But my remaining would benefit from the current system to be honest, being less competitive academically I suspect, no joke, don’t tell them I said that.
The content has changed somewhat in the 2004 and 2016 redesigns. Previously, what was then called the verbal section is mostly a vocabulary test with a few reading comprehension questions thrown in. Math has always been high school level algebra and geometry.
In the old days, test prep was much less common, but available. The vocabulary-centric verbal section meant that some of the prep books were books listing hundreds or thousands of “SAT words”. The amount of SAT prep that I did (<15 minutes doing the sample questions in the booklet with the sign-up form) seems to be unthinkable today.
So now it is now like preparing for the Spelling Bee.
In math, there was always that one question that could make or break whether you got an 800 or not.
@ProudDad721 so where is your DC actually going? did I miss that?
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They took out the antonyms in 1995 around the time of the recalibration. Then the analogies went in 2004 as well.
This is not a thread about SAT tests and comparisons, so please stay on topic.
Thank you for your cooperation
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For @ProudDad721 who brought up having to choose a major when applying to college…
This is not the case at ALL colleges. In fact, there are tons of colleges where you do not apply directly into a major and declare your major at the end of the second year in college. In my view, college is a time to explore many subjects not available in K-12. At large public universities, often you DO have to apply directly into a major. This is fine for some kids ,but some are not ready to commit to a major or haven’t had enough exposure to it.
There are exceptions to what I wrote above, even at private colleges for certain fields…such as at many colleges, you. have to apply directly into a program for engineering, nursing, business, BArch degree programs in architecture, BFA or BM programs in the arts, and a couple of others. But otherwise, for many colleges and many fields, you are not applying directly into a major or committing to one.
In my own family, I have two kids. My younger one …I could have told you her major as a little kid, as she was immersed in it from preschool going forward and indeed applied directly into a BFA degree program because this was her field her entire life (and still is now professionally). My other kid thought she was interested in a particular field, but it was not a subject in school. She did do one internship and a yearlong independent study for credit to explore that field, but was not yet ready to commit to an undergraduate professional degree program in it, and opted to apply to BA programs that did not require a direct admit and if she did opt to go into it (and she did), she could go onto grad school for the professional degree. Even in grad school, partway through (this was at MIT), she decided to switch into a specialty within her field and actually switched grad schools to go into that specialty. I never saw one kid’s path as a better path than the other’s…one knew her major from a VERY young age and one had a direction and interest when applying to college but wasn’t ready to commit to it and did end up going into it but at her Ivy, you declare your major in the second year.
It is the amount that both my kids will do (one high stats, the other average.)
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Ok, I will say it. Haverford. Not too shabby I think. I am very proud of him and it is a good fit. He likes collaboration. That is why he didn’t even bother applying to a school like Cornell, because of its reputation for being cutthroat. I have a cousin who went there, Cornell that is.
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I would hope a college counselor would have a better grasp of elementary statistics. The point of more applications is not to increase the chances at each school (which as you point out is static), but to increase the chances in the aggregate of getting into a school as high up the list as possible. As you’ve been more than clear about, the student should be willing to attend any school on the list. As such, the goal is to get an acceptance at the best school on the list as they can.
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Here is a thread to talk about historical SAT scores and the concordance to current SAT scores:
And yet tons of kids go test optional because they cant score above 1500 for the highly selective schools, which now increases the application pool by tens of thousands.
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Terrific college. Good luck as you celebrate his HS graduation and his start at Haverford!
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Great school. Know some people who went there and loved it. You very much should be a proud dad.
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And some get accepted, rightly or not.
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If this were true, then we wouldn’t have the phenomenon of the student accepted at Harvard and rejected at Case Western. There may be a baseline of chance of acceptance that dependent on the student’s stats and hard accomplishments. But everyone agrees that there is some idiosyncratic portion based on fit, how the application resonates with a particular AO, etc.
Suppose that random factor were a 2 percent chance per school (the chance that the application rises to the top of the pile at that particular school, not others). Alternatively put, a 98% chance of rejection. Then a person applying to 5 reachy schools would have a 0.98^5 [notation for power of 5] chance of not getting into any of those choices. And applying to 10 or 20 schools would mean a 0.98^10 or 0.98^20 chance of not getting into any of the 10 or 20 schools. What does that imply?
0.98^5=0.904 or 1-0.904 = 9% chance of being admitted to at least one of the 5 schools
0.98^10=0.817 implies 18.3% chance of being admitted to at least one of the 10 schools
0.98^20=0.667 implies a 33.3% chance of being admitted to at least one of the 20 schools
That is just an arbitrary example for illustration, but the point is if there is any randomness to the process, then more applications will increase your chances in some way (providing you have the time to complete them).
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Your son got into Haverford, and yet you start an entire thread complaining about his rejections, what the heck!?
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Only true if the admissions decisions are fully independent of each other, which they aren’t. College admissions are dependent (not fully dependent tho), especially at rejective/highly rejective schools…so a kid who hasn’t taken any physics won’t do well, or a lackluster LoR will deep six the app, or an engineering applicant who hasn’t taken AP calc BC will struggle for acceptances at the top engineering schools.
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I think it’s safe to say we don’t see this process the same way, since I don’t view this as a system to game. My children built their lists by asking themselves what they were looking for in a college. We didn’t care about prestige, which probably made it easier for us. We were more interested in finding places where they could see themselves and thrive. It sounds to me that your son was accepted to a school that fits that definition and you should hope the same for your next child.
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My own kids went to a rural public high school nobody here would have heard of. Just because they were raised in a rural area and their high school is not well known, doesn’t mean they don’t have the credentials to be competitive.
Rural applicants get a big boost in the application process for most ivies.
Nobody should be saying rural applicants are at a disadvantage (in terms of admissions officers reviewing their applications, not the resources rural applicants have) or not competitive.
An applicant with a 10% chance of being admitted to Harvard doubled their chances if they were rural. And if they applied for a fee waiver, they got a triple boost to 30%.
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