<p>I realize that numbers can't really tell the whole story, but sometimes that's about all you have to go by when trying to get a picture of what the students at a particular school are like. Are they studious? Are they slackers? Are they likely type A; intense, or more laid back?
It seems that for some schools, different stats paint different pictures. The test scores may not be high, but the GPA's look good, or the GPA's may not be stellar, but the % of students that were at the top of their HS class looks great.<br>
How does one weigh these different statistics? What would you look at to try to get a better idea of the type of students at any particular college?</p>
<p>GPA is nearly worthless for this purpose. Most colleges in the top ~100 of one of the US News “national” lists report GPAs above 3.5 (if they report them at all). For example, Maryland (the #62 ranked national university) reports an average GPA of 4.07 in its Common Data Set. That must be a weighted GPA, but what is their weighting formula? Many of the most selective colleges do not report average GPAs at all in their CDS files.</p>
<p>In my opinion, for what you want, if you must use only one for a first-pass comparison, SAT scores are the best of these metrics. Ranked lists of SAT scores are easy to access in order to compare multiple colleges. They seem to correlate much better than GPA to other factors used to rank colleges, such as admit rates, 4 year graduation rates, average class sizes, PhD productivity, and levels of need-based financial aid. They probably correlate less well to indicators of faculty quality (average faculty salary, faculty publication and citation rates, institutional levels of research funding, etc.)</p>
<p>stateuniversity.com ranks colleges by 75th percentile SAT M+CR scores:
<a href=“Top 500 Ranked Colleges - Highest SAT 75th Percentile Scores”>USA University College Directory - U.S. University Directory - State Universities and College Rankings;
Most of the colleges in that list with scores of about 1500 or above also:
- claim to cover 100% of demonstrated financial need
- have 4 year graduation rates of 80% or higher
- have admission rates below 40%
- have no more than 15% of classes with 50 or more students, and 50% or more with less than 20 students
(these are just arbitrary cut-offs for comparison’s sake)</p>
<p>If a college performed very poorly on many of these other factors, it would have a hard time attracting very many of the highest-scoring students.</p>
<p>The best gauge, for me, is a combination of GPA and Standardized Test Scores. 50% GPA + 50% SATS/ACT.</p>
<p>SAT alone does not tell much. It can be cheated. And, it favors the well-moneyed students of America. For example, many British students wouldn’t score well on SATs, even those who are Cambridge or Oxford-bound students, who aren’t necessarily less inferior students to their American counterparts. And data have shown that a lot of high-scorer students on SATs dropout from college and do not graduate at all. This is a usual occurrence at schools like Caltech, MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, CMU and such schools. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Here are the 4 year graduation rates at those 5 colleges (which all have very high average test scores):
84% MIT
80% Stanford
79% Caltech
73% CMU
71% Berkeley
(Source: Kiplinger’s)</p>
<p>6 year graduation rates at all those colleges in recent years have been above 85%.
<a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/data/sort%2Br_c_avg_pct_grad_6yr/sortdir%2Bdesc/spp%2B25”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/data/sort%2Br_c_avg_pct_grad_6yr/sortdir%2Bdesc/spp%2B25</a></p>
<p>RML, where are you getting your data from (about high scoring students dropping out of MIT, CMU… as a ususual occurrence? I do agree that for some of the more strenuous engineering workload schools it would take longer to graduate so 4 yr graduation rates would take a hit and 6 yr graduation rates would be higher. </p>
<p>@tk21769, thank you for that link. I hadn’t seen that ranking list before.</p>
<p>goingnutsmom, you obviously failed to analyze what the numbers provided by Tk mean. </p>
<p>Let’s take Stanford as an example. According to TK’s data, 20% of Stanford’s students do NOT graduate within 4 years. If that batch had about 1,600 students as freshmen, that means 320 high-SAT students do not graduate on time. Which only reinforces my claim that having high SAT alone does not guarantee academic success. The best gauge is a combination of high GPA & high SAT/ACT scores. </p>
<p>@RML Stanford’s relatively low 4-year graduation rate is due to their 5-year master’s degree plan + many dropping out to pursue start-ups. It’s not due to poor academic performance.</p>
<p>^^ I didn’t say it’s due to the school or students’ “poor performance”. I think it’s due to the fact that SAT alone isn’t a brilliant indicator of one’s academic success. If SAT alone is a perfect indicator, then why didn’t the best schools make it as a single criterion in choosing students? For example, Harvard, said to be the most selective school in the USA, could just ask all its applicants their SAT scores and rank them according to the HIGHEST scores submitted. Harvard can easily do that, right? But Harvard didn’t do that. Why? </p>
<p>
link please.
