@preppedparent, I agree with anyone who says you can up your odds by having something special like sports, ECs, etc, but are 99 percentile scores without anything else also considered special?
I guess only the AOs know what they are looking for. Oh, to be a fly on their walls!
I will say to anyone reading not to worry if you donât sound as amazing as some of the kids hereâŠapply and see what happens.
@Winter2018 Hello, the difference between a 99% and a 96% SSAT can be as small as 3 correct answers on the SSAT Verbal. Since kids can eliminate 5 choices down to 2-3 pretty easily, POTENTIALLY the difference between a 99% and 96% is as small as 3 questions on the test. It is highly unlikely a school is going to look at a 99% SSAT and say wow, we have an Einstein here. At a certain point, the ability to foresee an academic difference between one very high SSAT and another is not that great and can possibly be attributable to a few good guesses, or a silly mistake here or there. The SSAT is not the MCATs.
^^^probably not. Youâll see when you move on to elite college admissions. The cutting room floor of college elites are littered with kids with perfect SAT scores (itâs not enough), including my daughter. yup perfect score. WL - Harvard, Accepted - Penn and her first choice - Pomona as well as UCLA and a host of other good schools, but that alone doesnât account for getting in usually.
Thanks for making this, itâs really fascinating to read
Agree with some of the opinions and disagree with others. Basically, some people test really well. Not everyone has to prep to get a 99%. When you have kids who can test off the chart in SSAT, SAT and maybe even national math/science tests this counts for something ceteris paribus ( all things being equal) sorry had to use that phrase. The premise that some kid who tests 99% also does not have athletic ability, or social ability goes back to the fallacy that all people with high IQâs are socially inept. They are not. Many kids test in the top 5% and have all the other factors ( grades, athletics, musical/other abilities). They are stronger candidates. At BS and college as well.
I love the fact that they have national tests. Not all schools are the same. Some have âhonorsâ and other high level classes. Some teach at a high level for all. Some are low level. Not all Aâs are equal. The tests ensure that there is some metric which is the same for all. ( Yes, I realize not everyone tests well). There is no way you can tell me that some kid who says he is interested in math and gets an 85 and some kid who says he is interested in math and gets a perfect score and has won math olympiads etc are going into the same âmath kidâ pool. They are not. The schools even contact candidates who are highly interested in these fields.
One AO told me that they have X number of National Merits. This attracts other students to their school. I personally donât care about test scores ( my kiddo looked at SSAT info the night before the test). But all of the AOâs noted it.
Yes, BS accept a well rounded group which includes athletes, legacies, and super star academics. If a kid can fit into more than one box that can help a lot. But the schools will ensure they accept enough kids with extreme swings. They will get it with athletes via scores, musicians via tapes, artist via portfolios, and test scores for many other things.
Yes, kids need to be able to do the work. But the schools also need a handful of kids who are going to make the school shine in whatever way it can. One of these metrics is test scores.
We asked about importance of scores at most of our interviews as both kiddos score very high in verbal and low in math. Lawrenceville told us they could âeasily fill their entire class with perfect scoresâ but as they are building a well-rounded community, scores are not the most important aspect of an application to them and a wonky score will not keep a good kid out.
NMH told us that while what we are now calling âspikey kidsâ have an edge gaining FA, NMH also looks for what the AO at that time called âsticky kidsâ; kids who donât fill a particular bucket but that the AOs root for just as hard because they stand out as great kids. I am crossing my fingers and toes for all the âstickyâ kids tomorrow.
My own SSATs were 99th% and 6th%. This was a million moons ago and I got a letter from Andover saying they would love to take me if I could explain my math score and probably take math over the summer. To sum up, I would say a decent score wonât keep you out, and a wonky score will keep you up.
How could this possibly be right? Arenât there fewer than 30 or 40 (at most) perfect SSAT scores per year, for instance? 99% starts around 2320-ish most test administrations, and there are only about 600 in the top percentile. Even assuming a fat tail right at the limit because the test is not difficult enough to capture the full range of ability out there (as in the SAT), itâs hard to imagine that there are more than 40 who score 2400. Certainly not enough to fill Lawrencevilleâs entire class. Almost certainly not even a classroom of 12 once you realize that most perfect scorers are not considering boarding school and/or do not live within driving distance of Lawrenceville.
This was mentioned towards the start of the thread, but appears to have got lost. For day students, fac brats can take up a lot of seats, effectively reducing the acceptance rate for them. This would obviously depend on the year. Iâm not sure there is a limited number for them either.
Overall percentages are not useful in looking at the ease or difficulty of admission, especially the smaller the schoolâŠ
In almost all instances, admission committees are curating a class. Thus nearly everyone is competing in micro-segments (URM vs. URM, ORM vs. ORM, hockey player vs. hockey player, hockey player who is multi-sport vs. hockey player who is multi-sport, legacy vs. legacy, musician vs. musician, academic super star versus academic super star, FA applicant vs. FA applicant, development candidate vs. development candidate, international vs. international, faculty kid vs. faculty kid and on and on in all different kinds of combinations).
This is why it is so difficult, I would say, nigh impossible to predict who gets in, and why it seems so random on the outside. But it is not random on the inside. Admissions committees are like God assisting Noah fill the Ark.
On high test scores. They are very important - above 85%. To suggest otherwise is foolish. School have a great deal invested in having high average test scores, it signals competitiveness and academic quality and gives them reputational advantage. Most accepted students are tightly clustered around a schoolâs averages. Some will deviate above and some below this average. Those below are often strategic students, such as URMs, athletes and legacies. High test scores are necessary conditions for acceptance in most instances, but they are not sufficient for admissions.
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Higher than school average test scores are almost always required for financial aid, unless you are a strategic students, as noted above.
The best, most succinct description of the admissions process for highly selective institutions Iâve read was by another poster, @jzducol: âholistic by cohort.â Thatâs it, in a nutshell.
There is a group that is let in primarily on intelligence and academic accomplishments. But this group, at most boarding schools, is actually quite small (although likely responsible for an outside proportion of a schoolâs reputation for academic rigor and achievement).