<p>What do you think is the lowest scores for ACTs and SATs that should be allowed for the IVYs, and other top caliber schools, including LACs. Me, personally, I think a high 20s ACt and Low 2000s SAts.</p>
<p>1800.</p>
<p>10 char</p>
<p>why do you say 1800?^</p>
<p>There is no need for a cut off score, some perfectly brilliant people have gotten terrible scores.</p>
<p>And what about people who do fantastic on one section but not another? </p>
<p>And many schools don’t even consider the writing portion. </p>
<p>A score cutoff is highly unnecessary.</p>
<p>I agree with Kilijin. kwu’s number was just thrown out and has no basis or backing. :P</p>
<p>I don’t know and don’t care what minimum SAT scores <em>should</em> be allowed; that’s really for the colleges to decide, isn’t it? I will say that in practice at HYP-level schools, your chances of admission drop off pretty rapidly below 2100 and become vanishingly small below 1900 or so.</p>
<p>Princeton does a better job than most at providing transparency about its admissions standards. Here’s what they report for their Class of 2009:</p>
<p>SAT (CR+M+W) / admit rate
2300-2400 / 26.3%
2100-2290 / 11.4%
1900-2090 / 6.2%
1700-1890 / 2.2%
1500-1690 / 0.4%
below 1500 / 0.0%</p>
<p>WOW! They admitted someone or a few people with a 1500 - 1690??? Jheeez. They must of had like literally every single other thing needed in the world on their application.</p>
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<p>There’s no harm in discussing it even if we don’t have the power to change anything. In my opinion, although I certainly don’t believe that anyone should automatically be rejected because he or she has a certain score, acceptances for those with lower than 2100 should be very rare.</p>
<p>Lots of people have more to offer schools than SAT scores. In fact after senior year of HS good SAT’s are worthless. Musical ability, ambition, creativity, smarts in certain subjects, or athletic ability might not show up on the SAT. It is important for colleges to recognize that.</p>
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<p>Some employers ask for them, but in general you are correct. In any case, that could be said of most things, even some that have great importance in the moment.</p>
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<p>They do. But it is also important to recognize that the SAT and similar tests offer the only truly standardized metric of comparison.</p>
<p>I agree that in general students who are impressive enough to attend an Ivy League school or another top school will have high SAT’s, but I think they should have less bearing on admission than they do because, in reality, what do they actually show about a person?</p>
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<p>Well, they do a decent job of predicting college grades, so that’s something. </p>
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<p>Considering that they are, as I said, the only objective, standardized metric for comparison among college applicants, it’s surprising that they have as little bearing as they do.</p>
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<p>Well, they admitted 1 out of every 250 applicants at that level. Could have been the child of the university president or of the chair of the Board of Trustees, or a member of the Saudi royal family, or a 10th-generation legacy whose parents give $1 million in annual giving and pledged to fund a new $30 million building. Or the QB on the football team. If you get into Princeton at that level, it’s probably not on the basis of academic merit.</p>
<p>Hold on. I know a girl admitted to a top-tier Ivy this year who scored in the 1600s. She’s a recruited athlete who has dyslexia. She took the test three times and could never score any higher than the low 1600s (super-scored, too). But she graduated number 1 in her high school class and she’s not a URM. So be careful of drawing too many conclusions from one chart.</p>
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<p>Who are you talking to?</p>
<p>Nice Story. See that is what I am talking about. The SAT can fail certain people and misrepresent. It’s good to hear that this Ivy took that into account and made the right decision.</p>
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<p>Yes, but that was an exceptional case. It does not support the argument that the SAT should generally have less weight.</p>
<p>I agree with silverturtle. </p>
<p>Exceptional cases like hers are rare at best (As you can see, an example of this would be Princeton’s stats, where 1600’s were only .4% of all students). Unless you have an amazing sports or musical talent, with PERFECT ec’s , your chance of getting in without a good SAT scores are slim to almost dreamable.</p>
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<p>No, wait a minute, you can’t draw that inference. 0.4% is Princeton’s admit rate for students scoring 1500-1690. That doesn’t tell us what percentage of the incoming class were in this range. It could be they had applications from only 250 in this SAT range and accepted just 1. Or it could be they had applications from 10,000 and accepted 40. We just don’t know from the data they give us how many such people are at Princeton and what percentage of the class they represent; all we know is that, however many applications they had in this range, they accepted only 0.4% of them. That is enough to tell us, however, that the odds of admission of a student in this score range are very low, a 1-in-250 occurrence; and in that sense it is an “exceptional” case.</p>
<p>If she’s valedictorian and the school has a flexible and generous AI scale (as in they will count her class rank as 2 perfect AI subscores) then her being admitted with a low 1600s makes complete sense, dyslexic or not (AI around 214).</p>