Agree. CC seems to be heavily East coasters and it’s hard for you all to understand how much test optional/ test blind has taken hold in the west. Almost all the western public schools are test blind and as a result many of the privates aren’t emphasizing tests now either. The Claremont colleges for example have low test submission rates.
It may be changing - Stanford and Caltech etc. but my kid has loads of friends who haven’t taken the SAT or ACT and the ones that do generally don’t prepare for it. S25 took the SAT once, did ok, and went TO. It will probably hurt him with some of his schools.
I definitely think many schools like Clemson are test preferred and should say so. All of the big southern publics seem to prefer test scores.
I think in a few years this will shake out somewhat but it’s a bummer when colleges are unclear about what they really want.
That is how I feel. Colleges should be honest with the students and let them apply accordingly. Test preferred might be more accurate at many test optional schools these days.
For now, I will consider any test optional school that shows test scores as ‘very important’ or ‘important’ on their CDS to be test preferred, at least for unhooked applicants. Always caveats and exceptions!
Hmm - my son was deferred with an SAT score of 1440, and many, many other kids with good SAT scores were deferred. I didn’t get the sense that it was TO that was the issue. It seemed to be rank/GPA preferred IMO.
That might be more analogous to the old situation where some colleges listed SAT subject tests as “recommended”, which was largely treated as “required” for students coming from more advantaged backgrounds as is typical on these forums.
Is that what most people believe, that people who are “advantaged” do not have a good reason not to test and submit? And colleges also see it that way?
Back in the “SAT subject tests recommended” days, colleges understood that students in less advantaged high school situations may not have been told (from counselors, teachers, other students, or parents) that SAT subject tests were “recommended” by some colleges.
Today, there may still be some issues with SAT or ACT access in some areas (e.g. not enough testing centers), which students in more advantaged situations are more likely to be able to work around. Students in more advantaged situations are also more likely to have multiple testings and/or test preparation.
There is an abundance of free and easily available ACT and SAT test prep resources. Both offer fee waivers for low-income families. The ACT fee waiver comes with free access to the Kaplan official self-paced prep course. The fee waivers come with unlimited score reporting to colleges.
Many students find it difficult to self teach subjects, and do test prep on their own. Limited income students often have gaps in their learning as well, especially in math. It is not setting up students for success to expect them to teach themselves math. Lastly, and someone touched upon this above, it is extremely difficult to get test seats in California and Washington.
I believe test blind for UCs and CSUs had put CA students in a disadvantage for OOS and highly selective college applications. Due to very limited test seats in CA, I know many families had to take day off and travel a few hours and stay overnight in hotel just for taking the test. Each time, it cost them a few hundreds. Therefore, many students just give up on SAT and only applying in state.
If you’re a disadvantaged student applying to OOS selectives from California, then California’s test blind approach results in a real obstacle for those who can’t afford to go to some other state where more test seats are available. Another example of California being out of step with national realities
Sorry if this is off topic, but just for my personal clarification, are “optional” videos not actually optional? I wouldn’t be surprised, though feels like I haven’t seen much chatter about this.
NGL - no parent I know has thought that the two groups were treated similarly if they were from privileged backgrounds. Within a group of students applying from the same high school or the same zip code (if it’s economically uniform), why WOULD a school treat the two groups similarly? Colleges need a way to differentiate. If you’ve got 5 applicants all with virtually the same GPA, course rigor, and ECs, and one kid doesn’t submit, that would raise questions. It might raise even more questions if all the other kids submitted AP scores, and this one didn’t either.
The colleges have implied something different to parents, and the many students being admitted to top tier schools, in the past 4 years, without tests - might feel differently.
So I was curious and googled a list of schools that give the “opportunity” to submit a video. Google, of course, isn’t entirely correct. The AI-generated list includes USC, which does not do so, as far as I can see; AI probably picked up something about auditions.
I will try to find some older threads to avoid taking this one off track…
In my experience, the few kids who applied test optional from my kids’ selective private high school didn’t do as well in admissions (except for the UCs) at “test optional” T20 schools. I heard this from other parents at other schools. I’m sure that’s NOT true for other schools without resources.