Really, I think the key point for students to remember is that at the top, top schools, a SAT score can only hurt one’s application. </p>
<p>A good score does absolutely nothing to move one’s application towards the admit pile, since the admissions committee knows that: (a) there are random variations in day-to-day test taking ability (as mentioned), (b) the SAT can be more or less gamed by significant studying and utilizing expensive preparatory courses, and (c) the level of knowledge that the SAT questions is far too low-level (i.e. algebra and reading comprehension) to indicate mastery in higher level course work. </p>
<p>However, a bad score can mean a lot. It means that the student cannot grasp the basic concepts of the test - algebra, reading comprehension, and writing/grammar. These skills in themselves are obviously important prerequisites to a successful college education and could suggest that a student would not be able to do well or even graduate at a difficult institution. Of course there are exceptions to this in that some people are simply not good multiple-choice test-takers, and other students may not have the resources to adequately prepare for the exam, but most schools try to understand and account for these possibilities.</p>
<p>Basically I’m saying that high scores are necessary, but by no means sufficient, for acceptance to top schools; I agree with you that it’s sort of tragic that some students can’t be convinced of this.</p>
<p>Tokenadult, maybe the immigrant parents are wiser than you think. They may sense their kids have the horsepower to put down power scores. I’d say that a summer at home reading good books, mowing lawns and maybe working through the Ten Real SATs would be cheaper and probably more helpful than a summer playing the violin by a lake. Moreover, now that the SAT includes an essay, these test-obsessed kids of immigrants (aka Asians) will become more literate than the kids at expensive summer programs. Maybe not Harvard admits but achievers nonetheless. Harvard’s loss.</p>
Yes, surely a top score on a SAT writing essay is a wondrous literary achievement…</p>
<p>Also, for the record, I’m not suggesting that students shouldn’t study for the SAT. Colleges expect them to study for it, and if taking practice tests / prep classes improve their scores into the 50-75 percentile for a target school, that is probably a worthwhile thing to do (in terms of gaining admissions). However, I think what many students don’t seem to understand is that beyond this threshold, a higher score is inconsequential, and their time and resources can be far better spent on classes, ECs, or more difficult exams.</p>
<p>I think Harvard tends to prefer students who spent their summer attending TASP or RSI to students who spent the same summer doing test prep. MIT prefers students who did RSI or SSP, I think.</p>
<p>Tokenadult, here’s some more number crunching for you: The top 15 National Research Universities (per US News) have a total combined freshman class of about 24,000 students. The 75th percentile for test scores at those schools is right around that 1/2 of 1% mark – the roughly 12,000 test takers who scored 34 ACT and corresponding SATs and above. So of those roughly 12,000 high test scorers, about 6,000 will in fact will be enrolling in Ivy League schools, Stanford, Duke, Chicago, Northwestern, MIT, CalTech and WUSTL. The other 6,000 will end up somewhere else - LAC’s, state schools like UVa, UMich, Berkeley, etc. My guess is that quite a few will end up at good, but by no means renowned colleges and universities.</p>
<p>Yes, surely a top score on a SAT writing essay is a wondrous literary achievement…</p>
<p>Ahh . . . yes . . . spoken like many of my Mom friends who have "arty’ kids who can’t write a well crafted essay without help from mommy, teacher, tutor, etc. </p>
<p>The addition of the essay has been a true stroke of genius in weeding out the kids with lots of handlers.</p>
The writing section of both the ACT and SAT sections are complete jokes. They don’t test for any type of writing skills, only that you can write a generic 5 paragraph essay at an 8th grade level. You don’t need to be able to write a well-crafted essay to get a perfect score.</p>
I assume that by “well crafted”, you mean an essay in five-paragraph form. That is of course a useful skill, but it hardly demonstrates exceptional writing ability. I do agree with you that at least it eliminates applicants who have absolutely no idea how to form middle-school quality essays, though I’m not convinced that’s a “true stroke of genius.”</p>
<p>edit: I see that hotpiece101 posted pretty much what I said as well. Also, very few people who know me would call me artsy.</p>
<p>OK - perhaps numbers-based admissions are flawed. But isn’t that how top colleges used to pick admits years ago? I remember my brother getting into Cornell on the weight of his GPA and SAT - no stunning ECs to speak of. Didn’t those students go on to be good alumni?<br>
So our son applied to Cornell with a top GPA and tough classes, top SAT scores and healthy but not spectacular ECs. Rejected - along with a number of his high achieving friends. Perhaps there are just too many slots for too few students but it’s just so hard to predict who gets into these places!
