Good for her!
I think Penn is currently on the bubble for S24, but I would also be fine if he struck it from the final list. At which point he would only be applying to one Ivy/T10/whatever at all, and that would be fine with me. I’m really proud of how that way of thinking just isn’t a concern of his.
I think when people are debating sending scores, they should at the very least consider numbers before COVID. This is an interesting table from Compass Prep.
A good friend’s kiddo is at a BS where the same is in force. She told me they recently got a lecture about how their kids were lucky enough to get the HS education they are getting and not to worry about where junior is going to college - there is a school for everyone. She told me that messaging met with mixed reactions.
Everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt - especially if you have a kiddo with a really high SAT score. For example, because so few kids score a 1580 or above not many students with S24’s gpa/SAT combo have been rejected from elite schools. Does this mean his chances are good . . . unfortunately, no. It just means there is a dearth of data points.
I can imagine! 
Almost exactly what you would expect if three things were true:
(1) The increased volume of total applications did not necessarily indicate a proportionate increase in the volume of actually competitive applications (otherwise the top end numbers likely should have gone up more);
(2) Test optional means cutting out of the enrolled data the scores of people who were admitted and enrolled despite unhelpful submitted scores, and therefore a large majority of the scores still in the data are actually now helpful (as evidenced by the bottom end numbers going up a lot more than the top end numbers); and therefore
(3) Submitting a test score within most of the enrolled range these days is likely helpful to avoiding your application being treated as part of the additional volume of applications not actually competitive.
Or, you know, what the Yale guy said.
Yeah, even if for a given school we have like 3/5 in a certain box, that is simply not enough data to generate a meaningful prediction, and in fact there undoubtedly was some sort of specific story about each of those 3 that this numerical data isn’t capturing.
So our counselors are pretty much never going to tell a kid that they have a great chance at these colleges based on their numbers alone.
Instead, the next step of the process is to use other information and experience to guide different such kids to different reaches depending on where they think the fit is best.
And I am quite sure that is part of why those boxes look good. A bunch of people with similar numbers but who were not good fits did not apply, and indeed collectively we are not getting too many such kids stomping on each other at too few colleges.
But in a way, this is something anyone can do even without a high-end college counseling staff. Places like this forum, in fact, can help guide individuals off the beaten path at their HS and into more creative, personalized, college lists.
How do admissions officers have time to mentally process all the nuances when they spend 5-10 minutes on an application and have to sort through a bunch of random EC’s and “President of the Taylor Swift appreciation club”?
They must identify patterns as pluses or minuses and look for those cues.
That’s a good point and illustrate the importance of being familiar with the region they are covering. I’m am sure they spend a little extra time on one off schools, but they can probably sort a yes/no/maybe from a school that sends applications regularly pretty fast.
Well, apparently at Yale part of the solution these days is to have an experienced AO run though a lot of applications much more quickly to sort out which ones really have a chance. Then the ones they see as having a chance are sent to regional readers who can spend more time with them, and then they can be discussed at greater length in committee, and so on.
I think another part of the solution, at least at Yale, is basically to hold the applicant responsible for highlighting what they should really be focusing on. They didn’t put it quite this starkly, but when I was listening to them talk about essays, recommendations, activity descriptions, and so on, it just seemed really clear to me that they are basically relying on all that to help them focus their review.
I think I have mentioned this before, but an analogy I like (not theirs, I should note) is I think sometimes people in situations like this basically hand someone a bag of Lego bricks and hope the target will figure out for themselves how to assemble those Lego bricks into something cool.
But they don’t have time for that, you need to give them the simple pictures that show how these bricks go together to make an X-Wing Fighter. Or a Zoo. Or a Bulldozer. Or a Harry Potter scene. Or whatever.
And the confusing thing to many is there is no one Lego set that gets admitted, and hence no one particular bag of bricks you need.
But, you very likely need to give these poor readers a good idea of what the bricks can build. If not, they will likely not admit you.
That analogy may or may not be helpful, but the point is I think it is pretty clear you need to be making it easy on these readers to understand what handful of things really makes you someone they should want to admit, and not just throw a bunch of stuff at them and hope they figure it out for themselves.
Your point is I should be listening to these podcasts instead of looking at my fantasy football league.
Neither D22 or D24’s schools did either A or B (as far as I know). Or maybe they did B upon request, but they certainly didn’t offer to show you the scatterplots or show you Navience or do anything to suggest that as a parent you might want to look at the data. The only way that I’d ever see that information is if one of the kids decided that she wanted to show me a college from their accounts when they were home during a school vacation. I don’t think it ever occurred to me until now that I might ask their college advisor for that info.
That’s exactly what we did. There was no offer, so we asked. To be clear, it was not an isolated ask, it was part of a broader discussion of list construction and risk assessment of same.
ETA: to be clear, the kids also do not have direct access to the data at our school. They too need to sit with their CCs to see it.
Ah, interesting. At both boarding schools, my kids did have access to this data going back 4 or 5 years, and I believe that was part of the process of forming a list. In fact, I think that I learned what Naviance does over either spring or summer vacation when D22 (my oldest) was a junior. I can’t remember which school break it was but the homework assignment was to create a list of reaches, targets and safeties. That was when she explained that she could use Naviance to examine past trends and see where her GPA & scores fit in those trends.
For our D23 I was a SCOIR addict for no good reason. Our D25 also has SCOIR but goes to a school that’s half the size and every single scattergram says “not enough information.” WHY GIVE US THE TOOL THEN. 
This data can be important for making a list. Most of our “likelies” get the “that’s not a safety” treatment here. They included schools like W&M and Colgate. While our school now has a policy of not labeling anything as a likely, it would have been extremely surprising for any of these schools to not workout, even more so one of four or five.
The way we officially define likelies, William & Mary cannot be a likely because its OOS admissions rate is too low (the relevant admit rate has to be over 50%).
That can seem conservative, and we certainly talk about harder and easier targets, but I think having a couple of strictly defined likelies has its benefits.
And Colgate’s acceptance rate is 12%. To me, that’s a reach for everyone.
And for that reason it was tagged as a likely. The reality of Scoir was different.
Yes, but to @DroidsLookingFor point, plenty of kids apply from our school and NO ONE above a certain gpa/test score that was more than comfortable for my D had been rejected or even WL in five years. For both of these schools.
Our D’s school used Naviance so I’m not familiar with SCOIR. For us, there was no way to see who was a recruited athlete, if they applied early decision, if they were a legacy, the major, etc… and the information proved not reliable. Plus some schools didn’t have many data points. The guidance counselor suggested creating the safety list based on acceptance rates, not Naviance results.
