I think these SAT stats are during test optional. I wonder what the ranges were when tests were required.
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They’re for the class of 2028. I know Columbia was TO for those, not sure about the others. Regardless, if OP is talking about “ballpark” those are the most objective data to use.
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I don’t know about Brown but the others are test optional. Many students don’t submit the score if they are below the 25% so their reported range is higher than the actual SAT range of applicants which means that a 1510 should be in the ballpark for the schools that are test optional and just slightly below or on the cusp for those that are not. However, the issue isn’t the score but rather that there are lots of students in this range. There were very close to 2 million SAT test takers in 2024 which means about 40k in the top 2%. This also doesn’t count the students who have taken the ACT and scored a 34 or above which will have some overlap but probably adds another 20k or more. Most of these students also have high GPAs since high SAT scores correlate with high grades. Not all will be applying to top universities but likely a large number will and many will also have strong profiles.
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Yes the score could be “good enough,” but it might not be “good enough” for a student graduating in the top 2% of their class from a competitive HS in northern NJ. There is no shortage of highly qualified applicants from this area.
You did not provide any details other than rank and test scores. Regardless…these schools are reaches and beyond that, there is not much more to say.
This is a strong student and there are plenty of schools that would be happy to have him.
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We truly appreciate all the suggestions—my questions have led to a lot of helpful insights. However, the purpose of this thread was never to try to chance my son. Unfortunately, the discussion has begun to drift off-topic, and it seems that some CC members are less open to differing views.
At this point, the conversation doesn’t seem productive.
Mods, please close the thread. Thank you.
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Again just some general notes about test score ranges:
As a baseline rule of thumb, I think advantaged kids from advantaged high schools applying unhooked need to be cautious about the competitiveness of scores in the lower end of those ranges. The basic idea is advantaged pool tends to get higher test scores and so you may need to as well.
I saw data consistent with this notion in our own feederish HS’s SCOIR scattergrams, but perhaps the best evidence is in this Dartmouth white paper explaining why they were going back to test required, particularly Figure 5:
Figure 5(a) indicates virtually every applicant with much over a 1500 was submitting a score (same with non-first-gens as per Figure 5(c); in fact Figure 4 has more detail still, but all the types of advantage max out). Then Figure 5(b) indicated the fraction admitted was sloping rapidly upward in this range. The data is too crude for this to be more than a rough estimate as they used 50 point bins, but the line they fit suggested about 10% of advantaged students with a 1500 were being admitted, whereas 1550+ it might be more like 25%.
Now we don’t know a lot of details, but we know from, say, the Harvard litigation that at least a decent number of acceptees to schools like this from more advantaged backgrounds are hooked–lots of legacies, some recruited athletes including “niche” sports, some faculty and staff kids, some Dean’s List, and in fact a decent number of URMs. That last category can no longer provide an automatic boost, but colleges can still consider individualized stories.
OK, so if you subtracted out all the hooked acceptees with circa 1500 SATs, what would be the admitted fraction at Dartmouth among unhooked but advantaged applicants? And same if you did that above 1550 instead? I don’t know, but I strongly suspect it would change from being around a 2.5:1 ratio to something much higher.
OK, so there is a lot of gap-filling going on here, but I am personally convinced the following is in fact true. Even in the test optional era, it was generally expected that successful unhooked but highly advantaged applicants would not only submit test scores, but actually have test scores in the higher part of these school’s reported ranges. There were certainly exceptions apparent in things like school scattergrams, but a lot of the exceptions were in fact hooked in some way. So for the unhooked applicant from a very advantaged background, it could in fact be a heavy lift to get admitted with “only” a test score in the lower part of their reported range.
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Closing at the OP’s request.
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