Some schools obviously don’t want kids to report scores below 1500. It is all about their metrics. The SAT score ranges are overstated because the kids with the higher scores will submit, whereas lower scorers won’t. I also know kids who took AP classes but, didn’t write the AP exam. It has become complicated for college admissions offices/i.e. more work. And the college essay is only so many words and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A great college essay at one school, garbage at another.
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On this topic of colleges tracking the performance of previously-admitted students from the same high school, I am always surprised that they bother. For highly selective colleges, the sample size from most high schools would never be big enough and there are too many other variables and no standardization. Seems like a bridge too far.
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Back in the day my understanding it was mostly just for the regular feeders, but of course a lot of their students in fact came from one of their regular feeders.
That is still somewhat true (still a lot of students from regular feeders), but I also understand that now they might be doing a lot more sophisticated “Big Data” stuff. Potentially this can allow you to use internal data from many high schools to help you evaluate applicants from all of them. Conceptually this requires developing models that take into account all those differentiating factors, but if you work up such a model on past data and find over a few new years it is doing a reasonable job predicting outcomes out of sample . . . you might have something usable.
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I can only speak for my kid, but they have not reported AP scores on their EA apps. They’ve taken five tests so far, and got 3s on two of them (9th grade AP World, 10th Grade AP Gov), which we kind of thought would outweigh their higher Junior year scores (4s in Apush and Calc ab and 5 in AP Lang).
I’m rethinking strategy that for RD apps, because maybe that calc score can smooth out the C that my kid got in Calc, and is valuable enough to risk reporting those 3s?
This is all too complicated.
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But she can just report the higher AP scores, right? That’s what my kid did -(she had 5s on her junior year tests, 3s on her sophomore year tests).
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MIT’s stance is the clearest, and most logical. Test scores provide additional objective information which helps AOs make the best possible decisions. Yes SAT/ACT require signing up, paying up, and driving to a test site, but it contributes to overall fairness of the Admission decision.
Will an AO viewing an unhooked applicant submitting a TO application assume that the applicant most likely tested in the bottom 25% of the school’s historical average? Absolutely!
Should an unhooked applicant with test scores below the 25% historical average of a college be perceived as weaker candidate than one with scores above the 75% historical average? Absolutely!
Can the applicant with lower scores demonstrate other academic achievements of greater importance to be viewed positively and ultimately accepted despite lower test scores? Absolutely!
Do the best schools’ administrators want their accepted pool to display the highest possible band of test results for rankings/selectivity? Absolutely
Is a kid retaking his SAT to improve a 1530 to break into the top 25% of his top choice school making any sense. Will that improve his case if he improves to 1570? Absolutely!
I don’t agree with this. I don’t think schools are necessarily looking at a high 1500s score more favorably than one that is in the low 1500s. For S24 that would be great as he got a 1580, but I don’t think AO’s are going to look at that and think he’s a stronger candidate than a kid who got a 1530. My sense is that once a kid passes the academic threshold (whatever that might be) they are looking at other things.
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Then what would you say are the respective positive thresholds at Yale, MIT, and John Hopkins for instance? If you can’t tell, that proves my point
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I would consider a positive threshold to be anything close the 50th% for these top ranked colleges. Yale and JHU both have 1540 for the 50% and MIT is 1550.
1530 should be fine to Yale and JHU. Only place I would maybe consider retaking the test is for MIT .
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D25 retaking to reach top 75% across, that way she didn’t need to worry about this parameter and can focus on the rest of her case. If one can afford the expense, seems logical
for me it’s not just the expense of paying for the test. It is more of the time. If you think you can improve the score without much effort and you have taken the test only once before then yes you can take the test again.
If your plan is to spend many weeks prepping for it then I am not sure if that the best use of time. Good luck to your D25.
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we live in California and there is no shortage of test sites. My son took both the ACT and SAT.
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what are you basing this sense on? I absolutely think the top tier schools see a difference between 1530 and 1570. The latter is better.
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Just as a reference, JHU D3 coaches require 1500 for sports recruits (except for Lacrosse where they are in D1), so their AOs very much care. If two absolute twin candidates for one spot have 1530 & 1570, odds fall on the 1570
I’m not sure what the first sentence has to do with the second sentence here, and I’d generally caution us amateurs from stating hypothesis (AOs meaningfully differ between 1530 and 1570) as fact, since nobody commenting on this issue actually knows.
