<p>AGmom – What I meant to convey was that one’s status as an auto admit or as an auto academic admit does NOT merit you special status w.r.t engineering admission. Students must still have the requisite math scores and required HS coursework. That said, being an auto admit of some type does get you ‘first crack’ at getting in and that is always preferred.</p>
<p>The ACT/SAT expected grade formula stuff is actually public information. The formulas for UT are easy to find, and A&M, as a state school in Texas, operates much like UT. HB 588 applies equally to both schools, both schools answer to the same politicians, etc.</p>
<p>Numerous research studies are available on the freshman GPA topic and also on whether these test scores correlate, or not, with IQ. Freshman year GPA is commonly used as the proxy for academic success and the usage of the individual section scores is the norm. Given all the research into the topic, NOT using the individual scores and only using the composite could be considered negligent. </p>
<p>A&M uses section scores for auto academic admission. The A&M website has that, to get auto academic admission, the student must have ACT English & Math scores >= 27 or >= 600 in SAT Math and CR OR a combined 1300 in SAT Math & CR. The composite score is not mentioned nor are the other section scores. Curious. In effect, A&M is giving you a peak behind the admissions curtain as to what really matters … (Engineering is just a bit different from the university as a whole. We all should agree on the need for a high Math score. Whether everyone agrees on whether CR or Writing is more important is more of an academic style discussion.)</p>
<p>With the ACT, the Math and English scores have, by far, the strongest predictive power. Public universities keep massive amounts of data on students (class rank, test scores, ethnicity, county, school district, high school, etc.) and all this data gets fed to statisticians to help the school improve admission decisions. Since A&M gets something like 50,000 applications a year, the admission people need methods to sort and categorize applications. These expected GPA formulas are a sound statistical method for taking class rank and test score data and producing a single, easy to understand statistic to help simplify the holistic decision process. </p>
<p>The lawsuits involving UT and Michigan together with the internet have made much of this information more widely available. Since this information may not be commonly known, I thought I’d post on the topic.</p>