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<p>Yeah, right - like Stanford is all “open and transparent” about their magical, mystical process for selecting who gets in and who doesn’t.</p>
<p>Seems to me this selective admissions game should be a two-way street. If colleges can keep some of their important cards hidden, students should be able to as well.</p>
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<p>Good question.</p>
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<p>I totally agree, Xiggi. As someone said on one of these threads, should you be able to withhold a less than stellar grade on your transcript, too?</p>
<p>The less gamesmanship allowed, the better.</p>
<p>^^I’d agree with you if the schools themselves were as straightforward as we expect the students to be. But many schools are up to their eyeballs in the own form of admissions gamesmanship. Some schools operate a mysterious admissions game so slippery and opaque that it would make a sidewalk shell game hustler blush.</p>
<p>garland:</p>
<p>IMO, it’s not that simple. The system is NOT designed to work for “you” the applicant. The system is solely designed to work for “you” the colleges; some colleges just play the game better than others. The fact that undergrads are involved is almost an afterthought, particularly at the major research Unis. Moreover, test anxiety does exist; it is real. Perhaps the highly selective colleges should just exclude test-anxious kids in favor of those cool-hand (xiggi’s) luke’s?</p>
<p>But, regardless, until Dean Shaw (and Bruce Poch at Pomona, among others) publicly addresses score choice in the ACT, he, like all other spinmeisters, is talking out of both sides of his mouth.</p>
<p>But student gamesmanship does not give a student more power over a school; it gives him/her advantage over the other applicants. It’s disengenuous to frame it as an advantage over the school, I think.</p>
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<p>Perhaps, but the alternative is the give 100% of the advantage to the adcoms. But, back to the big elephant in the room: ACT score choice. Doesn’t that give those applicants advantage over the other applicants? Why is it ok for those in ACT country to have score choice and those in predominantly SAT country not to? And, again it costs separately to send each and every ACT score. The Dean is being disingenuous, IMO.</p>
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<p>While I am 100% in favor of increased transparency (mostly in the form of verifiable statistics) I am not certain if the label slippery and opaque is a fair one when it comes to admissions. Of course, with admissions rates in the 10% range, one can assume that 90% will find the results “slippery and opaque” if it means that a rejection was the results.</p>
<p>Fwiw, what suggestions would you offer to make the process less opaque? On an personal basis, I would love to see rules imposed on organizations such as COFHE to disclose every single one of their internal documents. I would also love to see the federal government forcing every school that accepts federal aid to maintain a website where every document filed with the government is disclosed to the public. Common Data Sets should be filed before November 1 by EVERY school and should be expanded to include statistics on non-admitted students. </p>
<p>This said, none of the extra disclosures would make gaining an admission any easier. So, in the end, people will still say that the process is nebulous or is a crapshoot every time they are not accepted.</p>
<p>Bluebayou–what really do you mean by “advantage” in terms of the colleges? Are the students competing with the schools? In what way?</p>
<p>My dc took the ACT multiple times over several years, for reasons unrelated to college admissions – to qualify for an honors program, to apply to Governor’s School, to enter a dual enrollment program, to participate in a talent search, to substitute for an annual achievement test, to apply for a scholarship, etc. I was not at all concerned, because I knew that ultimately we could send only the best scores to colleges. </p>
<p>Now I hear that as a result of the SAT’s new policy, some schools, including Stanford, will require students to send all test scores, both SAT and ACT. </p>
<p>I’m not particularly happy about this change. If schools are suspicious of students who take these tests more than a couple of times, what will they think of my dc’s lengthy record of testing? How will they use scores that are several years old? If my dc’s best scores are within the school’s range, but the older scores are not, will he be at a disadvantage compared to students who didn’t take the test back then?</p>
<p>And then there’s the cost of sending all those old scores, at $9 per test date for the newer ones and $26 per test date for the older ones.</p>
<p>I’m happy to send all scores from tests taken during dc’s junior/senior year, or some other reasonable subset. I just don’t think it makes sense to be required to send <em>all</em> the scores, when the tests weren’t taken for that purpose and the rules at the time allowed score choice.</p>
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<p>Slippery and opaque is a very apt description of current admissions practice, especially at the highly-selective schools. Slippery because you can never know from year to year (or may be even week to week) exactly what the adcoms are looking for - you’re asked to trust them that they’ll just know it when they see it. And opaque because the actual selection process is almost totally unknowable by outsiders. What you are left with is huge game of Guess Which Number I’m Thinking Of. </p>
<p>If schools wished to avoid the slippery and opaque label they could start by publishing a detailed description of exactly how they evaluate applicants and how they decide who gets in and who doesn’t. Right now all we have is a vague vision of the admissions version of a political “smoke-filled room.” Applicants dutifully fill out apps that ask all manner of questions, some of which are pertient but others seem at best irrelevant and at worst downright bizarre. The committee takes these apps and goes into seclusion and three months later white smoke appears from the Vatican chimney and they emerge and present us with the Class of 2013.</p>
