Interesting conjectures, though probably untrue due to the fact that these high SATs at UChicago predated the ED thing. It was already second only to CalTech when it was still only doing EA/RD.
@Fstratford - we don’t know whether it’s untrue now, or still true. All we know, so far, is that UChicago was high SAT’s as of last year’s entering class (Class of 2020) and that they admitted a huge proportion of ED/EDII’s for the Class of 2021. While that suggests they, in fact, DIDN’T compromise anything (else why would they have admitted so many?), we won’t know one way or the other till 3rd week. Which can’t come soon enough.
One thing to keep in mind, however: UChicago plays “best-ball” on the stats reporting thing - ie, they superscore both SAT AND ACT. It’s quite possible to “maintain stats” if, for instance, this year’s class of ED-accepteds were the type to take and retake the standardized test and, over time, produce very high superscores. Not sure what Cal Tech reports but I suspect those kids don’t have to do that.
High stats kids do not mean kids who would probably be admitted anyway. Most high stats kids are rejected from places like HYPSM and UChicago. To put this another way, high stats are a low bar. The challenge for admissions officers at schools like these has been to figure out which kids among those with high stats are exceptionally talented, driven, thoughtful, brilliant, and/or creative. My take previously, when the essays seemed to have played a bigger role in UChicago’s admissions, was that the school’s high stats followed naturally rather than were the principle of selection. IME, kids who can write something insightful or thought-provoking are typically kids who can also get high scores on standardized tests. The converse just isn’t true.
But if you’re primarily interested in yield, revenue, or gaming the rankings then ED is an easy and reliable if you already attract the right applicant pool. As I’ve said before, HYPS could all have 95%+ yield rates and classes filled with valedictorians with perfect or near perfect standardized test scores if they took this approach.
Most colleges – maybe, at this point, all of them – superscore everything. It makes applicants more comfortable, and it lets them use the superscored stats for reporting purposes. Win-win.
Chicago had very high test scores back when it was admitting 35% of applicants from a pool of 8,000 applicants. No one was applying to Chicago back then because it seemed like a fun place to pick up a prestigious credential. By and large the people who were applying were people who wanted to attend a demanding college where the focus was always on academics. I think that’s still true. Also, the admissions department was not admitting kids who looked like they weren’t going to be able to handle Chicago’s academics. That’s not to say test scores were ever the be-all and end-all of that analysis, but the kids whose records made them look like Chicago students also tended to have very high test scores. I think that’s still true as well.
@exacademic - completely agree that getting in ED with high stats doesn’t mean you would have been admitted anyway under the old system. We’ve known a few 35 ACT’s who were not admitted (male too and the admit rate is higher for them . . .). The essays are huge. What we are hearing from others in UChicago (who are obviously hearing it from the mucky-mucks including Nondorf) leads us to believe that a whole bunch of kids - A critical mass? All of them? not sure - who applied EDI and possibly EDII would have been admitted as EA’s the prior year. And yes, they had comparable stats. In other words, UChicago didn’t sacrifice stats for ED. That’s our takeaway but we are de-coding cryptic statements that could mean something completely different.
It’s funny when you talk to other parents as I did while waiting in line or at meet and greets, etc. The game “Telephone” comes to mind. I heard that this is the brightest, most diverse (across all spectrums) class in the history of the world. Nondorf seemed to suggest that at Opening Convocation. But he actually says the same thing every year so nothing can be gleaned from that.
@JHS - I was figuring that most elites superscore the SAT. Didn’t realize they superscore the ACT as well. UChicago gets a fair number of ACT’s given its location. Perhaps they feel that superscoring would be applied disparately if limited just to SAT.
Another factor to bear in mind: the lack of a D1 sports program at UChicago, which means that they don’t admit nearly the number of low-stats revenue sports athletes admitted to peer schools. UChicago doesn’t release a Common Data Set that you could use to analyze this, but if you compare published information from HYPS you can see the kind of “stats tax” this can impose.
Because S for decades has had the best overall athletic program in the country, there seem to be significant allowances made for athletes with regard to standardized testing. Between about 2.75% and 5.73% of students of students enrolled at S who took the SAT have a score of 599 or below on at least one section, and 13.48% scored 29 or below on the ACT composite (including 1.12% who scored between 18 and 23). At H, for example, those numbers are 0.99% and 3.68% for the SAT and 9.98% for the ACT, with no one below 24. At Y, it’s 2.00% and 2.00% for the SAT (they use different bands for the ACT). At P, the numbers are 1.58% and 3.27% for the SAT and 7.94% for the ACT, again with no one below 24. It seems likely that there are a lot more athletes in the lower reaches at S (because they’re not bound by the same Academic Index requirements for athletes as the Ivies). Put another way, there are 50-100 kids per class at S who would be excluded from HYP on the basis of test scores alone.
Given that HYP field 30-40 D1 sports teams each (some of which compete for national championships, go to the NCAAs, etc.), compared to UChicago’s 18 D3 teams, I can only think that there would be a similar, proportional difference between them and UChicago in this area which would reduce the average stats of the former relative to the latter.
most all schools superscore now. is there that big a difference in stats between non-FBS D1 ivy vs U chicago… probably not. S is FBS D1 which is a whole different ball of wax (larger allowances for admission stats).
valid points but it’s still impressive that Chicago is able to get a high stats class with a class size much larger than Yale and Princeton.
Before getting too impressed with the strength of the class, realize that there has been significant inflation in the number of high test scorers. The following table summarizes the number ACT test scores above 30 in 2012 and 2016, their percent of the total number of test takers and the relative change for each score.
