<p>What level of aptitude is really required to do well at a good school – or even at a top school?</p>
<p>I have seen countless posting by students and parents endlessly worried about if their SSAT percentile was “high enough” for a certain school. To put things in perspective, I have asked Forum members about the SSAT, then looked a bit deeper. I will share some findings here, and invite comments and insights. </p>
<p>Statistics show that 60,000 SSAT tests and over 2 million SAT tests are "administered annually" (which does not disclose how many individual students take each test).</p>
<p>Now, someone who ranks at, say, the 90th percentile on the SSAT could rank:
A) at the 3rd percentile on the SAT (if bottom 60,000 SAT takers earlier took the SSAT, then 90th percentile on SSAT [only better than 54,000 students] would be at 54/2000 on SAT)
B) at the 90th percentile on SAT (if the samples are representative, differing in size)
C) at the 97th percentile on SAT (if top 60,000 SAT takers earlier took the SSAT, then 90th percentile on SSAT [worse than only 6,000 students] would mean 1,940,000/2,000,000 on SAT)</p>
<p>Assuming the two tests measure largely the same aptitude, the truth is likely between B and C, since the overall SAT test population is a large portion of high school students each class year, while the SSAT is only a much smaller, select portion of this group.</p>
<p>However, more importantly, should absolute rank<a href="such%20as%20“a%20score%20of%20X%20is%20good%20enough”">/B</a>, or **relative rank (Nth percentile vis-</p>
<p>Interesting post - lots of great information to ponder.</p>
<p>But test scores and grades alone never tell the whole story, which is why I think the schools ask for so many “non-academic” things in their applications: personal essays, recommendations from teachers and other adults, parent statements, lists of community service and interests/activities outside of academics.</p>
<p>I am in no way an expert - I did not attend BS, so I don’t have any first-hand experience - but I believe that high test scores and high IQ alone don’t guarantee success at boarding school, or even in life for that matter. Is it an academic advantage to have an “off-the-charts” IQ, or a photographic memory, or an uncanny ability to require zero drill/repetition to learn new material? Absolutely! But do you need that level of ability to be successful in a challenging academic environment? Absolutely not!</p>
<p>A book that really challenged my thinking about intelligence was Howard Gardner’s “Multiple Intelligences” (which was revised and updated about 5 years ago). My guess is that AOs are looking for a mixture of “intelligences” in their classes, and ideally, a group of students that each possess a range of “intelligences” - in effect, a rich, complex, multi-dimensional mixture of individuals.</p>
<p>But I do think some “minimum” level of academic aptitude is required to be successful. Students need to have a life outside of studying, and if the only way you can pass your classes is to study 12 hours a day, that’s not much of a life at all! (And how do you define “successful” at BS? If you graduate with a “C” average, is that OK? Or is “successful” being in the the top 10% of your class?)</p>
<p>I believe (once again - just my personal opinion) that even if 100 Davidson Young Scholars (99.9 percentile) all applied to the same HADES school, only a small portion of them would be accepted if the ONLY thing they had to offer the school was demonstrated high IQ/test scores.</p>
<p>this is quite an interesting discussion. i don’t have a lot to contribute to it except a few observations.</p>
<p>first, i believe that the gladchemms schools want to know how well the applicants are academically prepared, not simply what their aptitudes or iq are. going to a gladchemms school from public and most private middle schools really is a jump onto the fast track.</p>
<p>our kid got a 79 percentile on the math ssat despite being 98 percentile overall on the ssat. the ssat score report remarked that his math score, although only 78 percentile on the ssat, would probably place him in the 98-99 percentile of all 8th graders nationally. indeed, that is exactly how he ranked on national math exams taken in his 7th and 8th grades of public middle school.</p>
<p>because his math ssat score was so relatively low, his chosen gladchemms school asked him to take a math placement test before starting there. after that, he was placed in a “medium difficuly” math course for his first term.</p>
<p>during that first term, he struggled really hard, too hard, in math. despite getting a "reasonable’ final math grade for his first term, the school recommended that he step down to a somewhat less advanced math course for his second term. he chose to accept that recommendation and it has worked well for him.</p>
<p>this is not a kid from a failing inner city middle school. this is a kid from a very highly rated suburban public school system in a town with a highly educated demographic made up of many accomplished physicians, attorneys, academics, etc.</p>
<p>my point is that there is a huge performance gap between very good public schools and the gladchemms boarding schools. here i am referring to performance of the schools, not performance of the kids. it’s really a national catastrophe. last time i checked, our american public schools ranked about 20th in the world, whereas only a few decades ago we ranked among the top 5 world-wide. our public schools have been in a state of continuous decline for the past 20-30 years. </p>
