Colleges That Request AP Scores on Their Application Forms

[lrnprcll]

Lehigh University, i think.

[siserune]

(tokenadult: )
Harvard admission officer who visited his high school [said] that an applicant should report ALL applicable scores, that is all scores asked for in application questions. He said that cherry-picking which scores to self-report was viewed as dishonest and was more harmful to an application than simply listing, say, a few low scores along with higher scores.

Note that this directly contradicts the idea (which you have posted many times) that Harvard is interested only in the highest SAT scores, because it merely "superscores" the SAT and the other scores may as well not exist.

To answer calmom's question as to how such a situation could arise, suppose that an applicant took SAT-I, got low scores and submits a higher ACT score in lieu of the SAT-I, without reporting the SAT-I results on the application (since ACT is standing in for those). The problem is that Harvard also requires SAT-II subject tests, and the SAT-I results are included on the score report. So they would discover the unreported scores.

If Harvard were interested only in one's highest scores, and they certainly have a conversion of ACT to SAT that they use, this "deception" wouldn't matter, since the lower scores might as well not exist. But it does matter.

Harvard indicates at the college representative meetings (among other places) that it is interested in as much information as possible. It is the least likely school in the United States to pre-empt any piece of information, such as the lower test scores, from ever entering into consideration.

By the way, the strategic implication of the above is that applicants who might have low SAT can avoid this problem by taking ACT first (many times, if they think it helps). They can then opt out of ever taking SAT-I if the scores are high, and submit a clean SAT-II report.

[marite]

I don't think that Tokenadult's and siserune's reasonings need be at odds as they apply to very different things.

It is indeed possible for Harvard to consider only the best SAT scores (and indeed, many colleges claim to do so, not just Harvard).

Unlike the SAT exam, which can be taken multiple times, AP exams are only taken once for any particular subject. So it is indeed reasonable for a college to want to know how a student did in every AP subject the student took. For a student to list AP courses on his or her transcript but not AP scores (if taken before senior year) might lead to speculation as to the worth of the class or the performance of the student on the AP exam. If the student list only the good AP scores, that, too, might lead to speculation that the scores were less than stellar. The only way that a student could avoid listing low AP scores without giving rise to negative speculation is if the exams were self-studied for.

[siserune]

That's assuming that the Harvard officer referred exclusively to AP tests (or non-SAT's). Otherwise, there is an apparent contradiction with tokenadult's interpretation. If a link is posted to the thread of a few months ago, we can take a closer look. There is an ongoing thread to which I posted a day or two ago where the same issue came up with similar remarks from an admissions dean at Cornell.

Edit: here is the link to the other thread. The Cornell remarks are reported as unambiguously pertaining to SAT/ACT, as distinguished from further remarks of the same nature about AP.

SAT dilema

[siserune]

(marite: )
It is indeed possible for Harvard to consider only the best SAT scores (and indeed, many colleges claim to do so, not just Harvard).

The question at issue was not whether Harvard uses the highest scores (like almost all colleges, it states that it does) but whether an applicant is guaranteed that the lowest scores may as well have never existed.

That is, will an application, no matter the information on the SAT score report or other data elsewhere in the application, always be treated identically to the same application but with the SAT history replaced by a single SAT score equal to the "superscore" of the report?

There are few if any schools that have claimed to pre-empt consideration of the lower scores. For Harvard in particular it would certainly be out of character. They are quite interested in exceptionally high SAT scores, for example, as internal studies show those to be correlated with magna and summa degrees. There is quite a difference between getting a 2350 on the SAT in one sitting in the second year of high school, and scratching and clawing one's way upward from a 2050 to a superscored (not single sittingg) 2350 over five tests and two years. I assume admissions is aware of that.

[marite]

Siserune:

We cannot know, can we? We can only surmise.

I expect that my S high SAT score in 10th grade impressed the adcom and was instrumental in his admission. But there is no way of knowing whether he displaced some other applicant who got the same score after several tries, early in his senior year.
But anyway, this thread was not about SATs, it was about APs. And AP scores must be treated differently from SAT scores.
Apples and oranges tend to go into different recipes.

[Chedva]

There are two different issues in dealing with APs, which have gotten a bit confused on this thread:

1) Does it matter for admissions if a student takes courses designated AP? The answer is clearly yes, since schools are looking for the "hardest curriculum". That's where the high school report comes in - it shows which APs were available to the student.

2) Do the AP test scores hold particular weight in the admissions process? For many schools, I believe the answer is no - they may be considered but they are not necessarily a deciding factor. The fact that even the schools that do ask for them on the supplement do not require an official AP score report from the College Board indicates to me that AP scores do not carry much weight. (And no, many high schools, such as my d's, do not record AP scores on the transcript, although they do designate AP courses.)

[tokenadult]

Originally Posted by marite

It is indeed possible for Harvard to consider only the best SAT scores (and indeed, many colleges claim to do so, not just Harvard).

Indeed, maybe the offense taken at not reporting low scores comes from the admission office noticing that the student doesn't believe Harvard's repeated statements on this subject. The statements that Harvard "considers only your best scores" (that is Harvard's statement, in writing in the view book) could very well be consistent with a desire to get a full report of AP scores. The exact viewbook statement this year is

Originally Posted by Harvard admission office

If you submit more than one set of scores for any of the required tests, the Admissions Committee considers only your best scores—even if your strongest SAT Subject Tests or portions of the SAT Reasoning Test were taken on different dates.

Strictly speaking, because AP tests are not required in quite the same way as SAT I/ACT scores and SAT II scores, the statement by the Harvard class of '11 student that I have passed on (which I have not found in writing from the keyboards of the Harvard admission office) is fully consistent with the statement by the admission office in the Harvard viewbook. But it seems to me a perfectly rational admission office policy to try to obtain the most complete picture possible of an applicant's academic performance (including but definitely not limited to test-taking) while construing each instance of score scatter in light of the HIGHEST scores a student has obtained in the case of retakes.

