I do want to give the U of California system credit for going test-blind rather than test optional. I think test-blind is a big mistake for the reasons I have given, but I can respect an Admissions Office committing to a decision, even if it is a bad one, and being up front with applicants about at least a small portion of the process, even if the net effect is to make the process as a whole much more subjective.
As I have said elsewhere on this board, a school can use any admissions metrics it wants to select its students, but it should be up front about the process and then applicants can make their own informed decision about whether a school that chooses its students in that manner is the right place for them.
I believe schools went test optional to manipulate rankings and market perception of the schools, and bait applicants who have no chance of acceptance at a school into thinking they do and sending in an application. If the school thinks that tests are of value in the admissions process, then the school should require them. If the school thinks they are not of value, then the school should not require them.
You are smart enough to know what I am saying. Letâs make it a straightforward hypothetical:
Candidate 1: 3.8 GPA, 1000 SAT
Candidate 2: 3.7 GPA, 1500 SAT
Number of AP and honors, ECs, LORs, the rest of it are all effectively the same, which candidate gets into U of C first?
This is not that complicated. If you really believe that tests are so bad, you should celebrate the outcome of the higher GPA applicant getting in with what is effectively an open admissions college SAT score. If SATs are so bad, then who cares what the score is? If you continue to deflect and reposition the hypothetical, that means that you think there is some value to SATs.
Which is it?
P.S. If the U of C committee that decided to go test-blind did not do an analysis a lot like this one and come to the conclusion that they donât care if the 1000 SAT gets in and the 1500 SAT gets rejected, then every one on that committee should be fired.
The only UC referral program I am aware of is the ELC program. The common understanding is that the UCs are all full up and there arenât open spots at any of them, except possibly Merced, and for Merced, there are already impacted majors. If you are in the top 9% of your class, applying to CS programs and donât get in, you donât automatically have a spot at Merced waiting for you even if you are in the ELC program. I am not saying that applies across all majors, but Merced is getting more competitive every year. It will get more so once the med school comes online.
Not trying to make the thread a race discussion. I will just share the things I hear and read within the Asian community. Just open and honest opinion. Just take it as a data point for a broad discussion.
As you mentioned there are too few spots in top UC schools. Currently, UCB has 31% Asian and UCLA has 26% Asian which is disproportionally high compared to the 15% general population.
People see things like prop 16 and test blind as a way to reduce the Asian percentage at UC.
As you have seen in the Harvard case, itâs perceived there is clearly a disadvantage to being an Asian in personality score. so parents are focused on making up the gap by pushing kids to do better in school and get higher standardized scores.
If the student has a perfect 4.0 UW GPA + ECs + Rigor, it doesnât really matter. He/she will get into top UC. However, those are a small percentage of Asian students. The question is for the student who might be on the borderline. The impression (not sure if itâs correct or not) is that a borderline student would have had a better SAT score that would have put him/her over the line.
As a CA resident, if we decide collectively that we will make the UC population mirror the general population (reduce the Asian percentage), Iâm ok with it. Itâs democracy.
Test scores are, of course, positively correlated with income, but so are all the other criteria, whose correlations with income just arenât as easy to study.
Even you will probably admit that the correlation between test scores and income are far from perfect. Plenty of low SES students achieved high test scores, even though they didnât have the supposedly needed resources to prep for these tests. Over the years (long before Khan Academy), Iâve personally seen lots of students (at least in the hundreds) from humble family background who easily scored in the top percentile without much effort. On the other hand, I havenât seen a single student, who needed a lot of prep and tutoring, became really outstanding in a highly quantitative field.
Add to this the long history of discrimination against Asians (Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment in WWII, media portrayal of Asians as weak/less than, anti-Asian violence, etc.). Moreover, a substantial percentage of Asian students excelling in school are children of first generation, working class immigrants, who toil away in the hopes that America, the land of opportunity, will give their children a fair shot. To see various attempts (in NYC, CA, VA, etc) to take away their hard-won seats at top schools (HS & college) is, to say the least, frustrating.
Obviously if everything is the same except for GPA, the applicant with the higher GPA is more likely to be admitted. However, who is well qualified for or âdeservingâ of admission is far more complex, and this complexity needs to be considered when deciding on a test optional/blind policy.
I discussed this hypothetical in more detail during the first post I saw that you bring it up. The value gained by tests is not from the score itself. College success is not based on rapidly answering relatively simple multiple choice questions at a pace of ~1 question per minute in a high stress situation⊠or it least it shouldnât be. Instead the value gained by the tests more relates to things like the score being correlated with the rigor and quality of HS preparation, and offering some degree of standardization for varying degrees of grading standards at different HSs This type of value overlaps with other criteria used in an non-score holistic system, so the benefit of test scores decreases the more additional criteria you consider, including directly considering rigor of HS courses, rather than looking at things that are correlated with it. Some studies, suggest as the Ithaca one, suggest this additional benefit of scores was near negligible beyond other available non-score criteria⊠particularly the ones correlated with rigor. As such, we generally do not see admits with scores as low as your hypothetical at highly selective test optional colleges. The kids with scores that low generally donât do well on the evaluated non-score criteria, which is more than just GPA.