Bottom line is I think the holistic process creates quite a bit of anxiety - and contributes to kids applying to multiple top schools as a way of increasing their chances. A son of a friend applied to ALL the Ivies last year with a great profile and was rejected or waitlisted at all of them. Then got in off the waitlist with one and is thrilled. So that’s the way to play this game? Apply to all of them, get a lot of help with your essays, and don’t forget to do stuff that impresses ADCOMs . Yuk…</p>
But that’s the whole point. You have two alternative measures – one of which is shown to have an economic bias, whereas the other doesn’t. If you are a state university or favor an egalitarian society (same opportunities for all regardless of income or social class), then you are going to start with the measure that is unbiased, and use the secondary measure only if it adds value. </p>
<p>To start the other way around – to begin with the SAT and give that primacy over the GPA-- is to inject a known bias into the system. They get the same predictive value, but a somewhat different set of students – one that is known to be skewed toward the wealthier students. </p>
<p>Now that might make sense for a private college which charges in excess of $40K annual tuition: pay lip service to being need-blind and offering guaranteed financial aid to needy students, but make sure that the admission criteria will inevitably result in a critical mass of full-pay students. </p>
<p>But the mission of the public institution is to serve all students equally, regardless of economic or social class. Far from putting a thumb on the scale of the data, I think the research did exactly what it was supposed to do – I think there would be an interesting civil rights law suit if it could be demonstrated that a public institution chose a class-biased measure over an unbiased measure of equivalent value.</p>
<p>Ok, cghen and her ilk – so you think the SAT writing section is a joke. Why then does it have the harshest curve of all the SAT sections? I don’t think it’s a joke. I think, in fact, that it is the very best tool we’ve come across to weed out the overly privledged, tutored, handled kids from the pack and find out who can think on their feet and produce in a very limited amount of time a wriiten product of coherent thought. Sure, the classically structured essay is beneath us all, cghen, but all of us are most certainly not demonstrating the capability of producing one under stress and without coaching. At age seventeen, I think we just need kids to show they can produce a solid essay. All this recent business of writing geniuses cropping up in high school has demonstated, quite tragically, what nonsense that is. If I were in charge of admissions at a college, I would only accept writing samples produced under controlled circumstances. The “brilliant essay” getting the so-so SAT scorere into an Ivy is ridiculous.</p>
<p>Yuk is right. The holistic approach has scattered the energies of our kids in a ridiculous quest to be “unique” when what they should be doing is learning math, grammar, etc. so that they can grow up and make a real contribution to society. Instead, they’re all trying to be president of their school’s save darfur club and write existential poetry that dad or mom gets published in an old college friends “journal.”</p>
Mammall, most top schools don’t even use the SAT/ACT writing test because they too realize that the writing portion is complete bs. These kids aren’t producing solid essays, they are producing mindless generic stuff, that many test prep classes easily teach to. Pick up any SAT test prep book and you’ll see tips (that’ll most likely work) for writing a crappy 5-paragraph essay that will give you a perfect score. Peruse the SAT/ACT board and you’ll see many brilliant CC students lament how they recieved a relatively low score on the writing. </p>
<p>I personally scored very high on the writing section, but I did it by writing FAR below my usual level.</p>
<p>And the reason it has the harshest curve is because it penalizes for creativity. Deviate from the 5-paragraph format and your score decreases, refuse to write in the first person (as I was taught was mildly inappropriate for any formal essay), and your score decreases. You’ll find that kids who have perfect scores of 5 on the AP English Literature Test and the AP English Language Test, do not get perfect scores on the SAT writing.</p>
