<p>KAPLAN</a> EXCLUSIVE: New SAT Scoring Policies from 374 Top Schools</p>
<p>Something I find weird is that colleges like Harvard and stanford weigh the writing section equal to the other sections but a lot of lower ranked colleges give it no weight at all. I thought that most colleges would sort of follow Harvard and Stanford because they are seen as "leading" colleges, since they're so highly ranked.</p>
<p>Interestingly enough..according to that, Yale doesnt weigh it at all and Princeton is still undecided. </p>
<p>I certainly hope they follow Harvard and Stanford by next year! That's my best section right now...haha</p>
<p>College admission committees are not always transparent and straightforward, especially regarding sometimes politically charged indices such as SAT's. Better to look at what college do rather than what they say. </p>
<p>The best way to see what colleges do, is to examine College Data's very useful scattergrams (something that would be good to have at CC). A quick way to judge the importance of SAT's, or their subsections, vs. GPA's, is to gauge the spread between average accepted and rejected students. At College Data, a red line and green line represents the average score for rejections and acceptances respectively.</p>
<p>The lesser the spread, the less importance placed on the test subsection. Yale purports not to count writing, and that appears to bear out, as the spread between the average rejection and acceptance is small, as might be expected if the spread was only due to correlation between other factors (e.g. CR). At Stanford, which purports to count the W equally, the spread for CR and W is nearly equal. </p>
<p>Princeton, on the other hand, claims to be undecided, but appears to be using W, as the spread for W appears the same as for CR.</p>