Aye, but, alas, there is zero chance of S taking the ACT. He hates standardized testing, so he’ll be sticking with the SAT.
For what it’s worth…here’s a guy from Georgetown saying taking the new SAT might have helped those applicants:
http://www.thehoya.com/class-of-2021-application-rate-increases-to-all-time-high/
@bucketDad I wonder whether this guy was just guessing that “the SAT came out higher” based on the Concordance Tables.
“The change did not affect the way Georgetown analyzes standardized test scores, since the admissions committee only calculates the combined critical reading and math scores. However, Deacon said the College Board, the organization that administers the SAT, has suggested there might be more students scoring higher than they would have on the old test.”
Also:
“Deacon said based on the 1600 SAT score scale, the average critical reading score and math score for the applicant pool rose by about 16 points, translating to a more competitive applicant pool.”
It’s unclear to me whether Deacon is saying it was a more competitive applicant pool or whether that was the author’s conclusion based on the 16-point rise. On the other hand, following bucketDad’s quote about the SAT being higher:
"Deacon said this ended up making the applicant pool significantly more competitive.
“Almost all of the increase was from people who are in the top 10 percent of their high school class. What you see going on there is that as you become more competitive, people begin to weed themselves out. People with lower scores say, ‘Why bother?’ If they are high, they say, ‘Maybe this is a school I should be applying for,’” Deacon said."
I don’t think I understand what Deacon was saying - were the SAT scores higher due to CB’s concordance or due to the applicants being more competitive. (And I apologize for not knowing how to make quote boxes still!)
So what he says is that if the students that took the ACT had taken the new SAT they would have had scored even higher. And he says that because he believes in the concordance tables. And he has no idea if the students also took the new SAT but their ACT scores were higher so they only sent their ACT scores. So no data here.
On the other hand he does confirm that more good students submitted the ACT instead of the SAT compared to before the change.
@evergreen Other than him saying that taking the ACT instead of the new SAT was a bad idea, I’m not sure what to make of his comments.
He says that new SAT scores are “higher”. Did they observed that in their data or are they just going by what the CB told them? Don’t know.
But it then seems like Georgetown just took the new SAT scores at face value and didn’t use the concordance tables (which would have lowered them relative to old SAT and ACT). By taking the new “higher” scores at face value, he says that ACT scores look relatively worse?
Without any data, I’m not following his logic, but the conclusion seems clear…that shying away from the new SAT may have hurt applicants to Georgetown.
According to last years CDS Georgetown’s 50% SAT was 1330 to 1500
The concordance for that would be 1380-1530
The sixteen points that they saw is less than the concordance. He obviously thinks that’s because the good students took the ACT instead of the SAT as some posters have suggested.
It would make sense that a larger number of good students took the ACT instead of the SAT this year. That was the recommendation of testing firms such as Compass Prep going back a couple years. The quality of the testing pools can change significantly. As I mentioned before, a 36 ACT was a 1 in 12,000 score in 2001, compared to a 1 in 935ish score last year, because a higher percentage of top students took the ACT.
“It’s a thread started by someone who appears to be an admissions officer at school <15% admit rate.”
Not my interpretation. He/she says, "I work at a highly regarded school with a <15% admit rate and *got to learn a lot about *how admissions works. Here are some things you may or may not know. Not in any organized fashion, just *what I remembered. * A working adcom wouldn’t phrase it this way, (much less post it in a random forum.) I’d guess maybe a faculty member or admin who had some involvement, we can’t know what sort.
From Boston College: "BC accepted both the new SAT and the old, 2400-point version, but Mahoney said a relatively small percentage of applicants opted to submit the old version. There was some talk that raw scores might be a little higher on the 1400-point scale, but Mahoney said BC didn’t really see that come true.
“We didn’t really see [the new version] as a radical shift in terms of using the tests as part of the evaluation,” he said."
I can only assume they meant to say that the new SAT had a 1600-point scale. That aside, this seems to confirm what other schools have reported, that the new SAT didn’t produce the higher scores predicted by the SAT concordance.
Here are the actual numbers from BC. Based on their admitted student data, their de facto concordance is:
New SAT 1360 = ACT 32.
New SAT 1400 = ACT 33.
New SAT 1480 = ACT 34.
“Students accepted to the class of 2021 had a mean SAT of over 1400 on the new 1600-point scale, and a mean ACT of 33. SAT scores ranged from 1360 in the 25th percentile to 1480 in the 75th percentile, and ACT scores ranged from 32 in the 25th percentile to 34 in the 75th percentile.”
