@massmom2018 @doingourbest Submit those scores as long as the ACT 34 section scores are not disparate. A 34 and 1580 are impressive and likely to strengthen your kids’ apps.
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The statistics surprised me (I would have assumed test-taking students would be admitted ED at a higher rate). But since it’s ED, I could explain this by the test-optional kids that were accepted, had some type of exceptional trait that means they would have been accepted regardless of test scores.
As someone else wrote, if you scored well on one of the national competition math exams, it doesn’t really matter how you did on the SAT math portion. If you’re an athletic recruit with decent grades and a good essay, maybe the school doesn’t care about your SAT verbal score. Etc.
But I don’t really know. We’ll only know when the full set of results comes out about admissions… but ED can be explained by them taking people truly exceptional in some area, where test scores would not be critical to them being admitted.
Here’s hoping it helps. My son is applying to highly selective engineering programs and has a perfect math score as part of that 1580. He’d be hard pressed to hold it back.
Plus, he’s proud of his score; he worked for it. To get a 780 on the English section is an achievement for any STEM heavy kid. We are proud of him because he set a goal and worked hard for it.
Good luck. So sad for all this year’s applicants-all the gamesmanship and packaging would not be necessary in a more rational system, but this is what we’ve got. Good luck to them all in what must be a very stressful season.
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@DoingOurBest can you offer a link to this?
Link to stats by previous poster:
College admissions is a zero sum game, with a defined number of admission slots to offer (albeit with some minimal flexibility) and a defined number of applicants. Take Dartmouth’s ED numbers as an example. This year, Dartmouth accepted 566 individuals out of an ED applicant pool of 2,644, which boils down to an acceptance rate of just over 21%. That means for every applicant it accepted, Dartmouth had to reject or defer roughly 4 applicants.
Some number of the 566 applicants that were admitted ED this year who applied TO would not have been admitted if they were required to submit an ACT/SAT score as in years past. What that number is will never be known, but it’s greater than zero. It necessarily follows that some number of individuals who did submit test scores and were rejected (or more likely) deferred this year, would have been admitted but for the new TO policy. Again, we will never know what that number is, but it’s greater than zero.
My own opinion, if you were rejected or deferred from Dartmouth this year notwithstanding your high ACT/SAT score, it is very likely that you would have been deferred or rejected even without the new TO policy. That said, it’s possible that you would have gotten in, and I can understand why an unsuccessful applicant with a high ACT/SAT score might feel an added sting.
One final point that occurred to me as I wrote this post. At elite schools like Dartmouth, a considerable number of applicants admitted ED are recruited athletes. These individuals need good stats, but they are usually well below what an unhooked applicant needs. I wonder if the TO policy allowed coaches to get recruits admitted who, in years past, would fallen short due to a (relatively) low ACT/SAT score.
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Excellent summary!!
Ok. @GoldPenn can you supply some links? Im not finding reports of these figures on Early TO admits.
@lookingforward Jeff Selingo, NYTimes reporter, tweeted those stats on Dec 16.
People do have to remember that colleges are under no obligation to have the same acceptance rates for TO and not-TO, nor do they have to report acceptance stats at that degree of granularity.
Edited to add: Dean of Admissions at Trinity College tweeted today that 91%(!) of early admits were TO
I got the stats for Boston U and Tufts from Jeff Selingo on Twitter. The stats for Middlebury came from the AO during a conversation with my D’s GC. The Middlebury rep told the GC it was deliberate, that they’re trying to accept the same percentage as applied, just as Duke is apparently doing.
All of these colleges promised students wouldn’t be disadvantaged to apply TO and I’m guessing there is some pressure on AOs to prove this is the case. Unfortunately, it could be that kids with scores are at a disadvantage. The only exception I’ve heard is Penn who accepted a larger percentage with scores.
Does anyone know how much of the application surge is due to international students? I understand that much of Amherst College’s increase was due to international applicants. With Amherst and the ivies being the only schools with need-blind aid for internationals, it would be nice to know the numbers. I don’t think U.S. students are competing with international students.
