UChicago was actually ranked 4th in 2008, 2012, and 2014 and mostly 4th/5th in the last decade. Overall, what we saw is going from 4/5 to 3 this year - not a significant move in my view.
The College has been hot; I completely agree. But the OP seemed to be referring the “meteoric rise” pretty broadly in the original post and more explicitly in post #2.
That’s why I questioned the narrative and for that, all of you started attacking the messenger and NU. You felt the need to say NU is “no Chicago” with “no global recognition” and is “average” and “ok at times”. The vicious responses were surprising.
You accused me of turning this into NU vs UChicago yet you were the ones who kept trashing NU in multiple threads and kept asking how NU was ranked. I brought up NU to show the comparison seems less lopsided than 10 years ago to support my point that the meteoric rise seems to be limited to just the College. I was implying Chicago is still ahead overall by a comfortable margin.
If you mention graduate schools, I just think you should look at the graduate programs holistically, instead of cherry picking only the couple that rose (a little) in ranking. That’s not informative and is probably misleading to others given the thread’s title.
NU is great also, just different. I don’t care if someone else comes into the thread. This isn’t gang turf.
Please stop with the snarky comments toward other schools and the fine distinctions of a useless ranking of specific graduate programs made by a defunct magazine that does nothing but issue seemingly-precise rankings on things that can’t possibly be ranked that precisely.
In short, please stop making us look like a bunch of insecure wannabees. I went to the U of C and my daughter is going to the U of C and it is a great place and the College really is on a roll, but it doesn’t become any greater by obsessing over these details or trying to pull other schools down. We have posters on this website who do that all the time for THEIR schools, and we all roll our eyes when we see their posts. Let’s not have people rolling their eyes at us too.
@ThankYouforHelp As the OP, I can tell you that our cherished NU visitor did get this thread off track. That defunct magazine – whether you like it or not – is tremendously influential and to such an extent that major policy decisions of schools are driven by its rankings and college application strategy by both college counselors and students are influenced by it as well. Rankings are a societal affliction and rankings have now proliferated. The market speaks.
Sorry if this has already been discussed since Hebegebe’s comment about SAT scores this year (#274) and @exacademic’s response about the difficulty of comparison.
Attended the local admitted student reception recently and Jim Nondorf definitely said that average SAT was 1499. As he didn’t specify whether that was in terms of the “old” or “new” test we can’t know for sure which metric he was using. However, after reading the comment about average SAT’s being 1520 this year, it appears he must have been referring to an “old score” equivalent, since the College Board’s concordance tables show that an “old” score of about 1490-1500 concords to a “new score” of 1520-1530. That differential reflects the fact that the new test has a different distribution with a notable shift to the right on the 1600-scale (they equate right at about 1600).
The thing to note is that 1499 (old) is about where the middle of the mid-range was last year. There are reports coming in (and I heard this last night as well!) that “scores have increased”. If the mean is 1499 on an “old score” basis, that means they have not.
@JBStillFlying ^ There is a thread devoted to comparing old and new SAT scores. “Old SAT scores compared to redesigned SAT scores.” The conclusion seems to be that once you get much higher than 1400 the new SAT scores are very hard to achieve. Most top schools are reporting higher old SAT median scores than new SAT ones. If the 1499 is the new SAT median, then that is incredibly impressive. Many schools have de facto concorded new SAT 1480 to ACT 34.
We all get infatuated with the word “rankings” and its negative or positive connotation, but this is the way I look at it. When looking at colleges, I look at the “rankings” for what they represent. Someone has gone out and done a lot of research on institutions and then according to a set of criteria, ranked them. I look at what criteria they used and determine if that criteria is useful to me. Most find USNWR criteria useful, as I do, so now I don’t have to go out and research 10-20 Universities based on that criteria, the work has been done for me and makes a great starting point for my search. After that I add my own criteria and/or review other “rankings” (as I don’t like to repeat work someone else has done) to narrow the search to 8-10 colleges to apply to.
I will add one point, as those who just apply to colleges based on a single ranking (or single criteria for that matter) without doing some of there own research are bound to miss colleges that would have been a great fit for them. This seems to happen quite frequently.
Interesting, @LadyMeowMeow thank you for sharing that!. Hopefully UChicago will report both sets of scores like other schools have done.
Avg. ACT reported upthread is 33 (which seems to be consistent with the 32-35 midrange last year) so no change there. The problems with the new test surely make comparisons difficult; however, if there is no inflation between old and new, which is what a quick perusal of that thread seemed to be saying (maybe even a slight decline?), then 1499 this year (whether that’s an old score or a new score) is consistent with last year’s mid-range of 1460 - 1600. Nitpicking a bit, maybe last year’s midpoint was 1530(?) (midpoint of that mid-range). This year’s 1499 was lower, but then the top schools are reporting lower so that’s not a big deal. But definitely not a score-increase any way you look at it (esp. given that avg. ACT didn’t really increase). Unless I’m missing something? Nondorf didn’t elaborate.
