@pantha33m, I actually believe it works both ways, likelihood of acceptances and rejections, assuming one profiles in the top-25%, until you get up to the top-15 universities and top-5 LAC’s and then its less clear as everyone that’s unhooked is bunched up together in the 34-36 ACT / 1525-1600 SAT range, dependent on superscoring.
@pantha33m, I think that’s the point everyone is making - save for hooks and a school’s other institutional holistic needs as assuming an applicants GPA and EC’s generally profile, ACT ad SAT scores are the best indicator of admission until you get to those tippy top schools where all unhooked applicants are in the 34-36 ACT / 1525-1600 range and then it becomes more of a choice individual holistic approach.
@collegehelp I may be misunderstanding, but you are suggesting converting 2002 SAT scores to New SAT scores using the College Board’s concordance tables? The concordance tables, flawed as they almost surely are, were designed to convert the Old SAT - the one with a total of 2400 that went into effect in 2005 - not the Old Old SAT.
(In addition, note that there is some question about the extent to which selective colleges actually used the College Board’s concordance tables; it seems at least a few may have not. See e.g. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1961046-old-sat-scores-compared-to-redesigned-sat-scores.html )
2002 data is nearly as old as my high school student. While there is no perfect source of data, surely between Naviance, the Common Data Sets, and the college websites themselves, we can get a more accurate picture of admissions chances than 15-year-old data on a different test. (Sorry, I don’t intend to sound harsh, but it seems that selective college admissions have become more competitive in recent years, so age of data matters.)
The tippy-top schools (those with acceptance rates below 10% for the RD round) are not REASONABLE reaches for anyone;. No one should seriously bet the farm on those schools, regardless of how impressive test scores are. Instead, my recommendation for students with perfect and near-perfect test scores is to use ED/EA tactically. Take the risk on the schools that interest you, but don’t assume you’ve got a “reasonable” chance at any of those in the top 10 or 20. And don’t take your “safeties” for granted. A careless or arrogant application which makes it clear that a student does not take a “lower ranked” school seriously has resulted in rejection for many students who have test scores that “should” have made acceptance a shoo-in.
@evergreen5, it would seem that the data provided by @merc81 in post #18 is more timely.
@EllieMom, agree as that is what we experienced with our twin DD’s who both profiled - 1 acceptance, 3WL and 7 denials below 15% acceptance rate, and 6/6 acceptances between 15-25% acceptance rate.
evergreen5, I think you did misunderstand. The data in the table from post #1 is from 2015, not 2002. What I said is that I went back to the most recent valid SAT percentiles for schools that are now SAT optional. For Bates, that was 2002.
Even with the latest numbers, this list is still not useful.
@collegehelp OK that makes more sense, thank you.
“The fourth number is the 25th percentile (from IPEDS 2015) which means you have 5 chances in 20 of being admitted. (Yes, I know that other factors matter besides SAT. This is intended as an approximate guide.)”
This is a major flaw in your methodology. Applicants with scores at the 25th percentile of accepted students would not have a 25% chance of being admitted. For selective colleges, the 25th percentile is hook territory, where holistic evaluation matters the most.
Yet your list ignores all other factors, including those which are more important than SAT scores at many or most colleges. SAT scores alone can be very misleading in terms of estimating reach/match/safety.
The college choice factor that is probably one of the larger ones that affects graduation rates is how affordable the college is. Financial reasons are the most common reasons for dropping out of college, although there are indirect effects of academic ability and motivation here (e.g. weaker students (in an absolute sense, not necessarily relative to the students at the college) may be unable to pass full course loads or need remedial course work, resulting in needing more semesters at increased cost).
I think the idea here is if you could have only have one metric that correlated with admission, it would be SATs or ACTs, which is reasonable. If you look at naviance at most high schools, you’ll notice a couple of things, one sat and gpa are highly correlated and two, the higher the SAT, the higher the acceptance rate, i.e. a lot of green accepts in the upper right (4.0 uw/1600 sat). Of course you have exceptions, as posters have mentioned in this thread, but the rule holds generally.
@theloniusmonk, we wish we saw that at my DD’s HS - few URMs. few First-Gen, lots of accomplished parents with legacy hooks which helps sometimes, but by far the biggest hook is recruited-athletes. So, unfortunately for the top school’s Naviance graphs there are many Red ED circles and Red RD X’s in the upper right (those that achieved the highest scores and grades), but still plenty of Green ED circles in the middle…
yeah, agree, the hooks, especially athletes will skew the SAT correlation
Yes, unfortunately we can’t have those students use it, and frankly we don’t let them see it as it will only cause them to say “wait, what?” and “why did I try so hard?”. That said, they all got into great schools, but not the tippy top reaches where they still easily profiled in the top-25%.