I’m not buying it … as an alumni interviewer I have met a ton of kids who were excellent students and were also articulate and passionate about something. And I do not believe these kids were coached into their interview performance … it pretty hard to fake the eyes, body language, and intensity one’s passion elicits. Many comments in these strings talk about kids doing things to look go for admissions … I firmly believe the schools are looking for the kids who look good to admissions because they do things. And I’ve met a ton of them … excellent students, with some outside passion, and who would make great contributors to any school’s community.</p>
<p>I’m out on this thread. Didn’t mean to get so entangled in the discussion. Let me just end my participation by telling you that I absolutely don’t buy that a 2300=2400. Sorry! Just don’t. Nothing vested here. My kids haven’t even taken the SAT yet. I’m just really sick of all the double-talk going on in education. And I’ve looked pretty closely at the new SAT and I think all the sarcasm about the essay is a bunch of sour grapes. A 12 appears to be quite rare and I will do all I can to help my kids get it. Bye!</p>
<p>I think it would be unfortunate not to value the english recommendation just because most often essays are not written under “controlled” circumstances. </p>
<p>If you’re good at english, you can be a fully mature writer by the time you are 17. I don’t think it matters whether or not they published in a journal, but if they’re talented then give credit for that. I don’t think it’s too common to have parents doing their kid’s homework, is it? Hopefully the teacher can tell if something weird like that is going on.</p>
<p>I used to have some hour-long essay tests for my freshman english class. It was enormously stressful although I did well on them. But then, they weren’t on dumb topics like the SAT Writing…they were about literature. I do feel that people, especially perfectionists, may do worse on the timed format.</p>
<p>Why do you think that GPA has no bias? Don’t you think that the curriculum is biased despite the best efforts of teachers to address the issue? Isn’t the kid who’s just immigrated and whose command of English is limited hampered in comparison with native English speakers? I can well remember my first year in college totally flummoxed by sports lingo sprinkled through daily speech. What did "off the wall’ “out of left field” “got to third base” “the whole nine yards” and so on mean? And that’s not counting the Jewish jokes :)</p>
<p>3 to go
Yeah I know brilliant kids too and most of them DID get into one of the top schools on their list. But I know a few who were obsessed with filling up their resumes and writing the “perfect” essay - some of those were successful too.
There is no perfect system for admissions. Not all kids who are 17 have found their passion yet - although they may be excellent students. With so many kids applying to multiple schools, it makes it that much harder for the very bright but not spectacular kids to get in.
It seems to me that the schools should do a better job of explaining what they want - instead of inviting everyone to apply, using highly subjective standards, and then rejecting the majority. Guess this method helps their stats and ranking though…</p>
<p>'I’m not buying it … as an alumni interviewer I have met a ton of kids who were excellent students and were also articulate and passionate about something. And I do not believe these kids were coached into their interview performance … '</p>
<p>I agree. And the evidence that those students who get accepted by the most competitive colleges are the real deal is that when they go to college, they spend their free time being deeply involved in extracurriculars that are student run and that students do for pure pleasure, not for money or to get class credit. </p>
<p>At Harvard, for instance, the annual Arts First weekend results in 200 visual, dance, theatrical and other performances by students, the majority of whom are doing this for pure fun – not because they are taking classes related to it.</p>
<p>Despite Harvard’s having no theater major, there are about 70 student theatrical productions a year. Again, the students participate because that’s their idea of fun.</p>
<p>Phillips Brooks House, the student-run public service organization on campus, has 72 committees, and 1,700 student volunteers even though Harvard doesn’t have a community service requirement for students.</p>
<p>Even though Harvard has no journalism major, students literally experience cut throat competition get on the unpaid staff of the student-run daily newspaper, where the last time I visited it, about 8 years ago, students were deciding whether to purchase the building next door and put a color printing press there.</p>
<p>H has more than 300 student groups and 41 varsity sports (more NCAA teams than any other college) even though its undergraduate population is only 6,650.</p>