@JanieWalker all the best to your daughter! I’ll bet she crushes it. She is so accomplished and I’m sure she will continue to impress during her interview. Thinking positive thoughts for her!
D21 has her interview tomorrow for her ED school. I hope she connects with her interviewer and feels good afterwards. I’m probably more nervous than she is. So much hard work, and it will be out of her hands by this time tomorrow. I’m so proud of her.
@2Devils In our state, every SAT has been canceled since the pandemic began. The coach at my D’s test prep company said the only kids who’ve been able to take the SAT are those who drove to another state. The same has been true for the ACT with the exception of one private high school that administered the test to their own students. I don’t know the percentage of canceled tests across the nation but that would be an interesting statistic to have.
@123Mom123 and @Solstice155 thank you! @Solstice155 , good luck to your daughter - I am sure she is going to rock that interview!
@burghdad The game was cancelled due to a number of football players in quarantine. The school is still business as usual.
@123Mom123 I wonder what that means in terms of how they factor in test scores. Since the number of students submitting ACT/SAT is much lower than they expected (but doesn’t surprise me), will that reduce standardized testing weight even more? Or will it give a boost to those students who submitted scores? Not that anyone has the answer, it will be interesting to see how things shake out (assuming we find out the % accepted with and without a test score).
Covid cases within the football program I believe
good luck on interviews, @Solstice155 and @JanieWalker !
Received an email from Grinnell today saying, “If you apply via Early Decision, you are guaranteed at least a $10,000 scholarship!”
Is this new? I don’t recall seeing it before and there is no talk of it on the Grinnell page.
@GoldPenn They mentioned the automatic $10K Early Decision merit in the Grinnell virtual info session D21 and I did in the summer, but I’m not sure if it’s new this year.
@ H0llyw00d I’m betting schools don’t release admit data with or without test scores this year. Perhaps give an average score of those who submitted but not how many? Will be interesting to see…
@H0llyw00d -No idea. But would love to know! My hubby and I played off each other different scenarios for several minutes last night only to finally just chuckle and admit impossible to know!
The theories will be vast though as we slowly learn about ED decisions, deferments, etc in these posts in the months ahead. Anecdotal evidence will be hopping!
I mentioned earlier how hard it’s going to be for colleges to spend the extra time doing holistic reviews with less test scores and ECs, and fuzzy grades from online classes.
The blog post from Dr Graves at UGA is a window into this problem and how they are handling it:
“Even though we’re committed to holistic there is a group that we can admit on stats, rigor, and HS very quickly.” They’re not going to waste precious time on this group. I bet test scores are a big part of this group.
First, this is “another large group” which means the first group was large too. This group is the ones that are taking sometime, but not too much. They probably have the GPA, APs, basic activities, etc, but not test scores or they’re from a HS that they’re not familiar with.
At this point they have admitted two large groups.
This is the group where they’re looking into hard and it’s tough. This group will eat up a big amount of time, so they will defer to RD date. They know there are a lot of excellent apps in this group, but they have to find them. It’s also a large group, but they’re not an accepted large group.
They’re also doing a auto rejects of a small group. Tells us that they don’t want to do a deep review before rejecting.
This is an interesting tidbit to throw in at the end. They don’t know what the RD pool will look like and they’re hedging. They also probably don’t know what their yield is going to be from EA.
I think the thing for me that I find absolutely frustrating is for our 2021 kids we operated under a certain set of instructions for the first 3 years or so. They need X, Y, and Z, etc.
Then, Covid happened.
Test scores were hard to come by and if you got one in it was likely only one (if you even got that).
ECs were scrapped as states were shut down. Summer jobs were scrapped. Service opportunities were limited. Sports were shut down.
Now it is who will stay closer to home, how do you evaluate students who have a test score vs those who don’t? How will defers affect 2021? What does the lack of ECs do for some kids? How do the different ways schools handled grades in the spring affect kids?
Admissions was never an exact science of course, but you could use data such as Naviance and admitted information to give you good bets.
When my son built his school choices he had a good range of reach, target, and foundations and now we are all wondering if targets are still targets even? It’s maddening.
It has taken an already long and difficult process and made it moreso.
@skkm0906 I remember back in 2016 when they changed the format of the SAT and nobody knew how to interpret the new scores. My older kid was caught up in that. Little did I know how much worse things would be in 2020!
I also am wondering about the class of 2022 also. Imagine the test score ranges that schools might report for the entering class of 2021. Given that so few are reporting because they couldn’t test or are reluctant to submit borderline scores, I wouldn’t be surprised if for the most competitive schools, their 25% SAT score is likely to begin with a 15–!
I wonder if colleges will even report their SAT scores this year. If they do, they would need to have a giant asterisk. Our high school updated it’s school profile but decided not to update the ACT/SAT scores for the class because they don’t look much like they have over the last ten years. They do call out on the profile that the scores are from the class of 2020.
I also wonder if AO’s will view this year’s test scores within the context of the range of scores at which they typically admit students and not just of this year’s scores. I mean, if an applicant’s composite is well above the 50% mark of the usual range ( not quite at the 75% level) but on the lower end of those submitting this year, will they be thrown on the scrap heap beneath students of comparable GPA’s but with no scores?
Fortunately, I think my D and I will be over the worst shock if she doesn’t get into her ED school,or gets deferred to RD. I am now thinking I’ll be surprised if she does get in. After a break from thinking too much about college, we’ve moved on to signing up for a few more virtual events for other schools on her list to revisit why she might get excited about them. She just applied to a probable safety EA and I do hope that gets positive results soon!
Some parts of this may have been shared here before - sorry if I missed that. Got this info today from two Brown AOs including the Dean of Admission: Brown ED applications up 16% this year. 65% of the ED applicant pool submitted “some form of standardized testing.” Teacher recommendations mentioned by AO as even more important in Brown’s reading process this year due to TO. Last year they grew class size by 100 students to deal with expected COVID melt (mainly by going to the waitlist). Normally they grant 40-45 gap years and last year they granted 80. For the coming application season, they have decided to increase their target class size from 1665 to 1700 in order not to have the increased gap years from last year affect admissions this year.
So by my math, say we have an applicant pool of 116 people compared to last year’s 100, and 65% submitted scores, that is roughly equal to 75 kids out of our new pool of 116. The non-submitters would be some combination of applicants with no scores and (coincidentally?) perhaps applicants with scores below the old 25th percentile?
I wonder if teacher recs are more important across the board or just for the TO group.
@evergreen5 @MamaSquale I just discovered this section of this board and it answered the questions I had about UVA and UNC EA application increases. I think the lack of test scores required means that many places have more applications. Jury is still out whether they are qualified or not and whether it will result in admission surprises. Florida state college applications went down by roughly 25 percent because they were requiring test scores. This is in contrast to our home state where Georgia and Georgia Tech both saw above a 25% increase in applications since they are test score optional this year. We will see for UGA and GT in the next 3 weeks (UGA on Friday!) - son already in Alabama and Clemson with merit. Reaches are UVA (legacy) and UNC but not holding our breath!
UGA just released their EA score info and apparently the average scores for this stage are higher than normal, I guess because the people who sent in their scores had high scores?