I know it’s been happening, as it’s also happening at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT and such school, but I’d like to see the actual percentage of Stanford students leaving the school to start their own company, as it affects the school’s performance in USNews criteria.</p>
<p>For all sorts of reasons, some students fail to graduate from the schools where they start. Some of them transfer to other schools. Some of them do drop out. Some drop out for poor academic performance. Others (like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs) drop out to pursue their ambitions early.</p>
<p>However, I don’t think the OP’s issue is whether these measurements are reliable predictors of future success, or even whether they are reliable predictors of academic performance in college. The OP’s question is about using each of 3 measurements (or maybe a combination) to characterize the student bodies at various colleges. He wasn’t perfectly clear about precisely what characteristics we’re trying to compare. They have something to do with studiousness or “intensity”. Those could be two different things. A college might enroll many very intense, ambitious students who aren’t especially studious.</p>
<p>I don’t doubt that GPA + test scores combined is a better predictor of *something<a href=“such%20as%20academic%20performance%20in%20college”>/i</a> than test scores alone. Where does the OP find it, though? Again, many colleges don’t even report GPA in their CDS files. None of the major college rankings (US News, Forbes, WM, stateuniversity) use average GPAs to calculate rankings.</p>
<p>Look again at the SAT score ranking I cited above:
<a href=“Top 500 Ranked Colleges - Highest SAT 75th Percentile Scores”>USA University College Directory - U.S. University Directory - State Universities and College Rankings;
If you could add average GPAs into that ranking, would the list change very much? For the OP’s purposes, would it paint a clearer, more accurate picture? I doubt it. Almost all the schools with the highest SAT numbers also have high UW GPAs (and relatively low admission rates). The converse is not necessarily true. Many schools with high reported UW GPAs do not also have very high average test scores (or very low admit rates). The also often have big Greek, D1 sports, and party scenes (which tends not to be the case at schools with the highest average test scores.)</p>
<p>Examples: Georgia, the Daily Beast #5 Party School, reports an average entering GPA of 3.83; Colgate, the Daily Beast #4 Party School, reports an average entering GPA of 3.64; UMiami, the Daily Beast #3 Party School, reports an average entering GPA of 4.2; UCSB, the DB #2 Party School, reports an average entering GPA of 3.91. UIUC, the #1, doesn’t report GPA in its CDS. </p>
<p>If you want to make finer distinctions within the stateuniversity SAT list (or within the US News top N) with respect to intellectual atmosphere (or something like that), you might want to have a look not at other selection metrics but at outcome metrics. What percentage of the student body goes on to graduate school? What percentage actually complete law school, med school, or PhD programs? What percentage enter the Peace Corps or Teach for America? What percentage goes into investment banking and business consulting? etc.</p>
<p>Schools that often are described as very rigorous and academically intense include Swarthmore, Reed, Carleton, and the University of Chicago. Alumni of all 4 earn PhDs at very high rates. Alumni of all 4 also have high to very high rates of Peace Corps service. UPenn, by contrast, sometimes is described as having a relatively “pre-professional” orientation. Its PhD and Peace Corps numbers are lower than Chicago’s etc. However, Penn/Wharton has a relatively high rate of recruitment into major investment banking and business consulting firms. I would not necessarily conclude that Penn is any more or less “intense” than Chicago/Swat/Carleton/Reed, but the numbers may indicate a difference in orientation that the OP would care about.</p>
<p>Washington Monthly tracks PhD production and Peace Corps participation rates for both LACs and national universities.
