I suspect that @ucbalumnus suggested Amherst and Brown because they have open curricula. I knew that my humanities-focused future Eph must have really fallen for Williams because she was willing to face a quantitative course requirement.
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Got it. I guess I just donât think any of the gen ed requirements cited by @ucbalumnus as being all that onerous. They certainly werenât at Wesleyan when my friend would have been applying.
Yeah, it wasnât about general education requirements. Thatâs a red herring. Itâs about what my friend and I observed during our time at very different institutions. He was happy to be able to escape a lot of courses that required highly subjective interpretations of subject matter and lengthy final papers. In my judgment he would have been a very unhappy fish-out-of-water among a student body such as the top NESCACs where most of the student body thrived in that sort of environment. There is no statistic you can point to that would invalidate that admittedly subjective judgment. 
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Inside higher ed published an article/data on the sheer volume of CAâs population of college students. There were almost 120 colleges outside the state of CA that had >10% of their 2018 freshman classes from CA. I have to think admissions officers around the country know it was virtually impossible for students in SoCal to test after March unless their schools offered testing just for their owns students. And itâs not like heading to another state to test elsewhere is like traveling between small states in the midlantic/NE. D had a friend who did travel out of state for a testâŠclosest available spot she could get this Fall was in Idaho, 14 hour drive away, outside the realm of possibility for most families.
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Except that most school districts DID offer in-school SAT or ACT, on a school day, this fall. Most students DID finally have the opportunity to take a standardized test, with results back before early decision application deadlines. The problem is that there was a lot of uncertainty about it, in the spring and summer, and students certainly did not have the chance to take the test over and over and over again - which is really not how it was intended to be taken. But we have to remember that these decisions were made last spring, when we really didnât know how contagious or widespread the virus was. Of course, even once we DID know, nearly half the country decided not to utilize that knowledge, as a political statement. In any event, the colleges had to make the decision to go test optional. In my opinion, under the circumstances, they should have gone test blind. Itâs totally absurd to divide the applicant pool into those who submitted tests, and those who didnât, and then allot a certain number of seats to each subsection, proportionally, so that theyâd be pitting test-submitters against other test-submitters, and non-submitters against non-submitters. What a yearâŠ
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Not in NJ, most schools were closed to anything aside from their learning cohort. Sports were unable to use locker rooms, weight room etc⊠school was locked down after 2 PM
We donât know whoâs dividing scores vs no scores for reviewing. Frankly, the ink is still wet, so to say, on any Early notices that have gone out. Too soon to be judging. Or assuming.
âmost school districts DID offer in-school SAT or ACT, on a school day, this fall.â Where is this?
The fact that so many kids, across the country, had trouble scheduling- or risks associated with taking the tests- is a large part of the decision to go TO.
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Do you have a source for this? I donât think âmostâ is even true in Illinois, where the state sponsored school day SAT is required for 2021s to graduate. Many schools are fully remote and have not yet offered an in-school test to their students, nor are they hosting the normal weekend tests.
What school(s) are reading apps this way? Source?
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In Northern California, most schools have not been opened since March, including Lowell High School, top public school in the nation and top 5 in CA, so I think your broad statement is false.
Private schools have been on hybrid schedules here but trust me, none have offered to host SAT/ACT in NorCal.
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My kidâs school district also requires SAT for graduation, and the state sponsors a school-day SAT. But this year that sitting was cancelled, along with 3 other test dates my son registered for. The state even waived the graduation requirement because so many students were unable to test.
By the time our district scheduled another school-day SAT, it was so late that results would NOT have been returned before the ED deadline. So itâs not like students could use the info to change decisions about where to apply.
Some students who were really intent on a high score that could help them get into a reach decided to go for it anyway. I know one who did, and he got in. But plenty did not take the test, and the few whose results Iâm aware of also got in to their first choice schools.
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I live in/around Silicon Valley. From March thru October, there were no tests given from Mendocino down to SLO. We were willing to drive almost anywhere.
D21 had tests scheduled for March, May, June, August and October. We had tests scheduled in various locations in NorCal.
We also scheduled a November test, which did take place. But the school finally had a school test day on 10/14 (I think), which D21 took, got the results on 11/4 and she was one and done.