For example, I mentioned Bowdoin in one of my earlier replies about this hypothetical. Bowdoin is test optional and reports scores of all kids admitted test optional for statistical purposes (or at least they did before COVID). Bowdoinâs reporting suggests 0% of their test optional matriculating class had an SAT score of <= 1000, like your example in 2019 (before COVID, when all kids were reported). Bowdoin doesnât admit <1000 SAT score kids under test optional because <1000 SAT score kids are highly unlikely to have all of the other non-score criteria that Bowdoin considers, which includes, but is not limited to rigor. Iâm sure they do admit plenty of kids who may score 100 or 200 points less than the average for kids with similar non-score application, but your example was a 500 point difference â thatâs not as realistic.
If you do find a rare kid who aces the rest of the holistic non-score application, yet still gets a <=1000 SAT like your hypothetical; I expect there is often a unique reason for it, that does not necessarily mean they are a bad choice for the college. For example, suppose a kid is a slow reader because he learned English as a 2nd language. He took highly rigorous classes and is well qualified academically to be successful at the college, but he does not do well on SAT/ACT tests because he struggles to finish in the time limit. This type of kid is likely to benefit from a test optional admission system. If he had stats like your hypothetical (great transcript, APs, LORs, essays, awards/ECs, personal qualities / character / motivation âŠ), do you think he should be rejected solely based on the lower score?
High schools would be in violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) if they sold student transcripts to colleges, and would risk (among other things) losing federal funding.
Iâm not a lawyer but I donât think theyâd be in violation if they sell the data in bulk (i.e. they tell a college that a group of their students met the collegeâs criteria).
Itâs an interpretation of the actual results of test optional policies â all of the dozens of test optional colleges that report SES stats by submitter/non-submitter report a similar pattern. In contrast, you have provided no evidence for your opinion that the evaluated non-score criteria are more correlated with income, suggesting it is an opinion that appears to conflict with the actual results of test optional policies.
Iâve listed specific correlation numbers in this thread. I also listed specific percentages in the post you replied to. For example, the post mentioned that the Chetty study found 2% of kids scoring 1500+ on the SAT were from bottom quintile family income. 7% of 1500+ SAT kids were from the bottom 2 quintiles. For 1400+ SAT, 3% were from bottom quintile and 9% were from bottom 2 quintiles.
I expect many of those kids attended a highly resourced HS and are not a major academic disadvantage, but nevertheless thatâs a significantly non-zero amount. There are indeed a significant number of lower income kids with higher SAT scores, yet itâs obvious that lower income kids are in the extreme minority of high score kids. Instead the vast majority of high score kids are from top quintile income.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I can certainly under the concern.
This I will never understand. I mean, I understand that itâs sadly a real effect. Just not why. I wonder if it is intertwined with the research that shows LOR descriptors like âhard workingâ have a negative effect on admissions.
The word âexpectâ signifies that is an opinion rather than a certainty. This expectation is based on a number of factors, including the referenced Chetty study finding that a large portion of these rare high scoring, low income kids attended Ivy+ type colleges. High score kids from low income were more likely to attend Ivy+ college than high score kids from middle income. Other studies such as the Avery one found that the low income kids generally donât apply to selective colleges and instead favor local options. It found that the minority who apply of low income, high scoring kids who apply to highly selective colleges like Ivy+ often are among the minority who attend better resourced HS where they are surrounded by a community that encourages students to apply to such colleges. So the combination points to a significant portion of this rare group of low income high scorers attending better resourced HSs. A good example is public magnets, which often have a notable portion low income kids. There are also other more obvious and direct contributing factors to this expectation, such as higher scores being correlated with attending HSs that better prepare for the test.
My observations go back decades, long before the existence of magnet high schools, long before some of these elite colleges started to target low SES students. These high scoring (when higher test scores meant more than they do now) low-SES students came from everywhere, even some of the poorest places on the planet.
UC Merced does not take prospective major into consideration for Frosh admission. UC Merced has an 85% acceptance rate. Many of those 15% (rejected) are UC hopefuls, i.e., hoping to become eligible with senior courses/grades. Some/many of these hopefuls are ultimately rejected due to not meeting minimum requirement, i.e., combination of grades & test scores. (back when the latter were required.)
But note, per the CDS, UCM accepted ~390 students with a sub 3.0 GPA, (so I guess test scores made them eligible?). In any event, not sure Iâd label a so-called research University (currently R2) that accepts sub 3.0 students and has a 85% acceptance rate as âfull upâ.
Merced is not an R1 university, they are currently R2. There are R1 universities that accept many sub 3.0 GPA students and have high acceptance ratesâŠsuch as Kansas, Iowa, Iowa State, Stony Brook, Rutgers, and U Oregon. I expect Merced will ultimately become an R1 university sooner rather than later.
IMO, the fact that other R1s take sub-3 students is immaterial as California has a 3-tier education system and many other states do not. The University of Californiaâs mission is to educate the top 1/8th of high school graduating classes, and its hard for me to see how a 2.7 fits in when the vast majority of those students would be educationally better off in smaller classes at a CSU (or a community college, also with small classes, while improving study skills).