The original post claims that “The fourth number is the 25th percentile (from IPEDS 2015) which means you have 5 chances in 20 of being admitted. (Yes, I know that other factors matter besides SAT. This is intended as an approximate guide.)”
That statement reflects a fundamental misunderstanding about conditional probability. You are confusing Pr(score | acceptance) with Pr(acceptance | score). The former conditional probability is the probability of having a particular SAT score, given that you were accepted, and that is what the percentiles actually mean. The latter is the probability of being accepted, given that you have a particular SAT score. That is what you erroneously think the percentiles mean.
These two conditional probabilities are quite different (although there is a relationship between them called Bayes’ Theorem). In other words, your fallacy is like saying (a) “50% of the people accepted to a given school are female”. (b) I am female. Therefore, © my probability of being accepted is 50%. Clearly, this line of reasoning is not correct.
Here’s the problem with this assumption – we know, in general, colleges will prefer applicants with higher test scores. So it is not as if there is a random distribution. When you look at the test scores that fall in the bottom end – such as 5% – those students have some other compelling factor that allows for their admission despite relatively poor scores. Typically that will be a “hook” of some kind, though it could simply be an academic record strong enough to lead the admissions staff to disregard the weak test score.
So let’s say a college admits 20% of applicants. That means in theory, all applicants have a 1:5 chance of admission. By your theory, the bottom 5% applicant would then have a 1:100 chance of admission. (Multiplying that 1 out of 20 chance by the overall 1 out of 5 chance). (Your math failed to account for the large majority of applicants who are rejected)
But it gets worse because it is reasonable to assume that it is more likely that a student’s academic record is consistent with their test scores, than not. So only a very small percentage of the students with SAT scores at the 5th percentile level will have compensating factors that favor admissions. That mean that logically the chances of admission are even smaller than the 1:100 that would result from merely extrapolating test score percentile in the context of admission rates.
So no, your system doesn’t work. It would make much more sense to look at the 50% mark as the delimiter for “reasonable” reach, except for students who are able to identify other countervailing factors in favor of admission.
I would agree that the SAT may be a better index of selectivity than the admit rate.
Although, even if we assume your numbers are accurate and up-to-date, we cannot assume that the score distribution among applicants is similar to the score distribution among enrolled students. The admit rate for each scoring bracket, like the overall admit rate, depends on who applies. It may be the case for example that HS students with perfect scores tend to be over-confident, hence apply in relatively large numbers to “top” schools even if their ECs etc. aren’t too interesting.
SAT score is not a better index for the schools that do not check the “most important” box in CDS. In any case, looking at the very low end of score spectrum is meaningless and irrelvant to most regular applicants.
This has been a great discussion and I appreciate the comments. Yes, college admissions is a complicated process with many factors at work. One thing that is not opaque is the SAT scores of the enrolled freshmen.so it is a good idea to start with SATs as a way to identify reaches. I know that other considerations may come into play but I think you are kidding yourself if you think you can predict how any particular candidate’s application will be reviewed by an admissions committee. How can you possibly predict how several different admissions officers will react to and communicate about an application?
So, how would you advise your own high school senior son or daughter with SAT CR+Math score of. say, 1390? Would you say “Look, you are not a recruited athlete, you are not an underrepresented minority, you are not a legacy, you have never won a national award for anything, and Daddy and Mommy haven’t paid for a new building on campus so don’t even bother applying to Cornell, or Princeton or Duke etc.”? What kind of parent or counselor would preempt the admissions committee process because they arrogantly believe the kid has almost no chance? The hidden message to the teenager is that they should strive for safety and mediocrity.
That’s why students should apply to more reasonable reaches than to matches or safeties. You give the student more chances to succeed in what is a somewhat unpredictable process. When you believe that a kid needs a “hook”, you are basically saying that a student can’t get in on their own academic merit. When the realities of the admissions process can’t be completely known, it is much more sensible and responsible to advise students to apply to reasonable reaches based on what IS known, such as the SAT percentiles.
So, all this discussion of hooks and so on may have some truth to it but it should not discourage prospective students from applying to reach schools because the actual role of such factors is speculative, variable, and unpredictable. The role of SATs is also variable from school to school but it is less variable, speculative, and nebulous. It is a good index to start with. Then give some thought to HS GPA and intangibles like essays and “hooks”.
@collegehelp Do you know what happened to a significant number of unhooked kids at our school who followed your logic and applied Early to reach schools where their SAT scores arguably gave them a chance? The got rejected or deferred and missed out on the opportunity to apply Early to a target school that was a great fit for them. Then they got rejected or waitlisted RD at those target schools and ended up at safety schools, which was a disappointment to say the least.
I don’t know where you are coming from but it doesn’t seem to resemble the admissions universe that most CCers have experienced.