<p>this should be alarming and actually has gotten a lot of news coverage but not much, if anything, is changing for the better. one can question whether perhaps this is because the schools in other countries have improved while we have stagnated. i don’t think so. last year, i read an interview with a long-time university of washington math professor who was decrying the increasingly poor academic preparedness of students there. he claimed that for several decades his department had needed to continuously water down the rigor of their courses in order to match the preparedness of their students. along that same line, a knowlegeable friend recently mentioned that even harvard university now needs to provide remedial courses for a pretty large percentage of their entering students.</p>
<p>ssat test results are, indeed, not a perfect predictor of success. however, i do believe that (much more than the sat test) the ssat test is a reasonably reliable indicator of how well our kids are prepared for the much greater academic rigor of the gladchemms schools.</p>
<p>I have read of an “optimal range” for intelligence. Quickly Googling finds the estimated range to lie between 120 and 145 on IQ tests. That’s thought to be intelligent enough to master any profession, but not so high that it gets difficult to relate to other people.</p>
<p>So, in short, more is not always better. There is a range of intelligence–and scoring above that range doesn’t necessarily mean the student will be more successful in life, or more likely to get in. When the schools say a score in the 80th percentile is fine, and that scores lower than that do not necessarily disqualify a candidate, I believe them.</p>
<p>in the book “outliers” the author, malcolm gladwell, writes about a long-term mid-20th century study by a british academic who, much to his own surprise, discovered that students with super high iq’s really were no more successful in life than students whose iq’s were in the 120-140 range. gladwell postulated that an iq of 120-125 was the threshold for being highly successful, but a number of other factors were required to actually achieve high success.</p>
<p>however, i reiterate that the gladchemms schools are far more interested in academic preparedness than in intellectual aptitude.</p>
<p>Our experience is that one can score 99% across all sections in SSAT, and one still needs to work hard to keep at “A” level in top schools. On the other hand, those who have had solid training in middle school but haven’t been the best test takers can do well too. In general, I think SSAT is a pretty good indicator of academic preparedness, especially when there has been no extensive test prep/tutoring and repeated test taking.</p>
<p>Being brilliant alone is NEVER enough, in any situation; but especially at top boarding schools.</p>
<p>As for the threshold Gladwell cites, the further one strays from the normal range of cognitive abilities, in either direction, the more difficulties arise. Even the most well adjusted 150+ IQer will run into situations where they just feel like they cannot convey what they are thinking, or fall into that profound loneliness that often marks that group - even (or especially) when they are unaware of their own IQ. It’s not the knowledge of it that creates the stigma; it’s the very thing itself.</p>
<p>Just a quick clarification on the detours on IQ: I used the example of Mensa etc. since its test requires, similar to the S/SAT, a test-taker’s intellectual faculties. However, my interest remains not IQ (I could have used height as a simpler example, with you standing 6’4", 49 average men and 50 giants auditioning for tall men’s roles), but more along the lines of what the minimum ability is (as based on an objective, standardized test) that qualifies someone at a certain age to be admitted to do academic work at a good school.</p>
<p>I maintain that the level may not be nearly as high as it seems (many very smart kids with high results notwithstanding); thus perhaps the unhealthy obsession with SSAT percentiles could be replaced with the harmony of the candidate’s overall profile. We all know, or heard of, the “child prodigy”: he the next Gauss, she the next du Pr</p>
<p>I know for certain that profoundly gifted kids have been turned down at the HADES schools. Doing moderately well on a exam (in this case, the SSAT) is only ONE bar that must be passed to have a shot at a slot at the “elite” schools. I know some truly fabulous kids who have been rejected, and I don’t think they or their parents have any idea why. </p>
<p>AOs are not looking to fill a class with geniuses. They seek a balanced mix of individuals who will not only fit in tolerably well, but will add value to the school community and possibly end up bringing honor and prestige to the institution, as a high school competitor, or later - as alumni.</p>
Well the short answer is - don’t worry about the minimum needed to “do academic work”. If you get in, technically you can “do the work” partly because there is a big range of “acceptable work” (e.g. from A to D). The tricky part is that for some individuals, the minimum required for “the work” wouldn’t necessarily get them in. This is a competitive process and the schools routinely turn down “acdemically admissible” applicants.</p>
<p>I think this all leads back to the idea of the well rounded student body. They want diversity, assorted strengths, and a passing score on all of their threshold measures.</p>
