S24‘s school provides no access to any admissions data, so we are mostly flying blind. I‘d be curious what colleges seem to care the most about test scores - the types of schools where a 1500 does not seem good enough absent athlete status or the like. I have my own guesses about this (UChicago would be one), but no data to confirm.
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SCOIR is fun but it doesn’t tell you things like recruited athletes or such, so there is some guesswork involved in that.
So we apparently had an admit to Chicago with a 1350. The next lowest was a 33 ACT. So I don’t know the story behind the 1350, but that was likely some special case. Maybe the 33 too.
Then there are a bunch at 34+/1500+, including several right on that line, so that appears to be where most of the competitive applicants for Chicago are located.
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What has stood out to me when looking at SCOIR is that there haven’t been any acceptances at Cornell or Brown during RD over the past 3 years (at least that have been captured) - every single accepted student has been in the ED round, and I know that only a couple of them were athletes, as that is publicized.
Not understanding your point. All other things equal, an A in a rigorous class is better than a non-A in a rigorous class…
I find SCOIR to be sort of unhelpful - you have NO idea about the background of any of the kids, including recrutied athletes. I also find the pre-COVID #s to be not applicable.
That being said, in the past 3 years of my kids’ competitive public HS, 1/18 got into Princeton RD.
In contrast, 10/61 got into Brown!
Can you tell if they applied TO or not/Is your HS counselor loading data that way?
Yes. An A in a rigorous class is always great. But AVOIDING rigorous classes to keep a perfect transcript isn’t always a successful ploy. Kids think admissions is “rack and stack”- top scores and top grades means you’re in. But the admissions patterns (at least in my neck of the woods) show that the mega competitive schools take the kids they want to take. Which in some cases means a talented poet who got a B in BC Calculus; the super smart math kid who stretched herself by taking AP Spanish and getting a B+ when nobody would have blinked if she’d taken a lower level Spanish class and gotten an A. There’s a lot of angst associated with “protecting my GPA” in many HS’s, but the uber competitive colleges don’t seem as obsessed with the perfect transcript as the HS kids are.
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Agreed, but why not just get all As in the hardest classes to at least eliminate any uncertainty over academic ability…?
sure! Why not get a 1600/36, for that matter?
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We don’t seem to be tracking TO in SCOIR. The low test score also had a low GPA, however.
It looks like for Brown, in the database have 3 admitted RD, 5 admitted ED. Last three years it was 1 of the RD and 1 of the ED admits.
Cornell we had 5 RD admitted, 10 ED admitted. Last three years, it was 3 of the RD and 3 of the ED admits.
Edit: Just adding the rest of the ED Ivies. This will be RD/ED total, last three years in paren:
Columbia 0/4 (0/0)
Dartmouth 4/4 (4/2)
Penn 6/8 (4/1)
Overall if anything we seem to be doing better relatively in RD recently. Strange.
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Of course. Get A’s in AP Latin, BC Calc, AP Euro, AP Physics, AP Bio, AP American History, AP Lit. Tell your kids not to bother coming home with anything less.
For most HS kids- even many who end up at the mega competitive colleges- they don’t. They also sleep, practice the trombone, visit their elderly grandparents, work at the local diner, are responsible for younger siblings and housework, etc.
There are only 24 hours in a day.
You seem to be missing my point. But I’ve made it and am moving on. No college expects perfection. Kids think performance is everything- many colleges believe that rigor- when it’s coupled with intellectual curiosity and a drive to learn more- even at the expense of the perfect transcript-- is the right kid for their campus. And every April when the HS seniors are moaning that a kid “who wasn’t even Valedictorian” got into Princeton- there’s a reminder that the colleges take who they want to take. They aren’t obligated to take the kid with all A’s.
Moving on.
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Exactly right.
For the several years I monitored it, the valedictorian in our local public high school was not the one with the best college results. One year the val ended up at Cornell, another year WashU, another year Dartmouth. Certainly fine results of course, but not the colleges they were aiming for.
And every year, there would be a student or two who would get into three or more HYPSMs. Those students might be anywhere from 3rd through 10th in the class (in case you are wondering how I know, while our school doesn’t rank, the top-10 students are honored separately during graduation and in order of class rank, although that wasn’t explicitly said).
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Consistent with my observations that there are factors not visible to non AO’s that make certain candidates strong across elite schools as revealed in cross admissions results.
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The best point made here is that the colleges will take, at, end of the day, the kids they want.
Let’s be honest, the testing game is a cash cow and all the prep stuff/practice stuff is its own industry. Making people feel that it is a “measure of intelligence” is part of the marketing.
End of the day, students should apply to the school that values what they bring to the table. Some schools don’t go past the “test scores” and to be honest, if a student is more than a skilled test taker, they should go elsewhere.
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These are major issues.
You can try to do some tea leaf reading for the first bit (e.g. by assuming that clear outliers on a scattergram were hooked), but that’s imperfect at best.
Then you get the sort of opposite issue which is that obsessive parents don’t understand why Sally, whose score and GPA fall right within the Accepted cluster, doesn’t get in. Or worse, Sally creates a list assuming that these scatterplots have positive predictive value when in reality they truly only have negative (i.e. rejective) predictive value.
And then there’s what’s happened in the last two years.
Our tippy top BS agrees with these issues so deeply that:
A) They do not give parents direct access to Navience at all. Like I cannot sit there and play around with this stuff.
B) When the CCs sit with you (or screen share with you if remote) they’ll show you the scatterplots, but only for the last two years.
The school has clearly determined that (way) too much focus on this sort of hard data takes (way) too much focus away from the rest. And the rest obviously matters, perhaps more than ever.
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Those are probably good policies, and yet personally I am quite glad my HS just handed us the keys to SCOIR and lets us take it for unlimited reckless joyrides.
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Haha yes don’t get me wrong I’d love to tinker away at it!
Oh and also for the record the general discussion here aligns with what I’ve understood to be the reality behind TO.
Our school is the same way and when we started the journey we thought Penn would be perfect but she hated the area and will not even apply.
Yeah, while I personally think you are quite right to underscore the potential attitude problems if you see yourself in a greener zone, seeing where the deep red zones start (usually with many more data points) really does strike me as usefully predictive in the negative sense.
And frankly, although I never doubted them anyway, all this obviously supports our counselors strongly discouraging some people from submitting applications to some of these colleges.