A different hypothesis, though, and I’ll pledge to check myself on it 3-6 months from now. I think that as Emory is saying the quiet part out loud (post-Covid grade inflation + TO policies has made it unreasonably difficult to predict and differentiate who’s appropriate and who isn’t for a highly selective school), and as there is no appropriate replacement for testing (APs, as you can infer from the thread above, are an awful replacement - for reasons of equity, precision, and quantity, at least), many of the schools that have not yet announced that they will be TO for 2025 are going to end up requiring testing.
I don’t have the quantitative data to back this up, but just from being an active observer, I believe that two things are true:
- we’ve seen essentially zero movement on new announcements of TO policies for 2025 in the last 4-6 months - if you didn’t announce before the early summer, you haven’t announced since;
- last year, we saw some schools confirm their TO policies during the fall (when Juniors are really starting to test), though some were later
I think we will see several T20+ schools (and maybe more than several) that are TO for 2024 go test-required for 2025 - there just needs to be a couple who say it for the others to follow. Ones to watch include Cornell (who announced their TO policy for 2024 in September 2022), UPenn (who announced in Jan 2023), Stanford (who I think announced October 2022), Dartmouth (maybe March 2023), Duke (unsure), Emory.
We will see!
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Is this a conjecture based on no actual data or experience in the matter? Absolutely!
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Because elite schools don’t rack and stack, stating that a kid with a 1570 is always going to be accepted over one with a 1530 doesn’t make much sense. I have no idea of exactly how these schools make their decisions - I assume that once a certain academic threshold is met they look at other things. Of course, we don’t know what that threshold is. Is a higher test score preferable to a lower one, sure. I just don’t think that kids should feel that once they are at the tippy top of the testing pyramid that their chances are materially better than other applicants. I have stressed this with S24 in an effort to manage his expectations.
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Since S24 isn’t applying to any of those schools, I have no idea. I assume his score would put him at or above the 75th percent at most schools, though.
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I might suggest people interested in this question of very high versus even higher test scores go back and check out the podcast in the top post, specifically the about 2 minutes segment starting around 13:44. In that segment, the Yale and Dartmouth officers discuss how a high test score is often a part of answering the initial yes/no question of whether the applicant is adequately prepared, and then if the answer is yes, the test score is not after that a difference maker, whereas the transcript can be.
The Yale officer specifically explains he sits on 5-person admissions committees daily during admissions season, and while they frequently discuss the transcript beyond the initial stage, they never discuss test scores again, and they never decide to admit people because they have particularly high test scores. The Dartmouth officer then agrees it is the same for them.
So I would suggest this is actually pretty definitive evidence on this subject for at least these two colleges.
The right question, for these colleges, is whether a 1530 or a 1570, combined with the transcript and anything else considered in that initial academic review, will get the applicant past that stage. As an aside, both officers also make it clear that is a contextual question, meaning the test scores they will see as helpful depend on things like the high school from which you are coming. So for sure, this is a somewhat difficult question to answer for each individual, and in fact it is the kind of thing where a lot of SCOIR/Navience-type data for your high school might help you refine things beyond just looking at their CDS statistics.
But IF you can get past that initial stage, then they could not have been more clear it is not a difference-maker exactly which high score you had.
And incidentally, at the end of this segment they describe this as a concept that might be surprising to some. So, I think they know there is a lot of reasoning of the sort, “If there are two otherwise identical candidates, but one has a high score and the other a higher score, they will admit the candidate with a higher score.” And they are trying to explain how in a multi-phase process where test scores matter a lot at an initial phase, but then stop mattering in the final phase, that sort of hypothetical is simply inapplicable, because that sort of comparison simply does not happen during the phase where final admissions decisions are made.
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Or we can look at the Harvard academic rating criteria. For an Academic 2, it is looking for mid to high 700’s per section or 33+ across all sections. While these scores may be dated, the point is that they pretty much put people in buckets after they pass a certain threshold. I think it also matters if the applicant has uneven scores if it is clear their interest and talents are stronger in 1 direction.
As for recruited athletes, they are looking for the best set of recruits that hit their academic threshold. The only exception might be where they have to hit a team minimum AI (similar) balance, and there is one or 2 very academically marginal recruits that they need to offset.
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