@Data10 provided some data, and far that data definitely doesn’t support your supposition that TO would lead to a significant increase in admissions for rich prep school kids and a corresponding drop in lower income admissions. So far, the data at least suggests the opposite.
You dismiss this, arguing the “modest” changes would have happened anyway, even without TO. The NYT article you posted addressed this . . .
But although fewer people from those groups applied over all, some selective schools saw big increases from students who are typically underrepresented at elite institutions. The University of California, Berkeley, received 38 percent more applications from Black, Latino and Native American hopefuls than in 2019. New York University saw 22 percent more applications from both Black and Latino students.
There is little doubt what is driving those gains: making standardized test scores optional for applicants. About 1,700 schools did not require SAT or ACT scores this year.
. . .
Cornell had made a significant effort in recent years to expand the diversity of its applicant pool, but Mr. Burdick, who oversees admissions, said nothing had as big of an impact as waiving test scores. “We didn’t see an expansion of wealthy kids saying, ‘Well, I’ll apply to Cornell.’ That was already happening,” he said.
Yes, applications are down at less competitive schools, but it is beyond a leap in logic to blame this year’s switch to TO for the multi-faceted problems that small privates and less competitive publics have been facing for many years. As the same article explains, Covid exacerbated this problem, not TO.
This thread is getting a little hot so I am going to depart it, for good this time. I guess we will just have to see what the long term impact of TO is on the college admissions process.
I will be surprised if there are too many significant changes due to TO. I expect TO students at top schools to do about as well as their test submitting counterparts. I hope that TO results in some increased diversity at elite schools, but it will take a few years to see if that is the case (applications don’t necessarily lead to acceptances). At some point I hope the deluge of applications (to top schools) starts to slow as kids realize that, TO or not, chances of admission are slim. We also have an upcoming demographic dip in the # of college aged kids so that will negatively impact schools that are already fighting to enroll enough students.
Although this might be true now, if the test optional admissions become popular, it might not keep on holding true. One thing that can happen is GPA inflation in high schools. It is easy to catch it now when you compare the GPAs to test scores. But once they are removed, how are AOs going to discover which high schools inflate grades?
When scientists perform experiments, they try to have a way to calculate a second, independent measurement that provides at least ballpark value that confirms or rejects the main measurement. I see test scores as that second measurement.
The linked study did not just look at GPA in isolation, nor do holistic admission colleges. They have many other measurements that confirm/support the assessment besides just GPA in isolation and SAT/ACT score.
Students are generally being compared to students from their or similar high schools. Student at the top of their class will still be at the top of their class with or without grade inflation.
Harvard accepts 2000 students. There are 24000 high schools in the US. How exactly does that “general” comparison happen? How do you define “similar high schools”?
Nonetheless, mean scores for classes admitted under a TO policy could theoretically remain static (or, even improve) for a variety of reasons, including the very high probability that adcoms would just be doing officially what they had been doing on an ad hoc basis for years.
The SAT/ACT scores used in the analysis are the best given by applicants/colleges (superscores, best of multiple tests) that have little added value to the model. However, colleges that have all tests ever taken by applicants find SAT/ACT helpful (Yale?).
High schools have school profiles. Ours has SAT and ACT percentages on it. You can see what percent of kids score above 1500, from 1450-1500, etc. You can also see that 96% go to four year college after graduation. You can see the 30-plus APs offered and the affiliated scores (what percent of the kids score at least one 5, etc). We don’t rank, but you can see that the top ten percent have x GPA weighted and x unweighted. All of that info can help an AO see if any particular student is a strong student even without a score.
So, is your hypothesis that the AOs are going to use the AP scores achieved by the high school students as a global criterion to ensure there is no GPA inflation?
The school profiles have a ton of information, and really do place grades and class rigor into perspective. Even if there is grade inflation at a school, the individual students grades will be in proper perspective - a mediocre student with a 4.1 wGPA won’t look impressive if the Top 5% at the school have an average of 4.95wGPA.
I would highly recommend people google their own school profiles to see this document, I found out about it only a couple of years ago and wish I had known more sooner.
I think if all the students in a school are geniuses, then the school is probably very well known to AOs and they can still place individual students into proper perspective. The grades and scores are just one part of a college application, there are still activities, essays, letters of rec and other stuff that will distinguish applicants. And school profiles give all the info needed to place an individual student’s grades into perspective within their school. Not all geniuses are going to have perfect GPAs, not all geniuses are going to want to take the same AP classes…#notallgeniuses
“Probably”? The students might be geniuses only in that particular year.
Again, even if we assume that the school profiles place an individual student’s abilities within the particular school, we still have the problem with the global ordering.
“We” don’t have a problem with global ordering - students don’t need to be ranked by a ‘standardized’ test when they didn’t have a standardized learning experience.
AOs at schools that have gone test optional are not complaining about a lack of ability to “globally order”. Probably because they don’t do that when reading applications.
Tell me about this “global ordering”, I have never heard this term. Are holistic schools doing this? Or are they making sure the student can succeed and choose who they want as part of their class, based on any number of reasons.
It is a math/CS term. You need to sort something using a criteria. You can’t do it if you split the numbers in groups and compare only within the groups.