Score____2012% of Total2016% of TotalRelative Change in % of Total
36_______7810.05%2,2350.11%128.08%
354,4570.27%10,9930.53%96.58%
349,604 0.58%18,7450.90%55.56%
33__14,864 0.89%25,0311.20%34.72%
32__21,438 1.29%31,1441.49%15.78%
3128,154 1.69%37,2431.78%_5.43%
3036,675 2.20%45,9142.20%_-0.22%
30+115,973 _6.96%171,305__8.20%_______17.73%
Given the test score inflation, any competitive university would that has not seen an increase in average ACT scores during this time period has other priorities in admissions or has decline compared to their peers.
Zinhead without examining the size of total admitted classes over time, isn’t it possible that the opposite of what you are saying is true? That is, it has become more difficult for the higher average score universities to maintain the high average scores?
ACT scores have gone up… so what? doesn’t change the fact that Chicago has higher test scores than any ivy with a class size demonstrably larger than Yale and Princeton.
@sbballer “ACT scores have gone up… so what? doesn’t change the fact that Chicago has higher test scores than any ivy with a class size demonstrably larger than Yale and Princeton.”
Chicago has high test scores, but it appears to sacrifice avg. gpa and then decline to disclose its avg. GPA. The Ivies are putting more weight on GPA and not so much weight on test scores.
The key to the success of this strategy is that it gives them good pr, and the only somewhat similar school doing it seems to be Washington U in STL. Good job!
“The following table summarizes the number ACT test scores above 30 in 2012 and 2016, their percent of the total number of test takers and the relative change for each score. . . Given the test score inflation, any competitive university would that has not seen an increase in average ACT scores during this time period has other priorities in admissions or has decline compared to their peers.”
This doesn’t mean that ACT scores have gone up - but it does mean that more kids have been taking the ACT.
@Zinhead is the ACT inflation due to superscoring now vs not superscoring in 2012?
Both reasons come into play. In 2012, there were 115,973 test takers who scored a 30 or more. In 2016, there were 171,305.
In 2012, students who scored a 36 made up 0.05% of the total number of test takers. In 2016, this has risen to 0.11% in 2016. Without considering the increased number of test takers, the percentage of those scoring a 36 has more than doubled.
@suzyQ7 -
These figures come from the ACT and are raw data from the profile reports so they are not superscored.
Class sizes have increased minimally during this time period. Since the total number of students who scored more than a 30 went from 115,973 to 171,305, there is a much larger pool of high score applicants for colleges to draw from than there are new slots.
If you can’t compete head to head for recruits, having a differential strategy for recruiting is a good tactic.
Son applied to U Chicago. Great school, but he has virtually no chance of getting in. High reach.
whether or not Chicago puts more weight on SAT/GPA vs an ivy is conjecture.
still doesn’t change the fact that Chicago has higher test scores than any ivy with a freshman class size demonstrably larger than Yale and Princeton. that’s impressive.
Your post supports my previous point about cherrypicking, @Zinhead. Per your table, about 32,000 kids had an ACT of 34 or better in 2016. According to the College Board (https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/2017-total-group-sat-suite-assessments-annual-report.pdf), about 85,000 students scored 1400 or above on the SAT last year. How many of those 117,000 students applied to UChicago? Let’s guess roughly one out of 20, or 6,000.
As shown in the thread I cited earlier, calculations based on statements by UChicago admissions officers suggest UChicago had about 28,000 applicants last year, of whom about 13,000 applied early and about 1,200 were admitted early. If we assume the roughly 6,000 high-scoring applicants applied early in the same proportion as the overall applicant pool, then UChicago had about 2,800 early applicants with better than a 34 ACT or a 1400 SAT.
Therefore, assuming all the above is accurate, UChicago filled something like two-thirds of its class with early applicants (most of them EDI/II) and the early applicant pool contained enough high-stats candidates to fill the entire class almost twice over. Add to that the use of “EDIII”, in which the school extended offers to candidates on the basis that those offers would be accepted, and I think it’s clear that UChicago was able to shape its class with a high degree of precision and skew it to higher-stats applicants without compromising yield. This simply isn’t possible for schools that don’t have ED and fill smaller proportions of their classes from the EA pool.
A couple of things to remember in discussions like this:
The ACT and SAT data are reported based on single tests, but almost all the colleges report their data based on superscoring. So for college purposes, the number of people with 1400 is a lot larger than it is in the ETS data.
Also, there is considerable overlap between ACT takers and SAT takers, but also considerable non-overlap.
And candidates often submit only their better score to the school, and the school will only use that score in its figures. If a college admits one kid with 1500 SATs (and an unsubmitted 31 ACT) and another kid with a 35 ACT (and unsubmitted 1400 SATs), it will look like the collegte admitted only students with ultra-high test scores. Which will be only sort of true.
Off topic as always, managed to get into Hyde Park this past weekend and take my boy and his suite mates out for dinner. First observation : hats off to the housing team as these boys act like they’ve known each other since childhood and not just a few weeks.
Second observation : UChicago was first choice ED for one, EDII for another and two chose over admits at MIT, Harvard, Stanford and other top tier schools through RD. Their decisions were based on specific departments, professors and school culture.
Incredibly impressive kids and for me personally, the UChicago experience keeps getting better and better.
@fbsdreams I totally agree with you. My daughter is extremely happy there! She loves her classes and teachers, and she has met incredibly smart and nice kids. The housing system is unbelievable; those kids felt at home from day one.