On the high end, for example - some of those schools carry kids into much stronger colleges. That should be considered when evaluating academics. Kids get B’s and it is not the end of the world - 1/2 kidding.
I think that matters as well and I understand the challenge you bring up and agree.
You’re making a generalization you often fault other people for. Based on @yearstogo’s posts, her/his kid did very well without any preparation for standardized tests.
If you believe math competitions should be treated the same way, that’s the definition of a casual contestant. I’m not sure if you’re aware, that most math professors can’t even solve, without significant preparation, many of the problems in IMO.
Excellent point. When my older child started looking at colleges I was taken aback at our high school’s lack of relationship with any T50 school. Their radius of “influence” seemed to extend only to local, regional colleges. In fact, we had to explain to our GC what SCEA (single choice early action) meant. She had never heard the term before. It shed some light on the myriad of red X’s on the Naviance scattergraphs. I just don’t think they had ever taken the time or effort to make personal connections with AOs at “better” schools.
The question is: Should that matter? Should students be at the mercy (good or bad) of the personal relationships GCs have formed with AOs?
My perspective on AMC, which some of my kids have done and some have not (the more mathematically talented did not): in my world, AMC is exclusively a math club activity, one sort of conjured-up goal for motivating students to practice problem solving. Encouraging problem solving skill and talent development in math is the true point of the AMC existing. It has a niche and offers an interesting angle about a student’s abilities and skills that is not found on straightforward knowledge-based standardized tests. Problem solving skill in math can be improved with practice, an inherently good thing to do for its own sake, a tremendously useful piece of a quality education. While the AMC may, coincidentally, identify talented students, it is far too narrow to be used as a tool for measuring math ability for most students applying to most universities, at least under current math instruction practices in US high schools. For college admission purposes, I would not suggest that students should be taking the AMC cold.
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Maybe it should not, but it seems to matter right now. And in a test optional world it might matter more, but we will see. So far, most kids seems to be performing as expected so I am afraid to go too far with this.
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Our GCs aren’t terrible and know what SCEA is but I just don’t feel like they go the extra mile for the students. I don’t feel like AOs want to help them, maybe just don’t know them well enough. I did bring this up to our head of counseling and she said AOs turn over so often that it’s not in the GCs best interest to spend a lot of time getting to know them. I called baloney on that. Our GCs also have 50 kids per grade so 200 kids total each year and have to help all of those kids schedule classes etc. They aren’t just college counselors. So the bottom line is that they just don’t have a ton of time.
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That is a common problem and it has been one for as long as I can remember. The issue is that these departments get rewarded, to some extent, by the families that do well in the process. We have 1 in public and 1 in private so I will soon know whether significantly better in the private environment. My guess is that it will be somewhat better.
It can be as granular as which GC and which college. Some GCs have relationships with some AOs and some do not. It’s like the luck of the draw here.
The Chicago Catholic high schools get a lot more kids into schools like Georgetown and BC. There’s a pipeline. At our high school, we seem to have pretty good results from Cornell but not so much for any other Ivy unless you are a recruited athlete. It’s a long history of other Ivies taking maybe one athlete and then that’s it. So, test optional or not, I expect this trend to continue because it’s what each college has done in the past and it’s worked for them. So far, from the little we’ve heard so far about acceptances, we’ve seen no surprises.
The quote was, "There exists a group of students/parents that spend an enormous amount of time prepping for almost any type of academic standardized test, and this group seems to be tremendously overrepresented on CC forums. " And I stand by that statement. Whether a single particular poster is part of the “overrepresented” group or not has little bearing on whether the statement is true.
The IMO is a 6 question proof-based contest spread out over 2 days. It is an international competition designed for teams of the best math students in the world. Even among the group of the best math students in the world, perfect scores are rare. For example, on last year’s test, every member of team USA did not answer the 6th question correctly. The fact that some math professors also couldn’t solve this question has zero relevance on whether it’s common to do huge amount of prep before AMC, and whether only the students who do that huge prep do well. They are completely different tests, with a completely different test taking pool, and are in reference to tests where you don’t need anywhere near a perfect score to do well (recall 87/150 = 58% was a top 5% score). It’s about as relevant as saying, my math teacher can’t solve all the questions on the IMO, therefore i need to spend all year prepping for the math SAT.
Actually, I agree, Most start in Middle School with Math circles or similar. I would add that AIME is a different beast. It’s not about who is the best at math. It’s about who has had access/exposure to previous examples used on these tests. This turned off my math kid a lot. Unlike most math, it isn’t cumulative. It’s often random examples based on discrete silos of learning. Similar to a kid who is great in Algebra never learning Trig and being expected to get it right.
Honestly, I think this type of learning turns A LOT of kids off. We saw that many kids on the highly ranked team had been on it a long time. Not the fastest learners but the most experienced. My kid was 5 years behind the average age and could keep up after the lesson.
So, were those kids really great mathematicians. No. They were highly trained and better than a strong student. Not to even mention that the demographics of these programs are often not very open to many ( females, low SES and a wide range of other factors are not found). My kid thought having parents tutor you for a math team was insane ( we agree). But kids were groomed to have them keep up. Some from an early age. ( This is customary in some families and cultures). Many kids on the team came from places where taking a high stakes test meant going to University or not.