<p>We all know stories of talent denied. I hope (and believe) that such talented and motivated kids find their way with help of parents and teachers (if they have been denied at a Top50 private school, then they are obviously beyond the inner-city underprivileged, unrecognized talent, at least socially, since those kids have never even heard of DEGAS, let alone the SSAT).</p>
<p>But to inch back towards my original question, what is moderately well in your view, and the view of others? This is exactly what puzzles me: pitting talented kids against each other on a test where some prepare lots, some very little, some do naturally well, some do not; in the end, where is the cut-off where educators can say the kid most likely cannot do the work?</p>
<p>If the test were the sole determinant for admission, as it is many places around the world, it would make complete sense to rank the kids from Number One to Also Ran. Of course, the test would have to be much harder to select the aptest.</p>
<p>But here, is the function of the test segregating an elite pool (just to claim the best, without any pressing need to distinguish between 88 and 98) or is it validating disparate educations by assessing each candidate individually on a standardized, objective test of aptitude? If the latter, why the percentile rankings? Why curve a group when absolute levels of achievements would clearly state: “this kid can and that one cannot handle what we ask at our school academically?”</p>
<p>Again, we are not talking about a student getting in at a certain score, merely, as other Forum members also wrote, being “worthy” (for lack of a better word) of consideration for admission.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Many students and their parents do worry about this “minimum needed”. Say a school takes nice, well-rounded kids who merely scored well percentile-wise (say, in the 80s), but they did not ace (97+ percentile) a small-sample, elite-pool standardized test. The school believes they can all do the work, and contribute beyond the classroom (because of their other talents, and niceness etc.)</p>
<p>Would the outcome for the school, and the kids, be radically different?</p>
<p>Why, would college matriculation statistics suddenly drop? Doubtful. SAT ranks all college applicants, a pool 35x the size of the SSAT. If the kids above were capable of doing good work (again: who would get A’s at this school? The kid with 98s in class or the best student in class, regardless of the score? If schools curve grades exactly as the SSAT percentile ranks curve the kids’ scores, then there *always *be some A students at our school, no matter the pool enrolled!), and such kids do well enough on the SAT (a test most everyone has easy access to, and which is admittedly only a minor factor in college admissions, where subject knowledge becomes equally important), then the equation really becomes one of social engineering a secondary school class based on numerous strengths beyond test scores or even academic preparedness.</p>
<p>All in all, I remain skeptical that an obsession with small-pool percentile ranking sheds much light on *individual * capabilities, as much as it polarizes the pool itself. If 12 kids in a class all score well enough on a test (in absolute points, not in comparison to each other), there is no reason to give a C to the lowest result. Or, (in our case of “being considered for admission”) fail him.</p>
<p>I think we got lost in the middle of the discussion, and I am clear again where you are going. I agree that obession with the “average S/SAT scores” doesn’t make sense. Colleges and BS are trying to have a hollistic approach taking all factors into consideration as much as possible when making admission decisions because it’s true that test scores by themselves don’t necessarily determine one’s academic success in BS/college let alone the success in life. However, we must understand AO’s are not gods. When dealing with thousands or tens of thousands of applications many of which have stellar credentials, it’s only realistic to have a certain amount of consideration of the unquantifiable factors (on top of development case, legacies, URM, etc.) and they are desperate for more differentiators easy to be applied. Having high test scores nowadays is hardly an advantage but not having it can be a disadvantage.</p>
<p>DAndrew: Thanks, my feelings, exactly. Which is why it makes sense to clearly define and validate what numerical standards (which are more unforgiving than evaluating subjective factors) the candidate is judged by. </p>
<p>If many blindly seek to achieve perfect scores, while some otherwise qualified students could get left out of the process because they are not “advised”, “trained”, “pushed”, or “required” to excel on this test, then the meaning of the test itself changes from judging if you are apt enough to a middling competition where the stakes are high, the competitors many, and the test questions only moderately challenging; making it really hard to stand out and really easy to remain unnoticed. As you pointed out: feels like no advantage, but distinct disadvantage.</p>
<p>(Really, I was stunned to read postings on this Forum that on some sections two or three questions could skew percentiles absurdly: think 73rd percentile vs 91st percentile. Absolute standards would never do that: on a moderately easy test a 49 vs 51 /60 is very similar, only a 22 vs 51 /60 is very different). Funny that.</p>