For top 15 schools is there any way of knowing what middle SAT ranges are if you are URM or URG, or recruitable athlete, or national award level musician, or 1st gen, or low income, or have research published in respected journal, or meet some other institutional need for which seats are set aside, like legacies and development cases?
The schools publish these ranges for the school but do not break them down further to the best of my knowledge.
No
Unless you are recruited athlete and get one of the coveted (approx.) 175 per school recruited athlete admits (in which case you only need to meet the Ivy League index criteria that applies to sports recruits in the Ivy League), you should probably just assume you need to AT LEAST be at 50th percentile.
Thanks@Hopper2019, yes I agree but it’s hard to know what exactly the 50% is on a composite basis. I had an earlier post on this and learned that most colleges release these averages based on section scores. Some top schools like Duke and NW I think release composite averages and they seem to be around 1460-1560, so I would think that for top 10 SAT composite averages are around 1500-1570. So it seems if you are in this range and unhooked, your score is probably a neutral factor, if you’re 1570+ if might give you a little boost.
All I can add is that some hooked applicants will be in the middle 50%, some above, and others below.
SAT I scores are one relatively small part of the admission process at Ivy League type selective, holistic private colleges. Higher scores are obviously better than lower scores if not test optional, yet plenty of unhooked students are still admitted with scores below the 50th percentile. For example, a comparison of math SAT scores for unhooked admits and all admits is below, from the Harvard lawsuit analysis is below. The reference is in comparison to the overall applicant pool. The overall applicant pool had scores of ~0.00 (1.00)
Math SAT Score
Unhooked White Admits: +0.55 (0.52)
All Admits: +0.44 (0.62)
Note how close the average SAT score is between the two groups. The difference is only a small fraction of either group’s SD. The groups are close enough to suggest that ~42% of unhooked white admits would have had math SAT scores below the overall average in a normal distribution. It suggests that it’s quite common for unhooked admits to have scores below the 50th percentile, which is what is expected from a holistic admission process.
One also needs to consider the score in the context of the application, rather than looking at it in isolation. A relatively low math SAT score might be more of an issue for a prospective math major than a prospective English major, especially if the lower score is consistent with the rest of the application – lower grades/rigor in math, weaker LOR from math/science, lack of quality math/science ECs, etc.
For example, when I applied to colleges (not recent), my scores were not well balanced. I always received perfect scores on standardized tests related to math, science, and similar; including the math SAT. However, I only received a 500 on the SAT CR, mostly due to a weak vocabulary. This put my CR score in the bottom few percent at highly selective colleges and put my combined score in the bottom 25%. Nevertheless, I was accepted unhooked to Stanford, MIT, and Ivies. I attended Stanford where my CR score was in the bottom 5-6 students of the matriculating class, lower than almost all recruited athletes. I expect that the CR was given less weight due to being a prospective engineering major and there being other information suggesting I’d be academically successful in spite of the score, such as consistently getting A’s in university classes taken while in HS, including ones that involved writing papers.
There are some hints in this Harvard Crimson article: https://features.thecrimson.com/2015/freshman-survey/makeup-narrative/ Note this is kids who attend, not who were accepted, and only those who respond to the survey. The more recent surveys don’t ask about SAT scores.
What is a URG?
I think it’s “under represented group”
btw- please do not think that only the top 15 schools are the best ones for top students. There is so much excellence outside that group! That said, I agree that you will not find meaningful data answering your question. Too many variables in your “hook” list also- and you missed many. Fortunately they do not track data based on many of your parameters.
Knowing results should not make a difference in your child’s search. Trying to make a case for unjust admissions criteria also is not helpful. I suspect an uber analysis of all of the facets of all of the students for the top 10, 15, 50 or whatever schools will not yield useful information. Fun with numbers.