I submitted a 1450 and a 3.78. I think it’s def still based on circumstance. I go to a boarding prep school but I’m FGLI, came from a more illiterate background, etc. and my school counselor encouraged me to (and discussed with the department as well). It’s better to submit then not.
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And for what it is worth, I am sure your counselor is right that is also the sort of context that Yale AO was talking about. As he explained, they want to admit people with your sort of background, and they want you to submit high test scores (and of course a 1450 is still quite high) because that helps them admit more such people.
I’m also dead sure one of the doctor or lawyer kids at my feederish HS would need a higher score, but that is fine with me.
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It’s certainly plausible that there’s a shift back toward test-required (although I think it’s more likely that we’ll see variations on “test preferred” or more nuanced definitions of TO), but I don’t think the dates when schools have announced their policies is a good indicator of future behavior. Cornell is a good example, given that 40%+ of enrolled students in 2022 didn’t submit scores and three of their schools are score-free. The idea that they’d swing all the way to test-required next year seems unlikely. Vassar (not on your list) didn’t announce its permanent TO policy until April of this year—very late relative to other TO announcements. When we toured Vassar in October 2022, the AO we spoke to said he had no idea when the decision for 2024 would be made and strongly implied the whole thing was up in the air and unknowable. I wasn’t surprised when the announcement came as late as it did.
These are big policy decisions, and universities move notoriously slowly on things like this; I work at a top 25 university and can vouch for this personally. They will announce when they’ve done all of the committee work and managed all of the politics, and not before.
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im from an underrepresented state that is pretty rural…im also fgli and urm, i applied REA to yale test optional do you think this will hurt me given the director’s words?
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Did you have a test score to submit, and if so what was it?
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Will an applicant with a 1570 always be accepted over an applicant with a 1530? No.
Will an applicant with a 1570 always be treated as equal to an applicant with a 1530? No.
Those 40 points don’t guarantee anything, but in the rarefied air of admissions at highly selective institutions, they matter.
no i didn’t i took the act the first time during Ramadan (which is a time when Muslims fast) so I found it extremely hard to focus and got a 26. couldn’t retake it over the summer because i was working above 40 hrs a week and couldn’t retake it in the fall because im working crazy hours as well. But my grades are stellar, I got into competitive fly ins, and so are my extracurriculars and recommendations I assume.
Really? I mean I’ve told my S24 multiple times that the 1580 he got on the SAT (800M/780EBRW) is not going to be a distinguishing factor (he also has a 3.98 UW). That isn’t to take anything away from him - he is a brilliant student - but the mantra here on CC is that average excellent students like him are a dime a dozen and have pretty low odds of getting into a T20 (he didn’t apply to any HYPSM although he has a couple of T20 on his list).
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Do you have anything you can point to that supports your position?
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Despite being told fairly explicitly by the deans of admission at Yale and Dartmouth that they do not.
Ok.
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So my two cents is:
(A) It is a moot issue if you don’t have a high test score to submit, and of course everyone is lacking many things that could be helpful. Like, would it help if your father gave them $100 million? Sure. Is it therefore hurtful if your father didn’t give them $100 million? You could put it that way, but I wouldn’t. And for that matter, there are people who would undoubtedly have a much better chance if they had your background (and nothing else changed, which makes this a rather thin hypothetical), rather than being a multi-generational ORM from a large metro area. But again they can’t do anything about that, and everyone is like that–some helpful things they do have, and some other helpful things they don’t have;
(B) Specific to what the Yale AO said, I took him to be saying he thought it would help more people from underresourced/disadvantaged background to submit test scores, but he definitely was not saying every such Yale admit had submitted a test score. He was more saying he wished they could admit even more such people.
OK, so it seems clear to me some people with such backgrounds are going to get admitted test optional. And you might well be one of them. But you also may not. And I would again not spend time worrying about things that could help others but that you don’t have. It is true of basically everyone.
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Thank you for the detailed response.
Really? I’m going to guess you are looking at a correlation and assuming there’s a causal relationship.
Playing the oboe matters at a college which needs an oboe player for its symphony because the current one is graduating. it does NOT matter at a college with a plethora of accomplished oboe players who are freshman, sophomores and juniors-- and a long list of applicants who play the oboe.