So, using AIME as a basis for anything IMO adds very little value. I’d add it, if my kid already had a score and wanted to apply to MIT/Caltech. Otherwise, there are many other ways to show math excellence.
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It’s not as simple as your GC having a relationship with an AO.
We and our girls had a relationship with the GC.
Imo, it’s less about hs “reputation” than their track record with some colleges. Some can say they’re synonymous. But “reputation” is often taken in isolation.
And there’s irony in a thread about the elimination of std tests now focusing so intently on advocating for another set of tests.
The long term viability of these tests is probably still assured as long as states continue to mandate a test score for the high school graduation requirement. ACT and College Board have been battling each other for those contracts for several years now, because that’s where the revenue growth is. There’s more threatening standardized testing than a move towards TO, although I agree that post Covid may see lots more colleges moving this way. The demographic cliff is the big threat and that arrives in about five years’ time.
There seems to be a lot of confusion in this thread about test elimination vs test optional vs test required. The thread title is “was test optional, ultimately, a disservice to kids…” Test optional does not mean the elimination of std tests. Instead under a test optional system, high scoring students still have the option to submit their high scores, if they choose (and were able to take the tests). However, they are no longer required to submit them, if they do not choose to (or were not able to take the tests).
The tangent about AMC was started by the comment below. Having the ability to list an optional AMC score or academic-related ECs/awards is also not the same as test required, nor is it intently advocating for replacing SAT with a different set of tests. Instead students have the option to submit AMC or information about numerous other possible academic-related ECs/awards if they choose to do so.
“For example, some of the schools above have had a spot on their application where students have the option to list AMC/AIME math score, which is completely different from the math section of the SAT/ACT, including having a much higher ceiling. Some students list their AMC/AIME score, and others do not, or do not take the exam. All of the above schools allow the student to list awards in academic-related competitions, including AMC/AIME among many others.”
This also isn’t a new wild theory about a major change. Instead, it’s an example of what has been occurring for years. At least 2 of the referenced schools have had a spot on the application where students have the option to list AMC score for years, although this may have changed more recently with COVID. All of still them provide a spot to list other academic related ECs/awards.
Given the low math ceiling on the SAT, extremely little connection between math SAT questions with any type of math a student would see in classes at MIT/Caltech type colleges, and math SAT adding relatively little predictive power to the application; I think also having the option to include other out of classroom academic successes besides just SAT/ACT score is useful. These out of classroom academic related awards/ECs include AMC and other math contests , but are not limited to just math contests.
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I agree wholeheartedly. My son made a 36 on the ACT as a Sophomore and
is a National Semi-finalist (waiting to find out if a Finalist)so his PSAT and SAT were excellent too. We submitted his scores anyway and hope that they will help even though they were optional. The many others who applied will be a distraction and potentially take his spot without having to compete on scores.
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Some concrete information from the college board on how many students were unable to take the SAT this application cycle as compared to last, as of December 2020:
In addition, the College Board, which administers the PSAT and SAT, reported that as of December, the number of rising high school seniors in the United States who have taken the SAT this year has dropped. Some 1.4 million students in the class of 2021 have taken the SAT at some point during their high school career, a College Board spokesperson said. That compares with nearly 2.2 million students in the class of 2020 who took the SAT at least once.
(from an article in Politico about SATs and scholarships)
There is one thing that every parent can do right now. Request a copy of the summary that goes along with the guidance counselor/principal’s report to every college. These are often shockingly and horribly incorrect.
If the summary lists that your HS offers 14 AP’s and your kid has taken 1-- an Adcom that doesn’t know your school forms an impression. But if your HS actually offered 2 AP’s- and your kid took one last year and one this year- GET THE REPORT CORRECTED. You may have to go to the district level- usually someone in the superintendent’s office who compiles and analyzes statistical data. The stuff that is sent to your state and the feds is mandatory- this piece of paper is usually an after-thought and is frequently riddled with errors (ask me how I know).
In some places nobody has read the description in 20 years. Make sure that whatever gets sent with your kid’s transcript is accurate. If the last AP Physics teacher retired during the 2008 recession and was never replaced, I won’t be surprised if you tell me the summary was never updated. Your kid is applying for engineering programs with no AP physics- this is not a problem if your HS doesn’t offer it. At a minimum it raises a question if it looks as though your kid took band and yearbook senior year and no physics, because she took regular physics junior year and that’s the end of the road in your HS.
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And I think that basically answers the question that started this long thread weeks ago. If you excel at standardized tests and are applying to elite schools, test optional hurt you because you now have to compete against other applicants who would have been disqualified by their subpar SAT/ACT score in years past. If you are a top student who struggles with standardized tests, test optional helped you because your subpar SAT/ACT score did not disqualify you this year.
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ok but no one is “taking” anyone’s spot. Anyone who is applying to a tippy top school without a score has an app where everything else is on par with the high scoring student. Maybe, gasp, the rest of their app is even better or matches the school better than the student with the 36. We’ve been told a number of times that scores do not get any student in.
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However, in past years, those students would not have been able to apply with any significant chance of success if their scores were poor. Now they do have a chance. In the world of tippy tops it’s a zero sum game. If someone who could not have gotten a spot previously (a great student with low scores) now can take a spot, that means that there are fewer spots left for others.
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