<p>The surest sign that process is opaque is the increasing number of kids who feel compelled to apply to 10, 15, or even 20 schools. This would almost never happen if applicants could predict with any reasonable degree of surety which schools will accept them and which ones won’t. If they could figure that out in advance they would just apply to the best or most desirable schools that will accept them and forget about the ones that won’t. If you want to see the angst and bewilderment that an opaque process engenders, go look at the recent SCEA Results thread for Stanford.</p>
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<p>The advantage Score Choice gives the student over the school is that it forces the school to accept him or not with incomplete information - only the best information about his test performance.</p>
<p>It the same advantage you would have over a prospective employer by mentioning on your resume the time you got the Manager of the Year Award but not mentioning that other time you got a bad performance rating and received no bonus. That would be the employment version of score choice. It’s a two way street and it’s part of how the game is played.</p>
<p>coureur has got it right. </p>
<p>I don’t understand the contradicting arguments from those who support the adcoms who refuse score choice. On the one hand, if we are to believe tokanadult’s research, the colleges couldn’t care less how many times a student takes the test, and others note that the way the data is entered, they won’t even see it. On the other hand, they oppose score choice since it indicates economic advantage. So how do they remain neutral, yet disapproving?</p>
<p>The only 2 tests that are accepted are already proscribed; why can’t the consumer who is paying for this “service” choose which one of the results they want to submit? </p>
<p>It is ridiculous that colleges can “superscore”, simply choose which parts of which tests they want to use as their public info on selectivity, and not allow students to do something far more innocous, by determing <em>which</em> one of their tests they would like to submit.</p>
<p>The lack of choice on the subject tests is what I find particularly aggravating. It discourages any form of risk taking on the part of the student.</p>
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<p>Again, I will have to disagree about one fundamental concept. The admission process is not akin to measuring how well the students and their family executed a paint-by-the-number puzzle. </p>
<p>Why is it important for candidates to “know” how the selection process really works? Why is important for candidates to try to decipher what the adcoms “look” for? </p>
<p>And, fwiw, Coureur, do you really believe that Harvard is less opaque than Stanford and less slippery than Yale? Do you think that MIT was better than other schools because their lying Director of Admissions was telling parents and students what they wanted to hear?</p>
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<p>Because then applicants can much more accurately judge whether they have a reasonable shot at getting in. If they know for example that Snotty U. is looking for people with musical talent who don’t require much financial aid and that they are not so interested in engineering majors who need a lot of aid, they can say “Well that’s not me. I’d better look elsewhere.” Likewise, if they know, in the selection process at good ol’ Snotty, that say the SAT score is given three times as much weight as say class rank - and their strengths are the other way around, well they know to keep their $70 and spend it at a different school where their strengths and achievements are more favorably viewed and weighted. Instead they are left groping in the dark - applying to schools that don’t want them in the first place and trying in vain to weave their way through selection processes that are stacked against them. That’s why they end up applying to 20 schools - to stumble on the two or three where the what the school wants and how they select it matches with what the student can provide.</p>
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<p>Nope, the high-end schools are all equally tricky and obscure. But to my knowledge the SAT score choice option hasn’t caused the head of admissions at Harvard to make public statements demanding openness and “transparency” from their applicants while providing nearly zero openness and transparency himself.</p>
<p>Harvard simply consistently says it considers an applicant’s highest scores. It has said that for years in the viewbook as the viewbook has undergone its annual revisions, and I’ve heard it said viva voce by lots of different Harvard admission officers, on and off the Harvard campus.</p>
<p>Coureur,</p>
<p>When you say “lack of choice on subject tests” what do you mean? The score choice program does allow choice on subject tests correct? Do you just mean that colleges that opt out will see all subject tests as has been the recent policy? Thanks for clarifying. Just wanted to make sure I understand score choice and subject tests.</p>
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<p>Tokenadult: this is where I really believe that colleges are being disingenuous, and those that believe this statement are being naive (sorry). Unless the score report is locked in a secured safe and only TWO scores are printed on the applicant folder (for those that require 2 ST’s for example), ALL scores are available for review (which Michelle Hernandez confirmed on cc). IMO, it is virtually impossible for H (and others) to say they only consider the top two scores where more are available; it’s only human nature – at least Dean Shaw admits to it. Two 700’s and four sub-600’s WILL be noticed, if only psychologically. If such a person is unhooked, good luck.</p>
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<p>I couldn’t say. I’m not the one who said that.</p>
<p>^ My understanding was that Penn and others were going to insist on seeing <em>all</em> scores including subject test, i.e. no change from current score reporting.</p>
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<p>Can some one verify this? I think the subject tests and reasoning are apples and oranges, and while I feel like the student should have the choice on all of them, the lack of choice on subject tests is particularly vexing.</p>