Once again, from BC: “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.”
Of course you can compare the scores. Why on earth would they publish these statistics, with the associated percentiles, unless they thought they were important and wanted to enable people to compare them? That’s the entire point of it.
Obviously admissions are holistic, but to the extent that the test scores matter, BC has decided what it thinks are comparable scores.
The fuss is, our kids extracurricular’s, and such, are being compared for what they actually are. If a chart came our and compared my daughters 12 hours of dance to that of 10 hours of dance per week, that quite frankly, seems wrong. We see how hard our kids have worked. And competitive colleges, are competitive. So I would guess how the colleges decide to handle it will have an effect on some kids getting in or not. We will probably never know if it hurt or helped our kids. The fuss is, if I could figure it out a long time ago, why the heck didn’t the professionals figure it out better. The small data point, SAT, ACT. gets some applications thrown out or put into the green light pile like no other data point does.
Yes it is just one part of the application. But unless you or your child is Class of 2021, you don’t understand the full cluster that it was to try to make a good decision with flawed information from College Board.
Indeed. The first clue as to what they might think or do about SAT concordances is to follow the instructions of the College Board, in their concordance tables. The second clue is what the instructions are on the Common Data Set. Here is what the instructions state under FRESHMAN PROFILE in the 2016-17 CDS:
So not just the College Board, but also CDS, are saying to use the concordance tables. This leads me to the wild conclusion that colleges are using the concordance tables.
The handful of cherrypicked PRs discussed here so far show mid-50’s ranges for ACT and new SAT that are supposedly not consistent with the concordance tables. One possibility is that the concordance tables have been abandoned in secret, and that adcoms at these several colleges all magically intuited this fact and created brand new tables all on their own. Another possibility is that there are significant differences in these cohorts, with the new SAT cohort being weaker—the fact that these students were admitted suggests they would contain a higher proportion of hooked applicants.
I won’t reiterate the reasons a high percentage of strong students had for skipping the new SAT over the past year and focusing on the old SAT and/or ACT, but as I stated earlier today, a large percentage of kids applying to selective schools take more than one brand of test, and either submit these to the schools or choose the best scores themselves for submissions. How do they choose scores? Based on the College Board’s concordance tables! Here’s an easy-to-use table, based on CB’s concordances, that kids and colleges can use to decide which scores are strongest: http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/comparing-act-and-new-sat-scores/
Here’s an article from a few years ago stating that a quarter to a third of applicants to selective colleges submit more than one test brand: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/more-students-are-taking-both-the-act-and-sat.html
As the article notes, the number of students taking more than one test is greater still (because many only submit their strongest tests). Either kids will submit their strongest scores per the concordances, or the adcoms will select the strongest scores per the concordances. This alone pretty much tells you that if the score ranges in their PRs show weaker new SAT ranges than ACT ranges, the new SAT cohort is weaker. Doesn’t mean there aren’t geniuses in the new SAT group, but ranges are ranges. The new SAT group could also be a lot smaller than the ACT group, and contain a lot more hooked students, who are permitted lower scores.
Actually there’s an important distinction between BC’s press release and the info they present in the CDS: the PR describes admitted students, while the CDS describes enrolled students. The PR shows a mid-50 ACT range for admittees of 32-34, whereas the CDS I looked at for enrollees was 30-33.
“More test-takers completed the new SAT from March through June of this year than took the old SAT during the same period in 2016. Nearly 1.36 million test takers took the new SAT in 2016, compared to 1.18 million who took the old SAT in 2015. This is a jump of approximately 180,000 SAT takers.” This was reported by the College Board.
That is accounted for by the fact that CB added a bunch of new states that administer the SAT to all juniors. I read that this alone adds about 240,000 involuntary takers, running the gamut from 1st percentile to 99th. What is of more interest for selective admissions is the top 10% of voluntary takers. This is the group I suspect has declined for the new SAT in the HS class of 2017.
From the NYT article posted: “Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming require students to take the ACT test, and Arkansas pays for the ACT if districts want to offer it. The SAT has only Delaware, Idaho and Maine.” What does this tell you about the relative cohorts taking the ACT and SAT? It tells me that it’s very difficult to compare them and, absent any real data, we should refrain from assuming any cohort has a larger number of “strong” or “hooked” students than another.
As for whether adcoms are blindly using the CB concordances? Despite the blurb in the CDS, it certainly doesn’t look like it. Adcoms have already made thousands and thousands of admissions decisions this year, based on many factors, and their published equi-percentile ACT/SAT data, i.e. de facto concordances, are the end result of that process, not the beginning of it. That’s why I find it credible, more credible than trying to argue that the new SAT students admitted to these colleges form some fundamentally different population than the ACT kids. You can argue all day long that BC’s 25th percentile ACT 32 is “better” than its new SAT 1360, but until further notice, I’ll go with BC.
That article is several years old, and the states contracting with the ACT or SAT have changed a lot since then. I posted that article as an indication that many kids take both tests—a point that is still valid, unlike the lists of schools in your random quote.
Your argument about the percentages doesn’t hold water because nowhere did BC say that the mid-50s ranges for the ACT and new SAT are equal to each other. They just posted the ranges of the admitted students and you leaped to a conclusion, based on wishful thinking.
And again: you’re sidestepping the fact that CDS is instructing colleges to follow the concordance tables, and the colleges are complying. So they are using them.
“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.”
