@homerdog yes that makes sense. And I kind of think that’s how it’s being viewed anyway, based on the ranges being reported this year by many schools.
Sorry if I should know this, but are they definitely redoing the tables soon?
Yes, they are releasing a new table this summer. I don’t know if anyone knows the date.
I wish that the ACT and SAT scores were a very integral part of the application process, but given my kid’s very mediocre acceptance results, I can personally say that my kid’s 35 ACT/1540 SAT played only a very small part in the application process.
Officially, my kid’s college app “tournament results”:
Wins: UC-Berkeley, UC-Santa Barbara, UC-Davis
Draws: Carnegie-Mellon, Northeastern, UCSD, UCI
Losses: UCLA, USC, Vandy, Northwestern, Stanford
Note that he did apply for Computer Science at each school which I’m sure was heavily impacted, especially at those schools.
My kid’s unweighted GPA probably was his “downfall” at a lot of the schools, even though he had a perfectly good explanation for a lot of it (his mother passed away at the end of his freshman year). His unweighted GPA for all his HS classes after his junior year, disregarding Honors, AP, and the + and -, was 3.69. The University of California system disregards 9th grade and takes into account a little bit of his Honors/AP/community college classes (not much, only 8 semesters worth), so that helped and brought his capped UC GPA up to 4.05. His uncapped weighted GPA, when taking AP and community college classes into account, was somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.25-4.30 depending on whether you count + and -.
@ProfessorPlum168 that was a tough tournament. I definitely think the computer science major might have been a big factor. I’m assuming he needed to get directly admitted to those programs as a freshman?
But thankfully he has Berkeley. That’s definitely an elite school worthy of his high scores!!!
I think you said you are a CA resident. I thought I heard last year that UCLA is harder than Berkeley now to get in (used to be the other way around?) and that it’s harder than it used to be for in-staters.
Did he accept any waitlists? I feel like Berkeley is better than his waitlists, but I don’t know anything about their computer science programs.
@ProfessorPlum168: CMU also disregards Fresh. grades (or did when my own kid applied last year); however, SCS is uber-hard to get into - we’ve known many super bright kids with perfect scores who weren’t accepted. Had your S been a D, that might have helped 
He sounds like a fine young man to have prevailed despite such a terrible loss. No doubt you are extremely proud of him. My brother selected Cal over Stanford once upon a time, majored in physics, worked up at LBL for five years as a researcher, and went on to a PhD at MIT. Betting your kid has a similarly bright future wherever he ends up.
Re: do we really think AO’s will sweat the difference between a 35 and a 36?
No, this thread is mostly numbers geekery. There are a few cases where it would matter if the concordance is off, though, mostly involving things like eligibility for certain programs.
Example: The McDermott at UTD. You need a 33 for minimum eligibility, but a 1490 on the new SAT. If the concordance is off, and some are saying by up to two points - then the SAT kid with a 1480 should be eligible but isn’t, and the 1490 kid who is eligible may be perceived as bottom of the barrel when really they’re not.
Ditto for certain auto-stats awards. The target SAT number might be unintentionally inflated.
@collegemomjam my kid asked me to register for Berkeley about 20 minutes after he recovered from his cardiac arrest after opening his email result. (I did wait until 36 hours later for the Stanford and CMU results, just in case another miracle occurred). However, I am still open to other schools where waitlist is cleared (even if he isn’t LOL) especially if some school offers a significant financial aid package.
UCLA is a bit harder to get into than Berkeley, especially for Computer Science, because you need to apply thru Engineering. Engineering acceptance rates at UCLA are much lower than in their other schools. Whereas Berkeley has two choices, EECS (Engineering) which is insanely difficult to get into, or through the L&S school, which has a more tolerable acceptance rate. However, for L&S, you’re not a direct admit, you need to achieve a minimum 3.3 GPA out of 3 core CS classes and then you eligible for the major. (My kid took the L&S route). Also, UCLA admit rates overall are a bit lower than Berkeley because there are usually around 15,000 more freshmen applicants.
Supposedly the California legislature capped out of state acceptance rates for each UC school at 18% starting this year, but from what I saw, some still went over. I’m no expert on this particular topic though. I know in the past few years the out of state acceptance rates were higher than the in-state rates at most of the UCs. That extra $25K per head in tuition comes in handy I guess.
I haven’t read through all the comments on this thread, but shouldn’t concordance questions be a simple matter of matching the score distributions of the ACT and SAT? (Apologies if this has been brought up before.) Both are very large N distributions (>1,000,000) and so will sort out very well by ability without any real selection bias.
Last I checked (2013), well over 1,000 students scored 36 composite on ACT, while only 300-600 scored 1600 on the SAT (or equivalent under the 2400 scale - I haven’t seen numbers for the last year though). This would suggest that indeed the ACT is an “easier” test, and also that 1580 or 1590 on the SAT might be more accurately mapped to 1600 in the concordance.
Anyway, someone has all the data, and this should be an elementary statistical exercise to match the curves at each possible score (assuming the distributions are Gaussian - which they will be - at least by narrow ranges on the SAT since so many possible scores are achievable versus the less fine intervals on the ACT).
