Did Peddie lower the minimum SSAT score requirement from “80” to now “70” for Year 2016-17 admission?
Are they having trouble attracting students to the school?
I’ve checked a couple of boarding school review websites and they’re listing “70” as the minimum SSAT score
for admission.
Do any schools really have a minimum?
Peddie has no problem attracting applicants.
I believe what you are seeing is the average SSAT %ile, not the minimum. Plenty of admitted kids, maybe more than half I would guess, will have scores below the average. I do not recall Peddie’s average ever being as high as 80 (at least recently), although I could be wrong.
SSAT averages fluctuate from year to year at any school because they are not the primary factor in determining admission.
On boarding school review Peddie shows 74% but of course that’s an average.
I think it’s true, but have no hard evidence . . . everybody will take a kid whom they really like for whatever reason/s as long as the kid can “do the work”. However, I suspect the floor for SSAT percentiles slides rather dramatically. Peddie may take a 40-50% kid whom they feel has other certain qualifications they like, and Andover probably bumps that up but they may take a 55-65% kid. How many “exceptions” will a school make? Peddie probably makes more than Andover. For either school, or any other, the average or median reported scores generally “hide” the floor from our view. Good work from those schools that take a low-SSAT kid and get them to substantially raise their SAT scores in a few years. But that’s not necessarily the norm, and some top-20 schools that have lower SAT averages probably admitted wonderful ninth graders who are also poor standardized test-takers.
Haven’t we all heard about the low-tesing Ivy admit who makes a mockery of 750/750/750? Same deal. (An insider has written that 650/650/650 won’t itself keep a great applicant out of any school.)
**** Furthermore, I’ve long thought that day students from high SES neighborhoods go a ways toward boosting the SAT scores of some schools. The College Board data from 2014 SATs clearly shows how rising income correlates with higher scores. I’ve read that some deny differences in qualifications between their boarding and day students, but certain schools in suburban Jersey, Philadelphia, Boston, etc., must have excellent testers to pick from.
Peddie: fantastic school getting better every year. They are in a great place with the applicant pool and student body. Really, the biggest weakness with Peddie is the location; if the school was in Amherst or Concord or West Hartford, it would be as famous as the other schools in those sorts of areas. As silly as it sounds, “New England Boarding School” is taken absurdly literally by some people who have a hankering to write a check and send their child far away to school.