<p>While there certainly is no harm in applying to a test-optional college – (many great choices) – I think it borders on insane for a student with a cumulative score between 1900-2000 to be fearful of submitting test scores. That is a good SAT score. It is not a great SAT score, but it is good enough score for the vast majority of colleges and universities in this country. </p>
<p>You said your daughter’s combined score is just below 2000. That puts her at 93rd percentile. Scoring better on a test than 93% of other test-takers is simply not a “middling” score. It may very well be in the middle score range of some of the schools you are looking at, but that’s not a bad thing either. If you had the data available to plot out a curve of the test scores for any school, it most likely would form a bell curve with the bulk of admitted students having scores closer to the median than to the extremes - that’s just how statistics usually plays out. </p>
<p>Yes, it might make sense to re-test … but I think that it makes a lot more sense to broaden the college list. Go against type: look for strong colleges that don’t get a lot of applicants from your daughter’s school or from your part of the country. You’re in the Northeast? – look in the South, midwest, west coast. </p>
<p>And- closer to home – consider the women’s colleges. Some of them are test-optional, and some want to see the tests – but all have far more holistic admission standards and are going to make admission decisions based on your daughter’s demonstrated abilities, rather than expecting super high test scores. </p>
<p>My boyfriend in high school (back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth) got bored and intentionally filled out the wrong answer on every item in the NMQST (I think that’s what the PSAT was called back in the day). No wonder my parents didn’t like him! </p>
<p>Forget superscore. Many schools do not take them anyway.</p>
<p>Very common for high GPA students to do poorly on tests. GPA is subject to getting parental help, schmoozing teachers, grade inflation, makeup tests, and many other factors. Some students need to spend a great deal of time studying and thinking through the information to arrive at their conclusions. This works well on homework and papers and in some classes where tests are not on a time limit. College prep exams are under a time crunch and can point out these deficiencies. </p>
<p>If 2000 is close to a real SAT rather than superscore, it is not all that inconsistent with the GPA. We are in a culture that seems to think every kid should get a perfect score or keep going. Tests tend to show which kids are inherently smarter, but not who works harder or who will have a better life. Colleges do not compare a 2000 and a 2100 and simply drop the applicant with the lower score. As long as the applicant meets the threshold the college has set, he or she will be considered based upon other factors.</p>
<p>Whoever it was that said the ACT and SAT are viewed equally by admissions is simply wrong. Every admissions program has their own way of viewing them. They test someone different aspects of intelligence and you can ‘ballpark’ a comparison, but there is no one-to-one comparison of the scores.</p>
<p>Another important point. Some schools don’t even look at the writing score for admissions. It is too subjective and has been shown that it can be manipulated by formulaic writing. Oddly enough the college board’s info suggests that better writing scores are better predictor of success…whatevs</p>
<p>OP - you said for practice tests, your D got 1400+, but 1200 for real test setting. My nephew was like that. He would score 2200 during practice, but below 2000 for real tests. He switched to a different tutor after working with one for 6+ months. His new tutor had him take the whole test in one setting, instead of taking each section at different times. The tutor noticed his scores got worse and worse as time went on. The tutor said maybe my nephew’s focus became compromised as his energy level went down. The tutor suggested they tried few real timed testing scenarios, with eating/drinking energy food during breaks. My nephew did better during those practice runs and they fine tuned it as to when he needed energy boost. He took the SAT for the third time and got above 2200.</p>
<p>When students do practice tests at home, they often do a small section then go get something to eat or get on their computer to chat with friends a bit. They are not getting used to taking a very long test in one setting, which can be a real challenge for some students. D2 is not a morning person, so few weeks before her SAT test, we had her practice taking the test very early in the morning, so she could get used to it. OP - you may want to try to do the same with your D, even if she is going to switch to ACT.</p>