@SatchelSF Everything you say is true. If you look at percentiles for both tests, the 99th percentile for the ACT starts at 34. The 99th percentile for the SAT starts at 1500. Yet, the concordance chart says that a 1500 is a 33. That seems off.
^^ This is pretty much what people here are saying. The problem is that we don’t have access to the data. We can only infer some of the data from things like 25-75 numbers from various schools.
So, yes, based on what we can infer from the numbers we’ve seen, the published concordance seems to be off, especially near the top.
I agree that the concordance is off. I bet the new concordance will map 1570+ to 36 where now it does not. Epic Fail on the part of the college board. All because the 2015 PSAT and the 2015 test survey questions on the old SAT(which the concordance was based on) were wrong vs actual results. The 2015 PSAT was too easy and threw everything off. Then in 2016 they made the real new SAT too difficult which means the concordance for the actual tests were based on the easy tests, when the actual tests were harder. Total mess/garbage and I hope SAT loses more business because of all this.
“Last I checked (2013), well over 1,000 students scored 36 composite on ACT, while only 300-600 scored 1600 on the SAT (or equivalent under the 2400 scale - I haven’t seen numbers for the last year though). This would suggest that indeed the ACT is an “easier” test”
I disagree that it means the ACT is easier. It just means that a 2350 (old) is just as good as a 36. The SAT has a more numbers to work with so is more precise.
Disagree that the first PSAT was “too easy”. The number of SF’s in MN was pretty much what it was in other years and we haven’t heard of any state having a larger-than-usual number for the 2017 competition, have we? Everything is relative, even when you compare one test to another. For every kid who scores a perfect 36 but can’t break 1500, there’s another who can’t break 30 but clears 1500 easily. The two tests play to different strengths and learning styles - probably even different prep habits.
The real issue is how to concord those two tests. That perspective is sorely needed now that it’s been a couple of years. CB seemed far more concerned with old-new concordance at first, but now it’s time to move on and provide the conversions with ACT. Will be very interested in those results at the higher end, just like everyone else here.
Re: real impacts of the concordance being off
It did affect where S applied.
He took the SAT once, without the essay, and got a 1490 (760 ERBW, 730 Math). Based on the info we had at the time, I knew he needed to be in the low to mid 1500s to be competitive for admission and top merit at some of the schools we were considering (Tulane, UTD McDermott). I knew S could jump 20-50 points on a retake, and wasn’t too worried about it. He had to retake anyway - to do the essay because the UCs require it and we didn’t know that in the first go-round.
For S, however, this was a no-go. He hates hoop jumping. He knew he had NMF in the bag. He knew he had full rides to choose from. He was done.
Me: Done means no Tulane, no McDermott, no UCs. Are you cool with that?
S: Yep. Done.
If that 1490 is really a 34, or even a 35? I can’t say for sure that it would have changed anything, but it might have.
I know that admissions is holistic at the highly selective schools, but where do you all think the cutoff is score-wise? If your kid had a 1510 on the new SAT, would you have her also take the ACT or is the 99% good enough to get past the test-score threshold?
Like everyone else on this thread, I wish the CB hasn’t screwed up the concordance tables to badly.
Sorry to be redundant, but are they definitely redoing the concordance tables? I hope they are reading this thread because it definitely supports them making some adjustments.
@shuttlebus I think it probably depends on the college. I would think that they have figured out the tables are wrong and I want to say that 1510 was as good as a 35, but I’m not sure. Might be a 34. Yet the 1510 just seems stronger than a 34, despite what the charts say.
@collegemomjam
https://www.collegeboard.org/membership/all-access/admissions/sat-score-trends-five-things-enrollment-leaders-need-know
"Disagree that the first PSAT was “too easy”. The number of SF’s in MN was pretty much what it was in other years and we haven’t heard of any state having a larger-than-usual number for the 2017 competition, have we? "
NMS needs a set number of semi finalists, so they just adjust the cutoffs higher to meet that number. They can’t have “a larger than usual number”. Read the Class of 2017 PSAT NMS thread if you want to get into the gory details of what that fiasco was all about!
@suzyQ7 at #637 - Been there done that. Glad we are a couple years out now! LOL.
Totally agree that the cut-offs went up - MN “jumped” 4 points or so. If by “easier” you meant that you had to miss fewer to get a certain percentile than with the old test - I’lll take your word. (D17 never took the old test so we don’t have that perspective). But Art at Compass and CB have both stated that this is a different test with different scaling so most basic comparisons are difficult-to-meaningless. As the Concordance Tables have shown us, even the “experts” 
have bungled up some of the conversions.
D17 took the inaugural test and got a 1500; however, she already had a 34 ACT and just needed the SAT to vet her PSAT for NMF purposes. She never submitted the SAT because too much uncertainty around the score and the integrity of the percentile, etc. We learned subsequently that this score might be a higher ACT-equivalent than the concordances were suggesting. Her school later reported at an admitted student event that the mean SAT for Class of 2021 (her class) was just below 1500 which seemed a tad low given their old SAT ranges and what the concordance tables would have predicted. So yeah, something weird is going on at the higher ends.
I have been following the continued discussion over concordances, esp. as my son opted to focus exclusively on SAT, and am very grateful that you all kept up the interest. Well done, die-hard CC parents!
I agree @JBStillFlying and I feel better about my son most likely sticking with SAT because of this thread.