My own kid scored a 34 on the ACT and a 1500 on the new SAT. Based on what you are saying I’d call those scores about equal. She’s an incredibly consistent tester so I’d be inclined to agree with you, based on our one data point. We had been worried about the concordance to a slightly lower score.
@CU123 - great explanation of how to use the ranking system properly. Unfortunately, like many schools that “teach to the test” (in order to boost standardized scores), many colleges and uni’s actually “play to the rankings”. They will make specific changes because they know how that will move them up. Some even fudge it a bit (and shame on them). Just another reason not to rely on them too much. As a general guideline they can be very useful. But as we’ve seen over the past several years, these rankings are beginning to converge to the point where many are simply tied with one another. That shouldn’t have been a surprising prediction but it’s an unfortunately occurrence because then the rankings lose their informative value.
It’s not really meaningful unless/until you see a comparison chart listing various schools’ medians (or averages) this year. Is UChicago still second only to CalTech? Has the gap between Chicago and HYPS widened or narrowed?
Direct comparisons between this year’s scores and last year’s are going to be messed up/manipulable because you’ll have a mix of old and new scores in this year’s class and because, IIRC, the concordance came out before the new test was in widespread use (so it was based on smaller-scale experimentation rather than an assessment of percentiles empirically generated by multiple administrations of the test involving the whole pool of SAT-takers). Also, Chicago’s previous mode of reporting (CR+M) gives you multiple conversion options with somewhat differing results (20 point range in my test example). And this year’s numbers seem to have been expressed as averages whereas previous data I’ve seen claimed to represent medians. (Sourcing is elusive enough that I can’t be sure if metrics actually changed or if someone misspoke or misheard). Basically, you need more and better and published data to assess what’s going on.
Looking forward, this year’s class may well have lower median SATs compared to 3-4 years from now because prep materials will be better targeted once the companies that provide them have more experience with the new test. And that won’t mean the class of 2021 is less intelligent than 2024 or 2025. Of course, College Board could decide to tweak next year’s test once it sees how this year’s worked out compared to what they anticipated/intended. It’s all kind of a black box.
My other, broader point, was that given where UChicago’s scores were already at, these kinds of comparisons are pretty pointless since SATs weren’t designed to make distinctions among kids at the upper end of the curve: the questions aren’t hard enough questions, there aren’t enough hard questions, and the multiple choice questions in the reading section tend to handicap kids who see nuance/ambiguity.
So bottom line is SATs are useful for a gross sort of applicants and for a reality check wrt what GPAs mean at high schools that AOs don’t have much experience with. But, for highly selective colleges, they aren’t a useful way of identifying the smartest/most capable applicants, which is one reason why kids with perfect scores are routinely turned down by such schools even as they admit other kids with slightly lower scores on the strength of their academic performance. There are enough kids with super high scores that any highly selective school (and some not-so-selective schools that are willing to spend serious money to attract such kids) can improve their stats at will by abandoning the more nuanced assessments they are making now. Just admit the highest scorers. In that sense, it’s like yield. You can always improve yield by taking more kids ED (or off the waitlist). Policy changes in the admissions process can “improve” the numbers without improving the class/school.
Agreed on all fronts, @exacademic. One additional point would be that as the new test’s scales are more like the ACT and they don’t employ the use of decimals, a lot of information is lost converting old (200-800 scale) to new (10-40 scale).
My daughter took the inaugural test which, from what I heard, had a nicer curve than subsequent tests. However, all of this is hearsay.
As are the reports back from these admissions events. However, I do know what Nondorf said (because I was waiting to hear these numbers) so that, at least, is good data (in my view, anyway ). He said scores increased and that this year’s average SAT is 1499. While we don’t know exactly what that means, we can use a variety of general inputs - concordance tables, crowd-sourced data, and reports from other posters who attended other UChicago admissions events, for instance - to figure out that those two bits of shared news are inconsistent with one another. Also, it defies common sense. How can scores increase notably in one year (enough for it to warrant mention as a selling point) when they are already pretty high to begin with?
Just think of the address to admitted students as a genre in which the speaker extols the superiority of this class to those who came before. Kind of a reverse-jeremiad. It’s a ritual rather than a news source.
Of course, in that case, they shouldn’t clutter it up with numbers, LOL! That just breeds skepticism in the literal-minded among us.
Maybe I’m too naive. These guys know how to lie with stats that are technically accurate. Just trying to figure out how 1499 represents an increase in scores. Usually I can figure out how they did their numerical backflips but this one is a bit confusing. Maybe he was tired and meant 1599! LOL.
@JBStillFlying Maybe Nondorf got his data wrong. Maybe he knew the class stats were better but forgot the actual number so just pulled one out from memory that seemed reasonable. How was he to know that there was a detective in the crowd?
