Test required, optional, or blind?
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I know that these scattergrams may seem obvious to those who know about “institutional priorities”, but I think that there would be a lot of value in showing these to students aiming at highly selective schools. They would get a very concrete understanding that a rejection truly does not mean that their academic accomplishments didn’t measure up. They could see how often schools turn away top students and how often they accept students with significantly lower academic records. They could see how some colleges do this much more often than others, and know which ones are which. They could know it really isn’t about you.
Obviously, you might not want to show them their own high school’s scattergram if it would result in them being able to identify individual students. But maybe showing them the results for a high school very similar to their own.
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which school is that one? (I mean the one with all the green in the upper right).
optional
I’m curious too but there are only 7 schools that offer REA, so perhaps OP didn’t want to name the school.
I’m guessing, perhaps Caltech?
(ETA: never mind, OP said they’re test optional and Caltech is test blind)
I am very sorry, but I am not saying. I don’t want some angry AO or college counselor coming after me. And if I mention someone’s alma matter, people will get defensive.
I appreciate your understanding.
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It could be that the college with the few green surrounded in a sea of red is a school trying to accept fewer students, but ones they anticipate will attend. If the college accepts the high stats students (who have applied for a “safety”), their acceptance rate is higher, which impacts its overall ranking in WSJ, USNWR,Forbes, etc.
Notice the one singular accepted ED applicant had higher GPA compared with other ED applicants, and the accepted RD applicants fell into a sweet spot of GPA/test scores of highly qualified students likely to attend (except the outlier who someone mentioned is an athlete)
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Since the college is test optional (assuming not recommended or preferred), it can be presumed that the lower test scores were not submitted, so the scattergram showing the test scores may be misleading in that respect.
For the scattergram in post #13, is that college test required, recommended, optional, or blind?
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So trying to improve their yield, right? Yes, it seems that way to me too. But you never can truly know unless you are an insider. It could be a few different things.
I just find it interesting that the top 8 candidates, according to test scores and WGPA, got the axe.
For the other school…the top 8 according to the same criterion got in.
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Great point. Perhaps all the applicants with over 1400 submitted the test scores, and the college knowing they would likely go elsewhere with those scores rejected them.
Or the school looks at who performs well on standardized tests (those who have better access to test prep), and use those stats to guesstimate which applicants come from less socioeconomically backgrounds to create greater diversity
And our school is private with tremendous socioeconomic diversity. Poor kids and super rich kids and everything in between. Lots of racial/ethnic diversity too.
We are an athletics powerhouse, although I am pretty certain that I have identified the two athletes in question in the two graphs.
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I really don’t think you can extrapolate much that’s meaningful from this chart.
To consider the “axed” students the “top” is to really ignore what actually happens in HS. The tough, boot camp AP Euro history teacher who has 25 years of HS teaching under her belt who writes “Joanne is the most thoughtful and intellectually curious student I have taught in over ten years”. That’s going to mean more- much more- to a highly rejective college than an extra ten points on the SAT, two more A’s vs. A- in a couple of classes. And the Adcom’s at the highly rejectives- assuming the HS in question is something of a “feeder” know exactly who the bootcamp teachers are, and how difficult it is to impress them.
Most HS’s of any size have the cohort of kids who will do almost anything for an extra three points on a quiz. Retake, extra credit, whatever it takes. HS teachers usually don’t enjoy teaching these kids, and college professors absolutely don’t enjoy teaching these kids. The sky high GPA in these cases reflects grit and hard work- no question. But sometimes at the expense of intellectual engagement, curiosity, etc.
So the chart shows that Princeton or Harvard or wherever doesn’t admit by GPA and scores? Which we’ve known for twenty years?
How is this meaningful “data”? Don’t we all know scores of Vals and Sals who get shut out of their top choices?
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Besides the hiddenness of lower test scores at test optional colleges (an unsubmitted 1200 is the same as an unsubmitted 1400), does the college admit by major or division? If so, then perhaps the top stats rejected applicants applied to more selective majors or divisions than the lower stats admitted ones.
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Great question! I don’t know the answer to that.
I never made this claim. I said that it was “interesting.” And it is.
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Maybe I am being optimistic. It seems to me that academically strong students generally manage to get a very good education somewhere, even if it is not at a “top 20” university. Perhaps I have just met too many very good coworkers who did not attend “top 20” or even “top 50” schools, but who did very well.
I have wondered about this. When I graduated from MIT with a degree in mathematics the option of going to work on Wall Street did not even occur to me. I do not recall anyone in my class even considering a job in a financial field. Now it might be something that would draw a significant number of students who graduate from a highly ranked school with a degree in mathematics.
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Of course. “Why do you rob banks”? “Because that’s where the money is”. High finance is the ultimate meritocratic proving field. Highly advanced math, I mean stochastic calculus etc., gets you that extra edge.
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The first school looks like our NorCal HS’s results with USC (though this was with my older kids who applied pre-COVID when UCs were test required). The very top students would generally get into and attend UCB or UCLA while USC was treated as second best (lots of donut hole families for whom the cost difference was significant), so USC seemed to direct its admissions offers towards students who were one step down from that level.
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Yeah, the first one does look yield-protecty to me. I note when I saw similar patterns in SCOIR data for our feederish HS, there might be more waitlistings than straight rejections in the high end, but I am not sure how Maia is reporting waitlistings.
I note I don’t love the term yield protection because it seems to imply the point for the college is to manipulate some reported statistic. In fact yield is not widely reported, and I doubt that happens much if at all.
What I think may happen is a college may not want to hold open offers that its yield model says are extremely unlikely to enroll if in practice that would lead to more waitlist admits.
Like, say your usual RD yield is 20%. You might be fine if your yield model says an attractive applicant has a 20% chance of enrolling. You might even be fine if it says 10%. But what if it says 2%? 1%? 0.2%?
At a certain point, you might decide it simply is not worth it.
Anyway, obviously it is impossible to know for sure that is what is happening. But I do believe it can happen, and I agree that pattern at least suggests that is a plausible hypothesis.
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Maia doesn’t report waitlistings or…if it does, I don’t know how to see them.
Scoir was so much better. And we had 6 years of data. Now we have to almost start over.
I do think that yield matters tremendously to some schools and not just because low yield affects class building. It is like a lot of prestige things. It takes on a life of its own despite not having much actual utility. “80% of kids pick Harvard, but only 40% pick us? We’ll fix that!” Rather than doing something meaningful, like rennovating dorms, they manipulate statistics.
I also think that the overwhelming majority of schools could care less what their yield is. But we have two T20s here…they are built different.
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