<p>I know that the top schools say they do not prefer one test over the other but it seems that most students take the SAT in the Northeast especially. Are your chances of acceptance hindered by submitting the ACT instead of the SAT in the top schools in the Northeast?</p>
<p>Not anymore. There was a time when some northeastern schools explicitly said they expected applicants to submit SAT rather than ACT scores, but I am not aware of any college that does that any longer. Princeton, which used to prefer the SAT, now says, </p>
<p>
<p>All applicants must take three SAT Subject Tests. The ACT does not replace the three required SAT Subject tests.
</p>
<p><a href="http://www.princeton.edu/pr/admissions/u/appl/%5B/url%5D">http://www.princeton.edu/pr/admissions/u/appl/</a> </p>
<p>Of course you should check the Web site of any college you are strongly interested in, but the new practice in admissions offices in general appears to be to treat the two tests as interchangeable.</p>
<p>Stanford's admissions director is on record saying that when an applicant from an SAT-dominated region submits only ACT, it can seem suspicious. The exact quotation is in some recent threads on the Stanford forum. A College Confidential poster who is an admissions officer at a "most highly selective" institution posted not long ago that whenever he has seen both SAT and ACT scores in one application, the ACT is always higher. Not coincidentally, the ACT allows an applicant to select which set of scores is sent to colleges, if the test was taken several times (and several colleges, despite their policy of "superscoring", say they want to see ALL test results from all sittings). Draw your own conclusions.</p>
<p>I believe the ACT is an easier test...but that's just me...don't bite my head off!</p>
<p>Here are score distributions for class of 2006 for each test. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.act.org/news/data/06/pdf/National2006.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.act.org/news/data/06/pdf/National2006.pdf</a> </p>
<p>(table 2.1) </p>
<p>The corresponding figures for class of 2007 should be posted fairly soon.</p>
<p>The score distributions are interesting, but it is not clear what (if anything) they reveal about the relative difficulty or credibility of the two exams. </p>
<p>For any two exams that sort test-takers on a linear scale one can match percentile to percentile as a way of converting scores, but there is no guarantee that this also matches whatever the tests measure in any meaningful way. The comments from the admissions officer about ACT scores being higher (i.e. exceeding the score conversions) when both tests are present indicates either that the Xth percentile of ACT scores tends to be less selective in reality than the "equivalent" percentile of SAT scores, or that the comparability is compromised by the ability of applicants to retake the ACT at will and send only the best scores.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The top schools in the northeast all have Web sites and have time at this time of the year to answer emails (possibly by an automated reply, but possibly by a human reply) about their test policies. If you don't like to ask questions like this by email, you could also listen and, if need be, ask for information about this at regional</a> information sessions, which many colleges are scheduling this month. </p>
<p>Best wishes in the application process.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The top schools in the northeast all have Web sites
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The most salient information is not likely to be found on a university web site, as most schools would be reluctant to discriminate officially between the ACT and the SAT (when they accept both). Sometimes, however, more specific answers come to the surface. Here is a quotation from a top school in the Northeast. </p>
<p>From Richard Shaw, then-director of admissions at Yale (and now at Stanford), quoted in August 2004:</p>
<p>
[quote]
Like many schools, Yale requires students who take the SAT to also submit SAT subject tests, such as biology or U.S. history, known as SAT 2s. That's not necessarily required of ACT takers. *If an applicant "is in a primarily SAT state and only submits the ACT, it would make me pause," Yale's Shaw says. *
[/quote]
</p>
<p>It is possible that over time, ACT and SAT will "converge" and be treated increasingly as equivalent. But it is not clear whether this is always the case today, especially at the schools where test scores are highest.</p>
<p>August 2004 is dated info. Having spoken with admissions at 3 "elite" schools in the last few months, either the SAT or ACT are accepted and not questioned, wherever you come from. But having said that, many top schools do expect ACT submitters to also submit SAT II's. The lay of the land for many very selective schools seems to be SAT I plus SAT II's OR ACT plus SAT II's.</p>
<p>
[quote]
August 2004 is dated info.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>How do you know that? The same reasons for suspicion of the kind articulated by dean Shaw (such as the less discriminating content and more manipulable reporting of ACT compared to SAT) have fueled the nationwide rise in ACT. What has changed to make those perceptions obsolete in 2007? </p>