So we skipped November test, but Novemberâs test did happen. I could have missed a location somewhere up here, but I was on that website a lot. 
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Our school district did not have have any testing onsite at all (small but very highly regarded district) - and neither did most of the HSâs in the large school districts surrounding us. Private schools, yes, several did but only for their own students. School day? We havenât been in school in person since last MarchâŠ
What is your basis for saying that? No schools have been open in my area since March. My D21âs senior year will be entirely online, as the process for eventually returning students to school begins with the youngest kids. She had 5 SATs cancelled this spring and summer and none were even available for registration this fall. Also, no schools in this region have ever given in-school SATs.
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Nope, in our area there were kids at many large public schools who signed up for 5-8 SATs and got to take zero. There were other kids at private schools whose schools closed to all but students ( no outsiders) and some kids just got a couple of bad dates far apart so missed the testing twice.
Every state is so different. There is zero basis for thinking most students had access to standardized testing this year.
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Earlier in this thread, there are links to multiple reports for enrollment changes following going test optional at a wide variety of different colleges, including one report describing 21 different colleges. At every one of the dozens of colleges that have been referenced, there was at least some degree of increase in metrics of % claiming FA and/or percent lower income. Itâs not just the policy/goals of the schools and/or reasons for going test optional or FA policies of the particular school, as those vary from school to school. Instead it seems to relate to the act of going test optional itself, which seems reasonable considering that lower income kids are overrperesnted among those with lower test scores than would be expected from the rest of the app, who are expected to benefit most from going test optional.
At Trinity they actually did not have an increase in total number of applicants upon going test optional. They did have increases in minority enrollment, although not dramatic enough changes to suggest that URMs are a primary targets of the test optional policy, such as admitting URMs test optional, but not ORMs. Specific numbers are below:
3 years before test optional â 7500 to 7700 applicants, 17-21% minority
3 years after test optional â 6100 to 7600 applicants, 19-24% minority
most recent 3 years â ~6100 applicants, 21-24% minority
Another way of avoiding Gen Ed requirements may be a college that gives credits for your AP courses. My older son only had to take two or three courses at Carnegie Mellon that involved any writing and one was a writing course all CS majors had to take. Meanwhile my kid at Tufts was forced to take a bunch of courses outside the area of his major because Tufts only gave credit for five APs no matter how many you took.
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So does anybody here think that if 50% of applicants are test optional then 50% of accepted students should be test optional too??
That, to me, is the biggest potential travesty here. That philosophy necessitates TO kids competing against TO kids; and test kids competing against test kids.
There is no way thatâs fair or equitable as the TO group will include a higher percentage of kids who donât meet the basic benchmarks for that schoolâthe YOLO kids who figured, why not Iâll just take a chance and apply!
This honestly scares me.
Iâm just wondering if anyone thinks schools should be doing it this way? I certainly donât.
Is it really fair to tell the 1580 kidâŠyouâre only competing against the other kids who also submitted high SAT scores. Because, letâs face it, nobody submitted low scores this year.
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Why is this true? Iâm sure that, in many cases, colleges can fill half of their class with TO candidates who are qualified. If an applicant doesnât hit the âbasic benchmarksâ for admission, they wonât be accepted!
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Look, once a large chunk of students couldnât take standardized tests, the process wasnât about fairness but more about mitigating the damage. This is a very unusual year and you are definitely going to get some applicants that donât test well but otherwise are great students that are accepted to some colleges. At the end of the day I do think that adcoms will get this mostly right. Remember for most selective colleges, they are going to look at many factors for admission (essays, GPA, AP exam scores, course rigor, ECs, LORs, the school district you are in, etc.) not just test scores.
TO this year is not fair but I think it was the lesser of three evils: test blind, test optional, and test required. Some applicants will have benefited from TO and others will be hurt by it, unfortunately that is how its going to be this year. Iâm sure the student with the 1580 is going to get into some great colleges this year even if they have to compete with only test submitted students.
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âIs it really fair to tell the 1580 kidâŠyouâre only competing against the other kids who also submitted high SAT scores.â
Again, we donât know this. And it suggests one is convinced scores are really the top measure. Or even the only legit measure. Itâs just not so.
IRL, do we sort kids by their scores?
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