It’s being done to help low income students, but I’m sure high SES students will be the ones most likely to take advantage of it…
Some items to consider:
% of students with Pell Grants: 11% (Pell Grant enrollment in the bottom 5% of all 4 year colleges)
ACT Middle 50%: 32-35
ACT Score Range (Admitted Students): 22-36
For applicants, there is no minimum GPA or test score requirement. No course load is mandatory
The University of Chicago does not charge an application fee ($75) for students applying for need-based financial aid.
I don’t really see a problem with this, since they will have to send a formal report if they decide to enroll. So self-reporting a score that isn’t accurate will just get your acceptance rescinded.
Nondorf’s reign has brought many, many changes…applications are up, acceptance rate is down, and yield has risen over 30 percentage points in the last 10 years. And since Chicago has now announced it will have ED, EA, EDII and RD, the process for this year will look unlike any in the past. Not sure what to think about all these changes, but the expressed purpose of this (self-reporting scores), along with the new Coalition platform and application, is to encourage more participation by a greater diversity of students. We’ll see.
Sounds like another shameless tactic to gin up applications. It’s not difficult to ballpark someone’s test score, ex. a low income student with a 3.98, five APs, summer online course, dual enrolled, and president of class is probably motived enough for at least a 90 percentile score.
@runnersmom I had no idea Chicago added ED and ED2 - thanks for mentioning it. I haven’t seen anything in the news about that. Wonder how they will treat their EA applicants now that others are committing through early decision. This new development will be a game changer for them. (A few years ago Case Western did the same thing - added ED 1 and ED2 to their EA). For some reason, I’m kind of surprised, and even more shocked that there’s been no news about this.
That’s a ridiculous overstatement. One of my kids has two Chicago degrees and works there, and I know two kids of friends who are undergraduates there now, so I have some sense of what the day-to-day culture is like at the college. It is not much different from that of 10 years ago before Admissions Dean Jim Nondorf arrived. Everyone frets over whether someday Chicago will lose its unique character, but that hasn’t happened yet, not even close.
Over the past 30 years or so, there has been a steady, deliberate program to make the college more student-friendly that has largely been the work of College Dean John Boyer, whose tenure has spanned four presidents, who is the university’s semi-official historian, and who is effectively the curator of its soul. What Nondorf has done – call it amazing, or shameless, or both – is cash in on the efforts of Boyer and others to make the college experience at Chicago better without losing its soul.
@JHS How does having a son that went there make you an authority on recognizing the change in ethos at the college over the last 10 years? The college ain’t what it once was and everyone knows it. Homogenized and infiltrated by grubby tiger cubs. Vain admins obsessed with rank and becoming a BRAND NAME.
He’s on campus every day, supervises some undergraduates, and is close to faculty in his major department. And does Scav every year with GASH. Plus, as I said, two children of good friends are there now, one a third-year and one a second-year. Both very much University of Chicago types – including way more math than social skills.
Lots of universities have gone to the “trust (on application), but verify (on matriculation)” with self-reported courses and grades, so doing so with test scores is not a big leap.
On the other hand, doing so with test scores is relatively minor in effect compared to doing it for courses and grades.
When it comes to self-reported courses and grades, I wish they wouldn’t trust us and just take the $#^& transcripts. Such a pain entering all of that info into the colleges system… :((
The colleges are offloading and distributing the work to the applicants. This is not wholly a bad thing, since each applicant has a strong interest in making sure that his/her record is entered correctly, unlike someone in the data entry army that the college would have to temporarily hire to get all of the transcript information put into the system. It also probably reduces the risk of problems where an application and transcript are not matched together.
Having to send official score reports is stupid and an expensive racket for SAT/ACT.
Kids apply to multiple schools. And often have to send reports for multiple tests (since many schools superscore or require all test results to be sent). Plus SAT subject test reports. Kids could easily have to send several dozen “official” reports even though an unofficial (and very hard to fake) online printout is readily available.
This does seem intended to boost applications, not for mere goosing of the stats, but in the service of socioeconomic diversity
I see nothing “shameless” about it. What’s shameless is the collective delusion that test scores matter significantly. They do to USNWR rankings, but not to undergraduate outcomes.
I am very curious to know how much weight they will give to the self-reported scores in the admissions process. My suspicion is that this is a way for them to become effectively-test-optional without saying so, thereby preserving the right to be ranked in USNWR. Or, perhaps, merely to experiment with score-blind admissions in a subset of the applicant pool and observe the results of that approach. Testing the no-testing waters, as it were.
Then again, maybe it really is just about saving low-income students the cost of the score reports. Given the inflation over the past 20 years in the number of applications an applicant needs to submit to be assured of finding a suitable match, the four free reports limit from ETS is way out of step with the times.
Either way, I expect we will continue to see more schools adopting this policy.
This should be how every school does it. There is no reason for official scores until you’ve decided to go there. If you lied, your admission is revoked. Seems easy enough.
Sounds like a smart idea to me. And no room for lying on the part of applicants as the report will have to be sent by any student who enrolls in the school and it is safe to assume that anyone who lies about their scores will be rescinded.
Some grad schools my D applied to let students scan in their unofficial college transcript and self-report GRE scores and were required to send official copies only if they enrolled which was a similar idea. Hopefully more schools will adopt this policy.
Without getting into analyzing too deeply the motivations/politics for making such a change, I think this is a very good idea – the hassle/cost of sending test scores to all the schools is one of the things that bothers me most as part of the application process.
One thing I wonder though, will there be a much larger number of revocations than usual because of this, and how will they handle that. Increased usage of the waitlist, perhaps, at least for the first few years, until they get a better idea how often applicants misreport their scores (although likely they already have some data on that). Also, will there be any tolerance for claims of accidentally misentering the scores.
Also, if more schools do this, the SAT and ACT companies won’t like it, and may increase their fees and/or change their policies in response.
So what happens if the applicant says, oops, I made a mistake, or the score is just a few points off, or one of the subsections is off, but the others are right, or the applicant retakes the test after reporting the score falsely and does better and then submits those scores
Is the college going to rescind on every one of these cases??
Also, I guess the college will require the applicant to submit the scores within two weeks of a conditional admit, before the final admit letter is posted. If there is any hanky panky, they never admit, so it doesn’t go against their number.
Also, lets not forget, that with no application fees, no score reporting fees, most applicants will throw a “Hail Mary” pass at Chicago. I assume a lot of applications will flood in from overseas as well. Most of these applications will probably not even be read seriously.
