omg, mtmind. my kid attends a super highly competitive HS.
I think everything got so confusing and more challenging once colleges decided that testing was optional for some year (s ?)
1 Like
Test optional makes it more confusing and challenging, but it also gives applicants an opportunity to decide how to best present and distinguish their abilities and potential. I had my doubts, but it does seem that some colleges really do believe that other aspects of an application (grades, course and school rigor, essays, recommendations, etc) can demonstrate strong academic ability and potential, even in lieu of standardized tests.
That said, it is hard to navigate and sometimes may even seem counter-intuitive. If your child’s school has decent college counseling then that may be your best source of information regarding what is the best option for your child.
My son attends a T50 university. He didn’t have a titled leadership position. He wrote short answers about how he took leadership roles in group project particularly in his computer science classes where they used AGILE. His essay included taking initiative in intellectual pursuits outside of school based on his interests.
3 Likes
Talking about grade inflation, my son’s public high school class has lots of kids with 4.0 GPA. His weighted GPA 4.83 ranked him 16th(!) in his class because he took only 12(!) APs.
1 Like
Ha! Our top graduates had 5.5+ GPAs. Over half the class was on the “Highest Honor Roll”, meaning a 4.0+ wGPA. A 4.89 doesn’t get you in the top 10%. Various weighting processes mean weighted GPAs aren’t really that meaningful. Iirc, South Carolina is on a 6.0 system. It gets to be rather silly.
As I’ve posted before, don’t conflate acceptance rates with admissions difficulty. Fishing for applications from students who don’t get admitted doesn’t make it “harder”. Not does the trend of students deciding “I probably have no shot, but it’s test optional, so what the heck” and spending $70 to be rejected.
College-bound High School graduate numbers have been relative steady over the past few years, and the top schools accept roughly the same number of students, growing at roughly the same rate.
So the same percentage of students end up at the same schools, and they are students at the same point in the achievement spectrum. For those who may “lose” a spot, it’s taken by someone who would not have been accepted in the past, so it was much “easier” for that student.
2 Likes
ultimom, thank you. Indeed, leadership goes beyond a particular ‘position’.
Grade inflation? - We’ll concentrate on our kid’s HS trends. Otherwise, it’s endless. Everyone does something different.
mtmind, got it. I think my kid has a reasonable college counseling so I guess they know what makes sense for the students at this particular HS ? and the trend for the schools regarding taking test and acceptance to top colleges.
mtmind, you wrote - it seems crazy, but college counsellors at some highly competitive schools will oftentimes advise students with high SAT scores (above 1500) not to submit test scores to extremely competitive test optional schools.
May you know what is logic behind that advise?
For a few schools, a score in the low 1500s may still put the student in the bottom quartile.
2 Likes
1njparent, Got it. For the top ones, when applying the student doesn’t know how many students score above 1500 and/or 1600 who are also applying. hmmm…
For the top schools, there are usually between 40k and 60k students applying. So you will definitely see more than several thousands of them with perfect or near perfect scores.
transfer2021, thanks. it makes sense.
Based on data I could find, over 20,000 kids each year get 1500 or higher and over 8000 get over 1550. These are single-sitting figures, not super scores. Scoring high is not what one should focus solely on anyway—it takes a lot more to get in to top colleges like the ones you mention.
Number of applications are far more variable. For example, UCLA had 139,463 first time freshmen applications this year, or 167,903 freshmen + transfers. Caltech hasn’t published application numbers this year, but last year they had 8,007. Olin usually has under 1,000 applicants. Being a “top college” seems more correlated with selectivity or endowment per student than number of applications.
1 Like
Caltech has 13,026 applicants this year, 62% increase over last year:
3 Likes
That sounds about right. I expect MIT and Caltech were the 2 colleges with largest application increase due to not requiring test scores this year. Many potential applicants saw their high score ranges as a barrier to applying ,leading to huge increases in applicants… even more so than at other Ivy Plus type colleges. Colgate had a larger increase, but I believe Colgate’s increase did not primarily relate to test scores.
I was referring to Top 10 national universities.
In this year’s class of 2025, 5 of the USNWR top 10 were out of the number of applications range you listed. However, this wasn’t a typical year due to the noted test optional increase. Last year, 7 of the USNWR top 10 were out of the number of applications range you listed. The most extreme outlier was Caltech, with 8k applications last year and 13k this year, as listed above.
Don’t forget the ACT.
A student with a score in the 99th percentile is simply meeting an expectation at the very top schools. 90th percentile scores are probably okay for recruited athletes or the child of a giant donor.
2 Likes
Another way to confirm @Lindagaf’s statement is to look at a college’s ACT 75-25 spread, take the lower score, and find the ACT percentile it represents. The reason you can do this is that since hooked students have easier admissions than unhooked students, a large fraction of them end up in the bottom 25th percentile.
For example, here are the 25th percentile ACT scores for the HYPSM colleges:
Harvard: 33 => 98%
Yale: 33 => 98%
Princeton: 33 => 98%
Stanford: 32 => 96%
MIT: 34 => 99%
Notice that even though Stanford has the lowest 25th percentile ACT score, it actually has the most difficult admissions amongst all five of them. For unhooked students, high scores are necessary, but not remotely sufficient.
2 Likes