, I’m in the “wouldn’t want it at all” camp.
Maybe an exam that covers a wide range of material and isn’t limited to performance at a single sitting? That would be better, but still too focused—you’d need a lot of different topics, and a fairly long spread of time.
And that sounds a lot like a high school transcript.
Worth remembering: A job at a fast food restaurant gets listed as an EC on the Common App—and I would strongly suspect that if a kid held a fast food job for a year or two, or even for a couple summers, that would count as a really strong EC for holistic admissions purposes.
My D17 is one of those, she’s now at a selective but not T50 LAC. (She got into a couple T20 LACs, but didn’t like the fit.)
My D19 scored better with minimal prep (a couple practice tests), and she’s at a state flagship (one of the ones CC types don’t usually lust after) studying engineering.
Both of them went to a high school program that despite its very small size (graduating classes in the 20s) had a wide range of students, and prided itself on not “teaching to the test”. NMFs were rare—one during the time both were there, if I recall correctly. They didn’t have val/sal honors, but all the students knew everyone else’s grades, and D17 would have been salutatorian, D19 would have been co-valedictorian.
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@dfbdfb jut want to clarify that my quote was taken out of context. I did indicate that schools are taking into account regular jobs and family responsibilities, in recent years. Socioeconomic diversity is often talked about as a priority by school officials at Ivies etc.
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@compmom Sorry, wasn’t trying to say you didn’t—I was just trying to point out that holding down a job wouldn’t be a knock against the EC count that so many here on CC obsess excessively over.
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Yes, it’s great that colleges are valuing jobs and taking care of siblings or other family. I just wanted to emphasize that as well 
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700 does not inherently correspond to any particular percentage correct. In some of the easier SAT tests, a student could get >90% correct and still not get a 700+. You also need to consider the time limit. If you make the time limit low enough, even if you make all questions as simple as 2 + 2 = ? , you’ll still have a significant portion of students not finish in time or make careless errors.
However, I was instead talking about the “top schools” that are mentioned the subject and first post of this thread. Among extremely selective colleges, the vast majority of students almost always get >700. This even occurred at Bowdoin as mentioned in the post you replied to, in spite of Bowdoin being test optional and a LAC, with relatively few tech majors. Instead the distinction between entering students is usually just a couple questions out of 58, which often has more to do with avoiding making careless errors when answering questions rapidly in a stressful situation than knowledge of algebra/geometry. This is even more true on the ACT, which requires a faster 1 question per minute pace to finish in time. Among tech students for which the math SAT/ACT score is theoretically more relevant, the score range is even narrower. It’s common for most tech students at “top schools” to get a perfect 800. For example, CMU CSC lists the following 25th-75th percentile ranges.
CMU SCS Math Test Scores: 25th to 75th percentile
Math SAT – 800 to 800
Math ACT – 36 to 36
Who says holistic “top colleges” do not value working to earn income for their family? Based on the Harvard lawsuit information, I’d expect a lower income student who spends a large portion of his/her free time earning money to support family to get bonus points in multiple sections of Harvard’s holistic application including personal, EC, and “disadvantaged” flag. Harvard has a special EC rating category for students whose family obligations includes working, as described below. Getting this rating was a associated with a boost in chance of admission.
Harvard 2021 Reader Guidelines
“5 EC Rating = Substantial commitment outside of conventional EC participation such as family obligations, term-time work or a significant commute (Important: should be included
with other e/c to boost the rating or left as a “5” if that is more representative of the
student’s commitment).”
As previously discussed in this thread, without exception, test submitter admits at test optional college always have a higher average income than test optional admits, and lower income kids are always overrepresented among the ones who are admitted test optional. Lower income kids as a whole seem to do fine in the test optional admission system… or at least no worse than they do under a test required admission system.
Depends on the area. At our school( low income) most of the kids have never taken a practice SAT. Most only take it once on the school day SAT and there is no talk of prep or Khan academy.
Why, in the name of the Goddess of Education and Theses are people trying to teach me about what a PhD is, what the process for getting a PhD is, and other minutiae regarding a PhD?
For the frikken’ record, I have a PhD and have been on PhD committees, my wife has a PhD and has advised a dozen PhD students, my father has a PhD, 1/3 of my friends have PhDs, I worked in five research universities which train PhDs.
Sheesh.