As before, the flaw in your argument is you assume the groups are the same, when there’s every reason to assume the new SAT group is the weakest.
As before, you have no argument other than a personal opinion. These colleges are choosing whom to accept and whom to deny. They have the full applications & data in front of them. They are doing the numerical equations, not me. Perhaps you should alert the admissions offices at BC, Vanderbilt, Williams, etc. If you do, please report back on the response you get to your interesting, private theory about how the new SAT students they admitted are weak.
Your opinion is that the professional psychometricians employed by College Board are wrong and it’s impossible that there is anything other than perfectly uniform distribution of testing talent among the various tests, ergo a simplistic concordance such as you made is valid. IMO you are engaged in wishful thinking. I presented a series of logical arguments showing why it’s a reasonable assumption that the testing pools are dissimilar. You haven’t refuted any of my arguments. The fact of the matter is, many students take multiple different tests, and they submit the best ones, or the colleges choose the best ones, based on the very concordance tables you pretend don’t matter. Nobody who got a 34 on the ACT and a 1480 on the new SAT only submitted the new SAT, because the concordance tables would tell them the ACT score is better. And if they submitted both scores, the college would choose to report the 34 ACT because it is higher on CB’s concordance tables.
There is zero evidence that these schools are trusting the concordances made by the professional psychometricians at CB, thank God. And, also thankfully, your highly speculative arguments about the quality of the different testing pools are increasingly being rendered moot by real data. BC admissions officers have concluded that an ACT of 32 belongs at their 25th percentile, and so does a new SAT 1360. If you personally feel that an ACT of 32 is more meritorious than a new SAT 1360, then you have a disagreement with BC admissions, not with me.
keiekei, the weakest by how much? 8 to 10 points, okay, I’ll buy that, but 40 to 50 points, NO WAY. I started this thread because I wanted to learn any new information or theories by any one, not to become an argument, I believe keiekei isn’t adding any new information, just arguing their point. We get it, your kid took the old SAT. My daughter took the new SAT and she thought she had a chance to get all the math right. I’m so thankful she was on her A game that day. She also said the last four questions were very difficult. The kids who took the old SAT have no idea what the new test was like, surely their parents don’t, thats your flaw, quite frankly.
Thank you LadyMeowMeow, for the new information, it matches what I’ve been seeing as far as ACT and new SAT comparison. I started a new thread, surprised you were rejected, wait listed and accepted 2021 so others can learn from what were experiencing, and help the future generation figure out what I believe is more of a game. I’m not real happy how adults (college admissions) treat children, getting as many as they can to apply and then reject them to move up in the rankings, to be more specific.
You might be right. Doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is what the adcoms think and do. From the data that’s trickled out so far, do you think they share in your assumptions?
Here are BCs old scores according to their commons data set
Math 640 - 750
CR 620 - 720
composite 1950 - 2150 which concords to 1380 -1490 according to College Board
Their new reported composite is 1360 to 1480 which does not look that far off.
But the SAT/ACT is off.
And a “trickle” it is. No one can dissect all this, at this point. If your kid is interested in BC, fine, you have some perspective on the current admits. Next year’s will add more to the picture.
I don’t even know why such fuss, to the point of arguing, over this. It takes more than stats to get into a top holistic. This is one small data point. If your kid scores better on the NS, they still need the rest of what the colleges look for.
@lookingforward With all due respect, the question considered by this thread is not whether it takes more than stats to get into college. The question is how the old SAT scores compare to the new ones. And every shred of published evidence that I can find so far suggests that what you asserted upthread, that there is “grade inflation” on the new SAT, is absolutely wrong. Just the opposite. The CB concordance does NOT explain the data released by actual schools with actual statistics – especially not when you get to about a combined score of 1400.
Incidentally, the BC adcoms examined some 30,000 applications. If you combine this with the data released by other large schools, e.g. the University of Georgia upthread, then you are looking at much more than a trickle. You are looking at CB being forced, once again, to revise its concordance.
But you cannot tell, at this point, how they compare. It doesn’t matter if you disagree with me, I said it is what is (was) expected at the college I work for. So go ahead and squeeze what you can out of the few results that are out. It doesn’t change what my school experienced.
And, it’s a trickle. What will matter is what trended at the schools a kid applies to.
Sorry, we have to wait for more info. If it shows x and y results that are different than what my school saw and worked with, so be it. If your kid applies to my school, he or she will still need to meet my school’s expectations, make it through their filters (which are more than stats.) Makes sense to me, lol.