<p>Before you head down the path of the top NESCAC schools, just be aware of what type of student from your school those colleges are taking. From our high school (also NE, affluent, top peer reference group) recruited athletes get priority and only occasionally do they give a slot to anyone else … so go ahead and put those schools on your list, but just be aware of the odds. Top students applying from the NE are a dime a dozen there, and therefore accepted students are picked because they fill a desired niche in the class they are crafting. </p>
<p>Definitely think outside the geographic box. I am a huge fan of the midwestern schools. We looked at these LACs: Carleton, Kenyon, Macalester, Grinnell, Oberlin. All fabulous. </p>
<p>Trying the ACT also seems like a no-brainer. The only factor against it would be whether it adds to your daughter’s sense of stress…</p>
<p>^^good ideas oldfort. I think helping the OP put together a strong application list is more important that whether the OP’s student can gain a couple hundred more points. If the OPs student does it just makes the reaches alittle closer to the bullseye. BTW Michigan is a reach for any out of state kid so if the OPs student wants an out of state big Uni there are other Big 10 schools that would be matches. If the OPs student is gungho about testing more, which I find interesting as most kids simply burn-out and peak-out then trying the ACT, which is shorter and quicker might work. If the student has retained knowledge in the basics - math into Trig and and has quick reading comprehension the ACT might garner a better score although my son tested about the same on SAT and ACT.</p>
<p>" I did tell her to select at least one school that is not popular in our area."</p>
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<p>I’m struck by this statement. I know kids are invested in what other kids think but college is way too important to choose based on a popularity scale (and that includes the prestige popularity scale). </p>
<p>I’m not saying to eliminate the high reaches, just to focus on your daughter and have her focus inward, not outward. What does she want in a college? What does she think may be interesting to study? What part of the county does she find interesting, intriguing? </p>
<p>Then build that list from the bottom up on her answers. That way it really doesn’t matter too much - it’ll still matter- where the schools on her list fall on her school’s popularity scale.</p>
<p>We’re doing that for my daughter, also a junior. D got some negative feedback on her early first choice, based on nonsense (the kids really didn’t know anything about the school). but after a second visit on a cold dreary day after getting lost she realized that the college is indeed a good fit for her. So now her friends accept this is a possible school for her (she still has to get accepted). Interestingly, some students have started to look at this school. She owns her list, not her friends or classmates</p>
<p>I live in Michigan and my kids attend one of the top schools in the state. I can tell you if your D is really interested in UM that they do not prefer the SAT over the ACT. UM is the dream school for a large percentage of the high achieving students in this area and most never take the SAT. ACT seems to be the preferred test in the midwest and only the students who are applying to elite schools out of this area bother to take the SAT. Definitely a good idea to have her try the ACT. Good luck to your D!</p>
<p>Another suggestion…if your daughter is having regular discussions with classmates about college applications and school choices…stop! Really, she is creating HER list of schools, and it should be done with her interests in mind, not in comparison to any of her classmates.</p>
<p>As I said earlier…yes…keep some of those tippy top schools on her list. They are not guaranteed for anyone who applies. She is no different than any other applicant in that regard. Then look for schools with similar personalities that are match and sure thing schools. </p>
<p>Agree with calmom (and I said this upstream), her SAT scores (CR and Math totaling 1290) are not horrible scores…not outstanding but certainly not awful!</p>
<p>OP I understand what you mean about being between a rock and a hard place-that is exactly where my daughter may end up.</p>
<p>I would be thrilled if she could get in the score range of your daughter but I understand the context-you are trying to figure out why she is an outlier on your schools Naviance grids. I don’t think you are saying it is a bad score it just doesn’t make sense to you and I get that. I am baffled by my girls score too so I can only follow this thread looking for tips-the one about taking a full length test is interesting and since she just actually took the online SAT practice test I can look at if she wears down as the test goes on. I did make her take it in the AM at the same time under as close to the conditions as I could get. </p>
