Application statistics

JHS
Mon, 28 Jan 2013 19:21:01 +0000

mekozak – I don’t doubt that in Michigan (a natural ACT state) many high ACT scorers also take the SAT, especially at schools where students are trying to “maximize their chance of getting a really high score,” but the converse isn’t necessarily true on the coasts. While it is increasingly common for students to take both, someone who scores 2300 or higher on an SAT test is unlikely to feel like it’s necessary to take the ACT, too. And not every high-scoring student attends a school where the general culture is to obsess about getting high scores.

Frankly, I don’t understand why someone who takes one of the tests and gets a really high score would bother taking the other, since they are complete substitutes.

Nationwide, I think there are about 1.6 million kids taking each test, but only about 3 million kids going to college (and not all of them take either of the tests). I was basing my estimate on the idea that about 40% of high-scoring test-takers would take the ACT alone; that’s a guess, but I don’t think it’s a horrible one. There will be students who take both, but only score 2300 or its equivalent on one of the tests, so I think that does expand the pool somewhat, too.

Remember, I was talking about the total national pool, not the Harvard applicant pool. Checking Harvard’s admitted student numbers, about 1/3 submitted ACT scores, but only 10% submitted only ACT scores (and notice that only 22% submitted both). I suspect the proportion in the applicant pool is higher than 10%, but it certainly isn’t 40%. But all I said about Harvard was that I thought “several thousand” (meaning in my mind two or more) of that pool applied to Harvard. It may be less, I don’t know, but it’s not a really small number.

Brown gives more detail, and probably isn’t a terrible proxy for Harvard in terms of proportions. Last year, it got 28,700 applications, of which about 22,700 submitted SATs and 10,700 submitted ACTs. So about 21% of Brown applicants submitted ACT scores only, and slightly fewer submitted both types of test scores. Brown got 5,500 applications with SAT CR scores 750 or more (and many more math and writing scores that high – 7,400 and 6,700 respectively). I don’t think it’s a crazy estimate to think Brown had 1,500-2,000 2300 SATs applying, or about 7-9% of SAT-submitting applicants. On the ACT side, it got only 143 36s, and you can’t tell exactly but it looks like high hundreds of 35s, so maybe 800-1,000 between the two of them, for about the same 8-9% of ACT submitters.

Brown also got applications from 1,600 valedictorians (a decent number of whom probably had 4.0s), and fewer than 40% of its applicants had a class rank (although some of the valedictorians may have come from non-ranking schools).

The bottom line, for me, is that Brown looks like it got applications from at least 2,000, maybe more, 2300 SAT equivalents, so it’s unlikely Harvard got fewer such applications. And Brown had maybe hundreds of 4.0 students applying, so ditto Harvard. And there ought to be a fair overlap between those two groups. And, by the way, Brown accepted about 25% of the valedictorians, about 20% of the people who scored 800s on an SAT section, and about 25% of the ACT 35-36s. Those are pretty good numbers, but it doesn’t make me think that a 4.0, 2300 kid is a shoo-in at Brown. And if not at Brown, then not likely at Harvard, either.