<p>The admissions officer comment about ACT scores generally being higher than SAT when both test results are submitted was from 2007, by the way. Admissions offices will have more experience with that as more applicants submit both tests, and there will continue to be a discrepancy for as long as the ACT allows cherry-picking of the reported scores and SAT does not. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Having spoken with admissions at 3 "elite" schools in the last few months, either the SAT or ACT are accepted and not questioned,
[/quote]
</p>
<p>That is exactly the answer you would have gotten in August 2004 at the time of Shaw's comments; Yale accepted the ACT, as he said, and no school that accepts the ACT has ever had a policy of "questioning" it. Again, what are you saying has changed that might alter the perceptions?</p>
<p>So despite the supposed national parity of ACT and SAT, the number of freshmen accepted after submitting only the SAT at Stanford is about 18 times higher than the number who submitted ACT but not SAT-I? (71 percent divided by 4 percent)</p>
<p>Now, maybe you believe that SAT-only was at least 18 times as popular as ACT-only in the Stanford applicant pool. An alternative explanation is that one test is correlated with a lower admissions outcome than the other, whether due to a worse reputation, or because its clientele includes weaker applicants, or the difference in score reporting practices is noticed by admissions officers despite official claims of "superscoring".</p>
<p>Maybe the ACT-only people went to Harvard, since the count is of ENROLLED students. It's clear enough from the figures that lots of students submitted both tests.</p>
<p>All of Stanford's main rivals are in regions that are at least as SAT-dominated as California. So there is no obvious source of yield bias against the ACT, and the ENROLLED numbers are in fact telling us something about the admittance and application figures.</p>
<p>Students submitting both tests would be expected to have a slightly better (if at all) admission rate, as they would generally submit ACT only if higher than SAT. It is meaningless as a data point on how ACT is valued in admission, as it is consistent with Stanford just ignoring the ACT scores when an SAT-I score is also reported. I guess if there were a much higher rate of admission for submitters of both tests, that might rule out any low value on the ACT, but that scenario is hard to square with the other numbers.</p>
<p>Perhaps you could ask a professor of statistics at your favorite institution of higher education to explain all of the possible conclusions from what various colleges report about the test score profiles of their admittees.</p>
<p>It could be argued that the ACT is easier based on the numbers.</p>
<p>1,500,000 people take the ACT every year. Approx. 250 get a perfect score.</p>
<p>2,300,000 people take the SAT every year. Approx. 250 get a perfect score.</p>
<p>250/1,500,000 is a higher % than 250/2,300,000.</p>
<p>A higher percentage of ACT takers get a perfect score, so it must be easier.</p>
<p>I think "n" in each score chart linked above is the number of DISTINCT individuals who took the test as a member of high school class of 2006. (Some test-takers took either or both tests more than once, and as noted before there is some overlap in membership between the two groups.) I see "Total Students in Report: 1,206,455" for the ACT report, and "N 1,376,745" for the SAT report. The new reports for high school class of 2007 should be out soon, and that will be a new set of data for checking various conclusions that can be drawn from last year's data. </p>
<p>I have no idea how self-selection of test-takers operates to make either group of test-takers stronger or weaker vis a vis the other group, although as a Midwesterner who only took the SAT back in the 1970s, I know which way I would the conclusion to come out. ;)</p>
<p>After the last SAT fiasco where ETS really screwed up a lot of people with grading errors that weren't discovered until after admissions season was over, many students even in SAT dominated areas started taking the ACT. I don't think admissions officers can blame them. I think this was in spring 2006 but I could be mistaken.</p>
<p>From above:
"It could be argued that the ACT is easier based on the numbers.
"1,500,000 people take the ACT every year. Approx. 250 get a perfect score.
"2,300,000 people take the SAT every year. Approx. 250 get a perfect score.
250/1,500,000 is a higher % than 250/2,300,000.
"A higher percentage of ACT takers get a perfect score, so it must be easier."</p>
<p>The correlation is not accurate. The ACT perfect score estimate is without using writing. The SAT is with the writing section which alone has greatly reduced the number of perfect scores. Prior to the writing section being added, the usual number of 1600s (a perfect score) on the SAT was in the 1,200 to 1,500 range per year compared to the 200 range for ACT.</p>
<p>The official policy of essentially all colleges now is that the ACT and SAT are interchangeable for admissions. Comments like those noted above made by Richard Shaw, director of admissions at Yale then Stanford, indicate that admissions officers may not always conform to stated offical policy and fuel controversies about the dishonesty of the admissions system and the officers who run it.</p>