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These things aren’t even close to being absolutes. And, in fact, they are directly contradicted by interviews with AOs cited in this thread.
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I believe that – at a very few schools – 40 points are relevant. My only evidence is correlation, but the correlation is pretty strong for a few colleges based on our school’s Naviance data.
One example: Penn. 108 kids applied there over the last 5 years. Every single admitted kid had a minimum 1550. No exceptions. We are in a well-resourced public school with 3-4 kids going to Penn a year – so this data isn’t relevant to most high schools. But I do think that 40 points may well make a difference at Penn.
Cornell: 197 applications over last 5 years. Nearly every accepted kid had minimum 1490. A much much larger range of SAT scores.
Our Harvard and Yale kids all had minimum 1560 – but there were far fewer admits, so who knows.
I don’t think anyone can say x score was determinative – but I also think a 1580 puts you in a better position than a 1520 at some score-sensitive schools.
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Maybe or maybe not.
I’d need to understand the applicant pool you are looking at before drawing any conclusions.
For example- Cornell- are you in NY State, and how many of the applications were to Arts and Sciences vs. the other colleges?
Penn- how many were legacy and how many of those legacies applied early?
Harvard/Yale-- by “fewer” admits- are you talking 3 per year or 8 per year? And look at the rejected pile as well. Were the rejected kids meaningfully lower in terms of stats, or likely other things?
At my own kids HS-- now going back a few years- the “paper stats” at Harvard/Yale weren’t meaningfully different in terms of stats accepted vs. rejected. It was the stuff you couldn’t see that made the difference. One kid who was choosing between Yale and Julliard. So we aren’t talking “Kid who likes music” EC. We’re talking conservatory level musician who had the option of Julliard or majoring in CS and continuing to pursue music at a non-conservatory.
How many of those kids exist in any single year? 30? 10? 3? And since they don’t all apply to the same non-conservatory programs, they get distributed around the country at Harvard, Yale, Rice, Chicago, Pomona, Stanford, Columbia, Amherst…
I don’t think Harvard or Yale care about 40 points- there are so many other factors that come into play.
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Let’s be perfectly clear @Thorsmom66, a 3.98/1580 kid is more than average excellent. That’s discipline - your S24 is academically elite. I hope he has a few elite state schools on his list, just for fun. Those are great numbers - congrats on being such a supportive parent. We all know it’s not easy. 
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That is really sweet of you to say. More importantly, he is a really nice kid - very kind. Yes, he does have several elite schools on his list so we’ll see. It’s tough for the unhooked so you just don’t know.
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Yes, what the Yale AO said is not inconsistent with propositions like that an unhooked kid applying from a very-high-resource high school may need a VERY high test score to pass their initial academic screen.
I really don’t feel like this is enough data, but I at least have SCOIR data for our HS for Harvard, Stanford, and MIT (not Yale and Princeton), for which I have 5, 3, and 4 admits respectively.
The lowest scores among the admits was a 1530 at Harvard (REA) and a 1550 at MIT (EA). In what I suspect is not a coincidence, the highest GPA among all 12 admits was the 1550 at MIT, and second was the 1530 at Harvard.
As soon as I switch to Penn, though, there are now way more admits to begin with–15. And then all but 2 of those were actually 1540/35 or LOWER. But in the 1480-1500 range, it looks like again you likely needed very good grades (within that group) to be seriously competitive for admission–only 3 of those. There were a couple more much lower I suspect were hooked.
And then that leaves like 8 in the 1520-1540/35 range. And actually, within that cohort they had similarly high grades to the 1480-1500 group, but it was more common among them to have such grades.
Anyway, point being I am pretty sure the HSM-type schools have a stricter academic screen than Penn and such when it comes to our HS. And yes, possibly without some sort of hook or a really stellar GPA, it might actually take higher than a 1530, or even 1550, at those particular colleges.
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It is, very tough. That’s why the balanced application portfolio is so critical. Sure, Johnny may not need to attend ball-of-fun, D1 sports, beautiful campus that’s going to offer an attractive package, but he should apply.
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