To me, the BU data (among others) is evidence that there’s more of a one-to-one correspondence, as opposed to the CB concordance data. @keiekei - are you arguing that that doesn’t matter, as you find other things that disagree? Or are you arguing that the BU data does not imply the concordance tables are off? If you’re arguing the latter - that doesn’t really make much sense. Are you saying that there’s a huge bias for hooked applicants to take the new SAT, as opposed to either the old SAT or the ACT? That’d be very bizarre. Just having different numbers taking each test doesn’t explain it. If you go to previous years - if a school’s applicants are 25% ACT and 75% SAT, or 75% ACT and 25% SAT - the various percentiles between ACT and SAT would still line up. Even if there was a bias for smarter kids to take one test or the other. If that was true, it would just mean that a higher fraction of say ACT takers was accepted, compared to SAT takers. But the median accepted scores would still line up.
WRT the CDS - that could easily be that “we want all schools to do the same thing, so just use the table that CB provides”. It has to be a standard for everyone, after all. But admissions is the bottom line - not how they report their numbers.
Re small percentage of old SAT submitters: that totally makes sense. You would have had to do it during fall of jr year and no later than January, with no possibility of retake thereafter. And then you would have had to be satisfied enough with your score (based on CB’s concordances) that you wouldn’t do the ACT or new SAT in the spring of jr year, along with most of your classmates. This was exactly what DD did, and it freed her up to focus in jr spring on school, APs, and SAT Subject Tests. Following the advice laid out publicly by Compass Prep back in 2014. Their main advice was to prep for ACT, except for those who had done very well on the sophomore PSAT (which was still based on the old SAT). http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/the-new-sat-a-note-for-parents-of-the-class-of-2017/
I think a lot of high scorers followed this or similar advice. Probably most went to the ACT, and some to the old SAT. Not everybody, of course, so don’t take offense if your kid took the new SAT and did great. But enough to seriously alter the high scoring pool at the margin.
“Your argument about the percentages doesn’t hold water because nowhere did BC say that the mid-50s ranges for the ACT and new SAT are equal to each other. They just posted the ranges of the admitted students and you leaped to a conclusion, based on wishful thinking.”
BC is representing itself and its academic strength. It’s advertising to everyone that this year, if you wanted to be in the top 25% of ACT scorers admitted to the university, you needed a 34. If you submitted the new SAT, you needed a 1480 to reach that same level of standardized testing.
I respectfully submit that you’re doing the wishful thinking if you don’t think they’re aligning those numbers to make them comparable. And as for the CDS blurb, there’s no evidence whatsoever that actual colleges are complying with the CB concordances.
And my point all along about the cohorts is that there’s no real evidence to suggest that SAT or ACT students are stronger or weaker. That’s your wishful thinking.
It’s really as simple as this, kids who scored 750 on the new SAT Math, most likely didn’t guess much, or at all. The last four questions were hard. In the past if you got 1 wrong on some versions of the Math test, your score would be 750. The College Board wanted some delineation between 800 and 750 on Math. So possible outcomes of 800,790,780,760,750. for example. I believe they skip one, as 4 wrong got a 750, not sure though. They accomplished that, but missed on the concordance at the high end. They tried to “fix” both problems this year. That is, some delineation of the top end for Math scores, and go to 4 answers to take the guess work out of the test, along with the test more matching what they are teaching in school. Even Donald Trump would admit a mistake was made and admit the concordance was wrong.
Given BC’s public statements, I would be surprised if the grades, recommendations, other test scores, etc didn’t generally align for the students of a given percentile independent of the test they submitted.
I haven’t read this entire thread, but it seems to me that if anything, the higher stat kids in the HS class of 2017 would have taken the New SAT, not the Old SAT. The reason for that (which is what my DD did) is that the PSAT given in the Junior year (the one that counts for NMSF status) was in the NEW SAT format. Most high stat kids are aiming for that recognition. Why would they prep for an old SAT when they need to take the PSAT (in NEW SAT format) to have a shot at NMSF status?
For that reason, if there is any difference in the pools of test takers, I would suggest the bias is actually opposite of what is described in this thread.
Of the high stat kids I personally know, all used this method and didn’t bother with the old SAT format.
^ This was my S as well. Had to switch to the new format for the PSAT, which is what drove the decision on the SAT. Granted, S is class of 2018. Earlier years may have made different decisions.
There are some here who have it as an unshakeable article of faith that the higher stat kids, with very few exceptions, went for the old SAT or the ACT. There has never been any evidence presented for this, other than some vague advice given in 2014 by a test-prepper and some anecdotal stories about how some kids played their testing cards. I happen to agree that a lot of high stats kids took the new SAT – the PSAT being one excellent reason – but even so, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that one pool had more high achievers than another. We do not have the data. What we do know is that many colleges have ignored the CB concordance for new-old SAT and made decisions that suggest those concordances are off.
I hesitate to post this because I don’t want to add fuel to any fires, but That Guy ™ from That Blog ™ posted a lengthy reply on exactly this topic. One can find it by Googling for his post on projected test ranges for 360 schools and scrolling to the bottom of the comment section.
I’m agnostic on the sitch myself. My kid has a 1490 and will probably retake in August. He’s fine in terms of admission, but he needs another 20-50 points to be more competitive for some of his merit options.
For the tl:dr version, That Guy thinks the concordance itself is generally OK, with the possible exception of the 750-800 range. He thinks the discrepancies popping up in the admit pools have more to do with things like comparative scarcity of prep materials, and human factors such as decision-making rather than a direct problem with the concordance itself.
But even he is caveating that we can’t know for sure, and probably won’t ever know for sure.