<p>My most important factor to help her is to get her to stop equating her test score with her intelligence. There are those who insist it is and GPA doesn’t indicate the true level of intellect. Well my son was an exceptional test scorer and an NMS so I have no axe to grind about these tests-is he smarter than her-things come quickly to him but if I needed something done and my life depended on it she would be the one I would pick. They both went to the same HS-a suburban HS that is perfectly fine but not the kind of pressure cooker it sounds like your daughter goes to-and their grades are very similar and all the state testing over the years is within 10% so her SAT just doesn’t make sense. I just looked into all this after her first PSAT score came back and it didn’t make sense-but she has stayed very consistent with the second PSAT and the SAT she took in January so perhaps it isn’t going to be a test she can use to help her with college admissions. The problem here is there is only one date she will be able to take the ACT which is the September date. I need to have her take as ACT practice exam but the couple of sections she has done indicate to me it’s going to be around the same score.</p>
<p>What to do? We are still working on that but we had a bit of a breakthrough a couple of weeks ago and led her to take the practice SAT and she did very well on the math-the CR a little better and the writing the same. It boosted her enough to want to try do some work on this. I do not expect much is going to get done before she takes the SAT again in June-I hope this summer she can get some good prep work in and boost the scores enough she will have some options she likes when decision time comes. One thing I have done is to relax-in trying to help her I was getting her more upset-so I backed off and told her no matter what I want her to enjoy the rest of her time in HS and I want to enjoy the rest of my time with her still living here-if her score doesn’t go up another point she is going to excel wherever she goes because she is an intelligent young woman with an awful lot going for her-I think that has helped her a lot.</p>
<p>As a parent keep in mind that very few people - parents and students - care much after December of the freshman year of college where the kids are attending. Most are breathing a sigh of relief when the kid shows up at Christmas with decent grades. Way too much attention is focused on WHERE the kids apply and get accepted and too little attention gets paid to picking a college where the student can be successful. The brass ring is NOT the college acceptance, the brass bring is watching the kiddo get the degree at the end of the line. Take heart because I think this preoccupation with the car sticker is limited to particular areas of the country and it sounds like you’ve chosen to live in one of those areas. The best thing you can do is what you are doing…keep her grounded with her eye on the ball. She’s going in with a great GPA and decent test scores and there are lots and lots of opportunities for her. Tell her to enjoy THIS four years and stop trying to live the NEXT four years because she can’t ever have THIS four years back. </p>
<p>One thing you CAN do is talk to her about building the list from the bottom up and start focusing on that. Tell her she can apply to a couple schools she really wants, but that it’s time to start thinking about the “rest of the apps.” </p>
<p>I am blown away by the uniformly thoughtful and detailed comments here! Every single one of you has contributed something valuable to this discussion and will definitely affect the way I help my D approach her applications. Thank you all! I wish I could respond personally to each of you, but please know that all of you have been extremely helpful.</p>
<p>In response to some of the recent comments:
I KNOW that her scores are not terrible. They simply are mis-matched with her GPA/program rigor/class rank in the context of the high school she attends. Therefore, she will be a hard sell to the types of schools that have always been on her radar based on her school performance.</p>
<p>As for practicing with full-length tests, she does that regularly. But that was a good suggestion to make sure she has enough energy snacks during the breaks.</p>
<p>I know I didn’t say anything about ECs because I don’t want to give out too much identifying information. I can say this: she has been on an athletic team for four years, was captain on JV, and holds leadership positions in two clubs. Nothing out-of-the-box. No ‘wow’ factor. No special awards. She doesn’t hold a patent and didn’t cure a disease. Just the same as thousands of applicants.</p>
I haven’t read through the whole thread, but an UW GPA is often a more useful metric than a weighted one since weighting systems vary dramatically by between HSs. If I assume with her large number of AP classes, she has the maximum possible increase from weighting, then that would make her UW GPA 3.6 or 3.7. If so, the GPA and rank would suggest a higher SAT score, but not tremendously higher. For example, the Princeton college planning chart at <a href=“http://phs.princetonk12.org/guidance/Forms/Betterton%20College%20Planning.pdf”>http://phs.princetonk12.org/guidance/Forms/Betterton%20College%20Planning.pdf</a> suggests a system of choosing match colleges by rating both academic and non-academic activities, then summing the two values. Under this system, the GPA and class rank would be rated as a ~6 out of 8, and an SAT of slightly under 2000 would be a ~5 out of 8. In reality, colleges consider things like how harshly/easily the HS grades, what classes were taken, which classes had the lower/higher grades, and other factors distort such as simplistic system; but the point is the GPA and SAT do not appear to be dramatically inconsistent with each other.</p>