Yes, there are different nuances between fields and departments. but the process has been, yes, standardized, so that colleges and universities can hire faculty with PhDs from other places
The strongest correlation is with parents’ educational background. However, the famous phrase “correlation isn’t causation” applies now. The high correlation doesn’t imply that “nature” or heredity is the cause for the high scores. Likewise, the high correlation between high SAT scores and wealth doesn’t imply that wealth is necessarily the cause. On the contrary, there’re plenty of examples of some poor kids do exceedingly well on those tests without much prep.
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@data10 please read my whole post, which includes this:
“Certainly regular jobs and family responsibilities need to be honored by admissions, and they have been trying for a few years now.”
There is a lot of rhetoric around this issue. All we heard on Ivy campuses was “socioeconomic diversity.” But we also know that the kid who can afford, say, conservatory prep and has a parent to take them to the youth orchestra (and whatever equivalent in other fields) still tends to do well with admissions.
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Well you could just skip over the ones you don’t like…or continue to argue.
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Here’s a true example. Had dinner with two friends. All three of us were NMF level SAT kids back in the 1980’s. Two came from very low SES, one from lower middle class SES. Span forward. Between the group there are now 6 kids. All six kids were top NM type scorers. A tiny bit of variation but all 95%+ now AND then. For the record, two are now upper middle class, one higher SES.
I think parental emphasis on education is key. Sometimes parents don’t have a college degree but they know the value of education and read to their kids when they are tiny etc. Make a huge difference. Not every low SES parent doesn’t believe in education.
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Alternatively, and here’s a novel concept, not argue
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The admit rate by income as listed in the Harvard internal study at http://samv91khoyt2i553a2t1s05i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Doc-421-112-May-1-2013-Memorandum.pdf is below:
<40k Income – 11% Admit Rate
$40-80k Income – 11% Admit Rate
$80-$120k Income – 9% Admit Rate
$120-$160k Income – 10% Admit Rate
$160-$200k Income – 10% Admit Rate
$200K+ Income – 12% Admit Rate
Did Not Fill Out FA – 7% Admit Rate
Lower income kids appear to have a similar admit rate to higher income kids at Harvard. Rather than not being driven to Youth Orchestra or similar, a key reason why lower income kids are underrepresented among admits is because they are underrepresented among applicants. The reasons why few lower income kids apply to Harvard is beyond the scope of this thread, so I won’t diverge.
I don’t think we can assume that lower income kids are suffering because Harvard is not valuing working to support family as much as parent driving them to Youth Orchestra or similar. It’s pure speculation about which activity a particular holistic “top college” values more. I suspect that working to support family would typically be valued more, although it likely varies from school-to-school, depends on rest of app, depends on level of achievement in Youth Orchestra, etc.
However, a more clear difference that the linked report does highlight between lower and higher income is test scores. Test scores among applicants by income are below. Test scores tend to be a relative weak point among lower income students compared to the combined rest of the application, which relates to why lower income kids are always overrepresented among test optional admits at test optional colleges.
Harvard Applicant Scores by Income
<40k Income – ~20% scored 750+
$40-80k Income – ~25% scored 750+
$80-$120k Income – ~35% scored 750+
$120-$160k Income – ~40% scored 750+
$160-$200k Income – ~45% scored 750+
$200K+ Income – ~45% scored 750+
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Tests are easier and more preppable today because that’s what we wanted, at least the marketing departments at the testing companies believed so. Easier tests compress the scores at the high end so more of us can achieve those high scores. Students would gravitate toward the easier test when there’s a choice. ScoreChoice and Superscoring, which so many of us favored (perhaps without realizing their consequences), help turned test prep into a giant business.
Now many of us demand these tests to be optional. It sounded too good: those who do well on tests can submit them so they can be considered while those who don’t or don’t care to be tested can skip them and be evaluated without them. There isn’t any cost. Or is there? We never seem to learn the lesson from the history of testing.
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Do you know the numbers for legacy applicants in terms of their income? I’d guess that Harvard legacies on average have fairly high income and far above average.
For a lower income kid, working at a fast food/minimum wage job (especially when the salary is necessary income, not “pocket money”) is seen as a strong EC. The longer it’s held, the better it’s done, the stronger EC.
In addition, test scores really aren’t that “distinguishing” for elite admissions.
Keep in mind that lower income kids who DO hit it out of the park with their in-school testing CAN send the scores to test-optional colleges. TO means they get a choice.
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