Not all colleges show this pattern for example Penn’s report at Penn accepts 15% of early decision applicants to Class of 2025, a record low | The Daily Pennsylvanian states 38% of applicants did not submit tests scores and 24% of those admitted did not submit tests scores. This implies the admit rate for test optional applicants was substantially lower than test submitter applicants. I’d expect the admit rate to be lower for test optional applicants than test submitter applicants for a variety of reasons, including more likely to be weaker in the evaluated non-stat areas and lower rate of LDC hooks.
Well, this would be one way to tick people off. The SAT was widely available in our state over the span of many months.
There are tons of kids at my son’s high school that just took the required school-day SAT and called it a day. One and done even though there were lots of opportunities. Yup, you guessed it, many of them applied test optional.
My fear is that colleges are going to care a lot about how they are “perceived” as handling the situation.
It’s upsetting to think that submitting a high score can disadvantage a student in any way. That’s just crazy IMO.
I suppose I’m a little salty as my kid spent significant time working through khan academy this summer. He knows many kids that chose, instead, to kick back, relax, and apply TO.
(Obviously I feel different about the kids who studied but couldn’t test due to covid)
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For how many colleges have you seen official publications, rather than twitter feed comments from a 3rd party not affiliated with college or informal conversation? The only college I am aware of that published an official announcement listing percentage applied and admitted with scores is Penn… too small a sample to draw conclusions about trends yet.
I don’t believe this is true. It’s only true if you believe that a kid’s life is pretty much over if he doesn’t get into Dartmouth- and I don’t believe that.
My kid getting into CMU doesn’t erode the value of your kid getting in to JHU, even though a generation ago, JHU was a rung above CMU prestige-wise (I don’t believe that’s the case anymore). Your kid getting in to Cooper Union to study engineering has no bearing on my kid getting in to Northwestern to study history.
Not sure the point your post is trying to make. A kid who doesn’t get in to Dartmouth usually doesn’t end up serving fries at a fast food restaurant-- that kid gets in to some equally fantastic college. Zero sum game would imply that there’s a winner and a loser in the race to get in to Dartmouth-- and sometimes the losers end up MUCH better off in the end.
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I don’t think we’ll see, publicly, such granularities from admission offices at most colleges, unless such details help them illustrate certain points they try to make. They aren’t known for clarity and transparency.
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Had I seen official publications, I obviously would have said so. I haven’t. Therefore, I referenced my sources.
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Somewhat disingenuous to not acknowledge admissions is a zero sum game. It doesn’t matter if the denied applicant was admitted to another fine school, the applicants presumably wanted that specific school, and colleges are not fungible. In financial aid offers alone, for example, there can be wide disparities between offers from highly similar schools.
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“I don’t believe this is true. It’s only true if you believe that a kid’s life is pretty much over if he doesn’t get into Dartmouth- and I don’t believe that.”
Where in my post did I say a kid’s life is over if he/she didn’t get into Dartmouth? Where in my post did I say that a kid getting into CMU erodes the value of another kid getting into JHU? I never said either of those things. I said that within a given school in the ED round* (I used Dartmouth as an example), there are a definite number of admission slots and a definite number of applicants, and that for every kid who gets into Dartmouth ED, four will be rejected or deferred. Do you believe that is true? If not, explain why. Obviously whether your kid got into CMU has nothing to do with another kid’s results as JHU.
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I know from 15 years of sitting outside of classrooms where auditions took place, and from sitting in the auditoriums and hotel ballrooms where competitions took place. My father called my sister a “money player” because when the pressure was on, she came through. My kid is like that too. Usually plays extremely well in auditions and competitions. But I heard other kids who played with my kid in ensembles, who had awful live auditions. I knew they were far better than how they’d performed in the live auditions, but they got nervous when the pressure was on. I saw a conservatory student clutch during a competition and play worse than a middle-schooler. But this year, those kids can comfortably record take after take over a period of six months, and present the best one. And as of the last time I checked (fairly recently), there were NO live auditions planned. It’s either just recorded submissions, or at best live-streamed auditions (which then do add the element of performance anxiety, but have trouble doing justice to accurately transmitting the player’s sound quality).