<a href=“http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings_2013/national_university_rank.php”>http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings_2013/national_university_rank.php</a></p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If you are looking purely at how good academically the incoming frosh are, you can look at their four, five, and six year graduation rates, which tend to closely track incoming frosh academic characteristics, but are not affected by HS GPA weighting, SAT vs. ACT choices, etc… However, be aware that the graduation rates are also affected in lesser ways by other factors (e.g. part time attendance, cost and financial aid, etc.), and some schools have special circumstances that affect them (e.g. heavy co-op job participation, or lots of five year majors like NAAB-accredited architecture).</p>
<p>Of course, as noted above, student bodies of similar levels of academic ability and motivation may have different goals (e.g. the academically oriented PhD-bound vs. the more pre-professional students).</p>
<p>^ An easy way to implement that approach (building a ranked list from graduation rates) is to click-sort on the “4-yr. grad. rate” column on the Kiplinger’s “best value” pages.
<a href=“http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-private-colleges/index.php”>http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-private-colleges/index.php</a>
<a href=“http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-private-colleges/index.php?table=lib_arts&state_code[]=ALL&id[]=none”>http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-private-colleges/index.php?table=lib_arts&state_code[]=ALL&id[]=none</a></p>
<p>This will expose a set of N top colleges that is similar (but not identical) to the set you’d expose by using the stateuniversity.com SAT ranking. What are the major differences in, say, the set of colleges with 4y grad rate >= 80%, compared to the set of colleges with 75th pct SAT CR+M >= 1500?</p>
<ul>
<li>Several colleges with a strong religious/sectarian affiliation go up in the graduation rate rank compared to the SAT rank (look at Georgetown, Notre Dame, Villanova, Brandeis, Providence College … Holy Cross)</li>
<li>Several colleges with high engineering program enrollments go down in the graduation rate rank compared to the SAT rank (look at MIT, Stanford, Caltech … Harvey Mudd)</li>
</ul>
<p>If (as ucbalumnus suggests) you are looking purely at how strong academically the incoming freshmen are, then I think the average SAT score is a much better indicator than the 4y graduation rate. If Villanova and Providence College students actually were stronger academically (test scores notwithstanding) than MIT, Caltech and Mudd students, then we should be able to point to some outcome metric to reflect that. One such metric is PhD production. MIT, Caltech and Mudd have some of the very highest PhD production rates in the country. Villanova and Providence would be far, far down the top N list. Georgetown, ND, and Brandeis also would rank well below MIT, Caltech and Mudd.</p>
<p>op here.
</p>
<p>There has been some great input on this topic! It is appreciated. There is so much to weigh in looking at colleges and this is an important aspect to my D that isn’t something you can just look up. I suspect it is a question that many students have. For my D, she has strong stats; very good gpa, very good, but not perfect, test scores, and is in a rigorous HS program (IB). She finds that she likes the students in the program, their level of interest in academics, their relative lack of interest in being partiers, the lively and informed class discussions, but the intensity and competitive nature of many of the students…many of whom are now burning out, is a drawback. So, ideally she’d like to find a school that feels more laid back, but has academically engaged students. I’ve talked with many others on CC who seem to be looking for the same. </p>
<p>When she sees a school that looks good based on other criteria, but then notes that either her GPA or her scores put her comfortably in the top quartile of students in the school, it makes her wonder if she will find the type of students she is looking for there. Particularly in the smaller schools where the top quartile may not be a large number of students. For her purposes, she doesn’t seem to feel she needs to be surrounded by exceptionally smart students, but she does want to be surrounded by interested and engaged students, so again, the stats just don’t tell the whole story.</p>