<p>Different colleges emphasize test scores to different degrees. Some selective colleges appear to be quite focused on scores and rarely except even 4.0 UW students with lower scores. For example, among Parchment members over the past 3 years who had a 3.95+ UW while taking several AP classes, at Vanderbilt the acceptance rate for 2350+ applicants was 97%. The acceptance rate steadily dropped off as the SAT score decreased, until reaching a 0% acceptance rate for scores of under 2000. Nearly all top stat applicants were accepted, and none of the 4.0/2000 applicants were admitted. More holistic focused colleges showed a very different pattern. As an example, with this same 3.95+ group with several AP group, Harvard applicants with a 2350+ had a 34% acceptance rate. That’s a lot better than their overall acceptance rate, but top stats alone is clearly not enough to get accepted at Harvard. The admit rate only decreased by small amounts at most lower test scores. Members with a ~2000 SAT and 3.95+ UW + several APs had a 25%.admit rate. Harvard has a reputation for being more selective than Vanderbilt, yet this mismatched 3.95/2000 group had a tremendously higher admit rate at Harvard than at Vanderbilt. </p>
<p>You may wonder why Harvard has such high 25th and 75th test scores, if they are admitting top GPA students with mismatched test scores, with strong influence from on other holistic criteria on their application. The admit rates are not inconsistent with the reported 25th and 75th percentile scores due to a combination of self selection and test scores being correlated with other criteria of the application. If they ignored test scores completely and only admitted based on GPA, ECs, essays, LORs, personal factors, etc then the test scores would remain quite high because applicants who are stellar in the other areas tend to also have excellent test scores This difference between correlation and causation can make it difficult to estimate chances of admission by looking at how your test scores compare to the reported 25th and 75th percentile scores, particularly at colleges that have highly holistic admissions policies.</p>
<p>Answering the OPs question, I’d suggest applying to a variety of schools, including a safety. I wouldn’t dismiss a holistic selective college, if test scores are the only factor that is lacking in the application, but I also wouldn’t expect a high chance of admission. You might try reviewing admissions decisions for similar applicants in Naviance and Parchment (if they exist) or applying to some schools via non-binding EA to get a sense for admissions decisions. When I applied to colleges, several years ago, my stats had a lot of inconsistencies and mismatches between different areas. Some areas were better than the vast majority of applicants at the most selective colleges, and other areas were among the bottom few percent at those colleges. For example, I had a 3.4/3.5 UW HS GPA and was not in the top 10% of my HS class, but I had a 4.0 UW GPA in the many university classes I had taken out of HS, which were at a higher level than offered at my HS and a LOR talking excelling in such a class. I had a 800 math and math SAT II, but only a 500 verbal. I applied to a highly selective college that was my 5th highest choice EA and got in, so I only needed to apply to the 4 colleges I’d choose over that college in RD. I ended being accepted to all but 1, including being accepted unhooked to Stanford, MIT, and ivies even though my combined SAT was in the bottom 25% at all of them (I am basing range on eng. school for Cornell, rather than overall class).</p>
<p>One possible reason for your D to feel your faith in her is lacking when you bring up schools like Binghamton on top of the elite school or bust mentality is the likely mentality among many classmates in some highly competitive high schools that if one’s GPA is higher than one’s SAT, then she would be considered at best “a hard worker”…a term which is meant as a backhanded compliment implying the giver’s perception of her lack of commensurate innate intelligence. </p>
<p>You may want to gently probe to see if she’s been receiving these comments from classmates or implications of such directed toward other classmates in similar situations. If she has, she may need reassuring support from you to counteract such comments/atmosphere. </p>
<p>I speak as someone who attended a public magnet where such implied or directed comments were commonplace among top students and sometimes, even from teachers who were themselves graduates from elite colleges/graduate programs. </p>
