It just helps to make an impression regardless of what they claim.
1 Like
Academics are the most important part of the application, at least at Yale:
"The single most important document in your application is your high school transcript, which tells us a great deal about your academic drive and performance over time. "
There’s that word drive again, wow who would have thought Yale wants kids that are driven academically, first and foremost.
“No colleges require them for their application.”
They’re not required but the competition at some colleges will make it a de facto requirement, meaning you’ve take them before 12th grade and done well in them. These kids have gotten 4s or 5s in Calc, Stats, APUSH, APLang when they apply.
3 Likes
It may depend on the college. When a college looks for anything to differentiate, AP scores could be part of it. For some other colleges, checking AP scores could even be routine.
Aside from Caltech, UCs, and a few outliers, highly selective colleges have not eliminated scores. Instead students with high scores and nothing much else can still submit their high scores, if they choose (I am assuming students who received high scores were able to take a relevant standardized test). However, students who don’t have anything impressive on the application besides scores probably aren’t going to be admitted to a highly selective colleges, regardless of whether the college is test optional or not.
If a college is test blind, rather than test optional, I agree that students whose scores are much better than expected based on the rest of the application are more likely to be the ones who are negatively impacted. However, this group is less likely to be “poor” kids, assuming by “poor” you mean low income. For example, the discrepant SAT/GPA report at ERIC - ED562878 - Students with Discrepant High School GPA and SAT® I Scores. Research Notes. RN-15, College Board, 2002-Jan suggests the group that is most likely to have a higher SAT than expected based on GPA is White males with >$100k income… not exactly “poor” kids.
The report also indicates the group that is most likely to have a lower SAT than expected based on GPA (more likely to benefit from test optional) is the opposite – low income URM females, particularly those who speak English as a 2nd language. This same group tends to be well overrepresented among test optional admits at test optional colleges. For example, Ithaca’s test optional report at https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:97MWOaxD4gcJ:https://www.ithaca.edu/ir/docs/testoptionalpaper2.pdf+&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us indicates the following percentages:
Test Optional Admits – 29% Pell, 35% ALANA*
Test Submitter Admits – 15% Pell, 22% ALANA*
*ALANA = Non-White (Asian is URM group at Ithaca)
1 Like
accurate
@momofboiler1 So there’s another source of inconsistency-- the difficulty level of various AP classes varies from school to school too. You seem to be assuming that the AP English courses are more rigorous than AP Euro for instance. At our high school AP Euro is extremely demanding and the AP English classes are pretty ordinary. So you can’t even assume things about another kid’s set of classes from the lens of how things are at your high school.
If TO policies remain in place post COVID (which I expect), and if applicants see no visible benefits whether they submit test scores or not (highly likely), fewer and fewer of them will take the tests in the future. In that scenario, the tests themselves will gradually disappear (simple economics). No student will be able to take these tests at some point.
Regarding primary vs first, the issue is how word spreads on CC, how others digest and then pass on, with certainty.
Even Yale, stating “most important,” is subject to interpretation. Transcript is a major bar. Of course. It’s a critical hurdle, a major indicator. Sure. But by no means the sole factor or, by itself, determinant. And they say most important document, without defining that further. It leaves a lot of leeway.
On what’s noted to be the 20-21 CA (a blank pdf,) there is space to report AP scores. I can’t link it or copy for some odd “security” reasons.
@lookingforward if you take profiles of students you know, and consider academics to be a hurdle. Then take applicants you know and take academics to represent 50%. I know what you will find. There is essentially no difference. On the other hand, I have seen people who would miss the cut with a hurdle, only to be brought back into the mix because of something else great. Maybe just 1 per year, but it does happen. And that is why I think describing academics as 50% feels more accurate to people. If there was truly a hurdle, you would never bring an applicant back in if they miss the academic hurdle. But it happens.
I don’t think there’s any leeway, unless Yale is purposely trying to mislead. If you say this is subject to intepretation, how in the world is an applicant supposed to understand what a college wants?
3 Likes
We did send S19’s AP scores because they were all 5s from soph, junior year (AP Lang, APUSH, Euro, BC Calc) and thought that would reflect well. Still, it’s not like he went 100% in acceptances. Anything short of all 5s and it’s hard to know what to do.
I have heard that, for Ivies, send them. In fact, I had a friend at Harvard who suggest we even send the actual report to the one Ivy S19 applied to (not Harvard) so they knew the scores were real.
INJParent. Simple. Yeah-huh.
It’s not either-or. And the search for some better clarity is by no means as easy as finding one quote. I think we agree on that.
@michaeluwill, yes, some kids can be “brought back.” But ascribing a percentage to the academic side has perils. (And is another attempt to quantify something that, overall, resists that.)
I’m referring to the initial “maybe not” category in reviewing. I’m sure you agree: not kids so off academically that they couldn’t thrive at a tough college and deserve a better match, somewhere else.
It would not be surprising if some colleges’ institutional research correlated high school GPAs to college GPAs for various high schools that send significant numbers of students to the college. Probably more likely for a big state university to get large enough samples for many high schools, though.
The rank gaming/grubbing/competition will still occur near the decile breakpoints. The top 10.1% (second decile) student would really want to climb over the top 9.9% (first decile) student to get the more favorable decile ranking.
In Texas, there appears to be some fierce range gaming/grubbing/competition to get into the top 6% and 10% automatic admission categories for the state universities in Texas.
1 Like
@ucbalumnus our deciles change for each class (of course) and are not reported for each grade until the October of senior year so no one really knows where they stand until it’s too late.
You can thank immigration selection where skilled worker and PhD student immigrants make up a substantial portion of the Asian American population. Immigrants from Europe and Africa share similar characteristics, but are relatively invisible among the larger European American and African American populations when people look at race/ethnicity first among demographic characteristics.
1 Like
Rankings in high school are always based on GPA, weighted in some way as defined by the high school and inclusive of a full set or a subset of classes. Different colleges, on the other hand, likely want to include different subsets of the classes and weight them differently from each other and from the high school. The more you think about it the more challenging the problem beccomes.
While it may be optimal from the point of view of test applicability to the college’s admission and academic goals for each college to specify its own standardized testing, the likely result is that colleges not choosing the dominant players (applicant option between the SAT and ACT) are likely to lose applicants who do not want to bother taking a special test for a specific college, especially in today’s norm of intensive time consuming test preparation. That is likely why we were at the state of (applicant option between) SAT and ACT being used by almost every selective college and trying to be a little of everything in terms of various colleges’ testing goals, but not really satisfying to any.
That may actually increase the incentive for rank gaming/grubbing/competition, since students who are not near the borderlines may believe that they are and therefore engage in more rank gaming/grubbing/competition.
For those colleges that I mentioned (and probably others), applicants will likely be willing to take the college specific test (perhaps these colleges can come together to reduce the number of tests these self-selected applicants need to take).