Could not find it. Can you link it?
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My two cents is this is confirming that at something like Princeton’s latest 25th on the CDS (1510/34), that is not mostly recruited athletes and such getting admitted despite a low test score, that is mostly non-recruited-athletes and such getting admitted in part because of a still quite high test score.
Not far below that, though, and I think it starts to look more like it is mostly just hooked applicants getting in.
Also of note: 74% submitted a score of some kind. The CDS (for year prior…) has the number at 60% submitted SAT; 25% submitted ACT. That means roughly 10% submitted both. I had always wondered what percent of kids submitted both. For tippy top schools, a decentish (?) assumption is that it’s around 10%.
26% of enrolled kids were TO. If 16% of kids are athletes, and half of them are TO, that means about 21% of non-athletes are TO? Is my math right?
This leads to my personal conclusion IF you are applying to T10 schools (only a minuscule percentage of applicants). If you are not an athlete, or URM or FGLI – you should not apply TO. If you are a legacy, you should not apply TO.
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If you want a legacy tip you better submit a score and a high one at that!
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Absolutely. I expect that the athletes who did not submit scores likely were told not to by the coaches. Perhaps to a lesser extent, the same may be true for urm and fgli applicants. They took the test but their application is better without it. Everyone else needs very high scores to keep the median up.
I don’t believe that’s the case for the FG applicants. Especially if they come out of a poorly run or struggling school. Submitting means the scores are what they are… nobody can contest an A average by saying, “Yeah, but the HS is a disaster”. Even a 20th percentile score shows that the kid isn’t barely reading and computing, despite the issues with the HS.
Yeah, fascinating that non-legacies had a modestly higher percentage of 36s, but then legacies many more 33-35s.
Which is sort of what I have long heard about Princeton and similar colleges when it comes to legacies these days. If you are a high numbers legacy, and have at least very good activities and recommendations and essays and such, maybe you then have a better chance than non-legacy applicants meeting those standards.
But at least these days, it typically isn’t doing much if anything if you are not already that sort of “average excellent” applicant by their standards.
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That would be an SAT score of 850-900 for your fg applicant. No, that can’t be submitted and frankly the student likely can’t survive there with that score.
No, I’m talking about the 600/620 kids. They can survive Princeton with adequate support.
The 900 kids shouldn’t submit and they are getting bad advice if they apply.
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Back when tests were required of everyone, only 13% of Princeton’s class had an SAT of 1200-1400. I would guess that the majority of this 13% are well into the 1300s.
If you truly believe test scores are not particularly indicative of future performance in college, then you could argue a 1220 kid could do just fine. Personally, I would be extremely uncomfortable sending my child into Princeton with a score wellll under their 25th percentile of 1460. I would worry that I was setting them up for failure.
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A former student of mine, recruited athlete, ACT 21 (applied TO), 3.1 HS GPA with no rigor, is at an Ivy. Doing well, more As than Bs, albeit in an ‘easy’ major. No 504/accommodations. This student works hard and is a grinder. For some students, there can be academic growth post HS.
I could also talk at length about how students like this one don’t get recommended for accelerated/honors classes in k-12 too, but that would get us off topic. We have to go to the race thread for that.
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Based on this argument, should students in general choose not to attend admission-reach colleges, even if they get admitted to them?
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I don’t have the answer to your question but I think fewer of those kids used to apply. I also think that for the vast majority of the kids at a school like Princeton, Princeton is not a reach, but a match. Do I think kids should go to matches? Yes. The reason we label these schools as reaches for “match” kids is due to acceptance rate, and that has nothing to do with how qualified someone may be or may not be.
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I define reaches differently. I guess we all do. I’m not sure I have a hard cutoff but, for me, I would not want to send my kid to a school if they are 200 points below the 25th percentile. There are stories of success, as noted above, and every kid is different, etc. etc. But the chances of success (and leaving with self-esteem intact) seem…slim.
When you are 300 points below the mean, I think it’s much more than a “reach.”
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This can also be hard in the other direction. Yes, I know, Bama is full of NMSF. But the truth is that they are a very small % of the population. Kids can find their people most places but my D is much happier at a place where she is surrounded by them than she would be having to seek them out. Being a really big fish is not for everyone.
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These arguments are more relevant to smaller schools (e.g. LACs), where the tails of the distribution of academic strength are too small for the college to offer more suitable courses for them.
Note also that academic strength in college is not that well predicted by the SAT (or ACT) that people here seem to be using as the sole predictor. Unfortunately, in the US, all of the typically available academic predictors are either relatively weak predictors (SAT or ACT), inconsistent (HS record), or not universally available, especially for not highly advanced students (AP scores and college courses). There are also late bloomers (high school stuff will underpredict college academic strength – probably like @Mwfan1921 's example) and perhaps some early bloomers who burn out (high school stuff will overpredict college academic strength).
It is also the case that college rigor mostly varies much less than college admission selectivity. Orders of magnitude more students can succeed at Princeton and graduate than can be admitted to Princeton.
Given how many (disproportionately higher income) students get within range of highly selective schools’ SAT/ACT ranges only with extensive test prep, I’m not sure I understand the argument that a student who can’t get close to the 25 percentile without prep is unlikely succeed at these schools.
I also listened to a Brown admissions information session with the president and dean of admissions last night, and the dean was very clear that students should think about their test scores in the context of their HS and NOT rely on the range published in the CDS. He said a student who gets an SAT score that is strong for their school should submit it. That says to me that they see test scores as highly relative rather than absolute.
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There seem to be more kids with mental health issues on campus than there used to be, and those issues seem to frequently focus on academic stress ( as opposed to roommate issues or love life problems). Presumably more kids are both 1. Concerned about their college academic performance than there used to be and 2. Are indeed struggling at whatever college they attend, compared to their peers there. This suggests to me that attending a reach may be a real mistake for many.