Not necessarily. If those top schools ONLY looked at GPA + test scores… that would be true. But they are looking at other factors: essays, recs, life-activities (music, athletics, sustained commitment to particular EC’s, etc.)</p>
<p>The problem is that the schools at the high end like Penn & Columbia are lottery schools anyway… Even if your daughter had a score of 2390… she could apply to them all and be turned down. So either way, you need to find match-level schools with reasonable admission rates that your daughter would be happy to attend-- in addition to those all important safeties. </p>
<p>I’m also not sure that there is such a “mis-match.” I personally believe that a student whose scores fall significanlly lower (such as 80th percentile range) should be able to perform well in most university settings. Non-testable skills like internal discipline are much more important, both in school and in later years on the job. CC’ers who know about my Barnard-grad daughter’s SAT scores sometimes assume that she the hard-working, plodding type. Nothing could be farther from the truth – she is fun-loving and spends time socializing with friends, watching movies,-- but she is the most efficient and well organized person I have ever met. Somehow she didn’t inherit the procrastination gene that the rest of our family seems to have. She keeps on top of her school assignments – does things right away, and long-term projects and papers are completed well ahead of schedule. If she blocks out 2 hours of time to study, starting at 8pm – then at 8pm on the dot she hits the books. </p>
<p>So the point is: your daughter’s test scores may simply be a reflection that her talent does not lie in answering ambiguous multiple choice questions over a sustained 3 hour period. She might never get better at it. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with her ability to perform well in an academic environment. </p>
<p>My own daughter is very smart – and she works smart. The whole standardized test thing doesn’t really fit within that. It doesn’t mean that there was some sort of mismatch between daughter’s intellect and her GPA – it’s just a mismatch between daughter’s intellect and capacity and the design of a test that bears no relationship whatsoever to anything else she will ever need to do in life. </p>
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<p>Neither do the majority of the kids who get accepted to the elites. Some do, but for most it’s more a matter of presentation and passion or commitment than an objective “wow” factor. By presentation I mean that the college app is not the time to take an “aw shucks, it’s nothing special” attitude - its the time to tease out the special qualities and make sure they get mentioned in a L.O.R. or highlighted in an essay. It may be a subjective quality or a one-time incident that is not the sort of thing that wins awards but is the sort of thing that gains the attention and respect of others. Don’t discount the value of your daughter’s “ordinary” life.</p>
<p>But again: I don’t think your d. should be aiming for those lottery schools. I think her college search should be more efficient. I like Data10’s approach of applying to choice #5 EA, thereby narrowing things down to only 4 more apps once he was accepted. Focus on the schools were your daughter can be reasonably sure of acceptance - and you might have a very relaxed senior year and be very happy with outcomes. </p>
<p>Brantly, do not discount or underestimate your D’s ability to evolve and mature. Last spring at the end of my D’s Jr. year all the schools she wanted to apply to were either Ivy’s, elite LACs or top research universities. She would dismiss all other suggested schools as inferior or lacking in some way. She often asked me if I thought she could be accepted to “X” elite school. And I always said that she could, but there would likely be an additional 6-8 students who were equally qualified applying for each 1 spot. I had several conversations with her about the idea of academic and financial reaches and insisted that she also apply to some schools that were safeties/ matches. I insisted she have at least 1 school on her list that was an academic and financial safety and that she would be happy to go to. Early in the summer she identified a few schools that we visited over the summer and she liked one a lot and fell in love with a small midwest LAC. She also pared down her list considerably. She had 3 acceptances before xmas that were all affordable for us and got a great merit scholarship to the midwest LAC. We visited in February and she accepted admission before she even found out if she was admitted to the one elite LAC and one ivy that she ended up applying to. She is super excited, the school is a great fit for her and everyone who really knows her is excited and happy for her that she has found a school where she will be able to pursue all her many interests. I agree with many of the above posters- let your daughter know that you will support her applying to some elite schools, but help her identify some reaches and safeties to add to her list. Best of luck!</p>