Admissions Question: Science GPA

Olo
Sat, 10 Dec 2005 02:38:25 +0000

@Mombot: I don’t know what kind of answer you’re looking for, so I will provide multiple. :)

If you look at the Common Data Set, you’ll see that ~11% of students at MIT got less than a 700. That number may be small, but it’s definitely significant.

The more important thing to remember, however, is context. Maybe your daughter is just a poor test-taker… that’s okay. Maybe she’s just so far into mathematics that she can’t remember the basic stuff, and that’s okay too.

Speaking as an SAT tutor, I can testify that the SAT math is more about tricking you than it is testing your mathematical aptitude. It’s testing your ability to recognize shortcuts and see things from different points of view. That’s why it’s called the SAT Reasoning Test, because it’s more of a test of reasoning skills than mathematical aptitude, and a lot of those “reasoning” skills are learned. It sounds like you may have looked into this, but definitely pick up some prep books (although NOT those horrible SparkNotes ones… Princeton Review and Barrons are fairly good) and do those practice tests over and over, trying to see common things the SAT checks for.

Also, if you think about it, your daughter’s AP Calculus grade represent a school year (usually 36 weeks) of ability, whereas her SAT represents about 3.6 hours (it’s gotten so much longer now, too. Blegh). In terms of mathematical aptitude, the AP calc will test what you know far more than the Math SAT I or even SAT II.

And of course, there is The One All Important Statistic ™: The acceptance rate of people who don’t apply is 0%. If your daughter honestly believes she’d fit at MIT, and that she would prosper there, she has no reason to withold an application.