There are abundant opportunities for parents to meet college admission officers, not only in the cities where the colleges are located but all over the country,

http://exploringcollegeoptions.org/

and one thing I highly recommend to parents who are curious about these issues is meeting the admission officers in person at public meetings, as I have repeatedly done, and asking them about whatever issue you are curious about in the presence of other parents, where vocal clues such as hesitation or immediate response and body language clues make possible a better nuanced interpretation of the official answer, as does the interactive nature of the public discussion.

[marite]

Chedva:

I do not know of high school transcripts that list AP scores--there may be, but AP scores are received in July, well after final grades have been computed. I realize that at SOME schools, AP scores are incorporated into the final grade, but these are a minority of schools. I know for certain that our school does not list AP scores.

I believe that only some colleges ask for AP scores. And if they ask, they must certainly take them into consideration--otherwise why even ask for them? I'd be extremely surprised if the 20 AP scores (15 5s and 5 4s, 8 of those in his junior year) that a friend of my S received played no role in his admission.

[CountingDown]

Then, of course, there are the courses that are NOT labeled AP at a high school because they cover more than the AP curriculum and/or are taught in one semester instead of two...and they are not labeled AP on the transcript!

Yet another reason to include the course descriptions in certain circumstances...

[Chedva]

marite, I think that anything that sets a student apart from the pack has an impact on admissions. Just the fact that your S's friend took those AP classes and got those scores does set him apart. (And please note, I never said that the AP scores have "no" effect; I said they have little weight, IMO.)

But for the average kid on CC who takes 3 or 4 and comes on asking, "I got a 2 on one of my tests. Am I sunk", I still think that it has little effect. Not nearly as much as the required SAT IIs, nor do good APs substitute for bad SAT IIs.

[kelsmom]

I can tell you that the Harvard admissions rep TOLD US at a reception that they do not care about the AP score ... they only care that the course was taken if available. This was echoed at the same reception by admissions reps from Penn, Georgetown, and Duke. In addition, when asked about taking the course from a local college rather than as an AP if the AP is offered at one's school, all 4 reps said NO --- even if the teacher is awful (the reason given by the questioner as to why he might choose the college course over the AP course).

I imagine that a school like Harvard asks for AP scores, even though they say they don't care about them, because everyone who got a 5 wants a place to list that fact. Or maybe because the 5 is a nice plus, but the 2 would just be ignored. If they are looking for ethical students, they would expect anything they ask for to be reported. For example, my D got sick during the ACT & had an abyssmal science score. She took the test again & did well. She never tried to hide the low score (or even to explain it), and it wasn't held against her in admissions (even by Tufts).

If you think that the "only" school where you could possibly be happy is Harvard (or some other school that requires AP scores on its app) ... and if you have a "low" AP score ... you might want to have a back-up school in mind.

[tokenadult]

If you think that the "only" school where you could possibly be happy is Harvard (or some other school that requires AP scores on its app) ... and if you have a "low" AP score ... you might want to have a back-up school in mind.

An important point. More generally, anybody applying to any of the colleges listed in post #1, which are all highly selective, had better think first about a good "safety" college that also offers academic challenge but additionally offers a sure bet for admission.

I take it that reply #27 is based on attending one of Exploring College Options sessions, which is something I did in my town. I don't recall, at the session I attended, a question that was quite as specific about AP scores as such. But I think what post #27 reports makes sense: the main issue for the college admission officers is that high school students take a challenging academic program (that WAS said at the program I attended) and in many cases a high school AP course, even one that yields a "low" student score on an AP test, may be more academically challenging than the "same" course taught at a local (community) college. Here in Minnesota, a lot of the students in the Twin Cities suburbs mull over the choice between going to a suburban high school with a lot of AP courses or going to the state university for dual-enrollment courses under the state's PSEO program. The highly selective colleges with a national draw admit some students of each kind each year. The main issue is not to take wimpy courses. It happens that both the male and the female AP state scholars from Minnesota in the most recent year are on their way to Harvard in the fall, but it certainly is imaginable to gain admission to Harvard from this state with fewer (or lower) AP test scores than what those students had.

[marite]

I think we need to take what the ad reps say at info sessions together with the CB's recently announced analysis of the whole AP program. Remember that Harvard's Fitzsimmons is on the CB Board and has reportedly said (I paraphrase) that "with APs, what you see is not always what you get." In other words, Fitzsimmons believes in the validating value of AP tests.

This does not mean that a student whose school does not offer APs is sunk at Harvard or anywhere else. Colleges do encourage students to take the most challenging curriculum *available to them". This is important to bear in mind. But when a student has a high AP course grade and a low AP score, some explanation is in order. Maybe the student was sick on the day. Maybe the teacher was lousy (but then how good an AP course was it?) In other words a low AP score will not automatically disqualify a student, but high AP scores will definitely advantage those who have them and be used to validate the AP course grade.

A problem with college courses is that adcoms do not know how to evaluate them. There are great and challenging college courses and some that are, charitably, not so great. Harvard has applied this belief so stringently that while it gives credit for APs, it gives no credit for any college courses taken in high school, even its own courses. In this sense, it is probably extreme; I know many other colleges give credit for college courses. But it is an illustration of the preference for APs. And by this, one means AP scores.

[calmom]

Originally Posted by marite

. So it is indeed reasonable for a college to want to know how a student did in every AP subject the student took.

At $85 a pop for the test, it certainly is not reasonable.

But that sentiment does illustrate once again how the entire process is stacked against students from low & middle income families.