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<p>My son had the flu the day he took the PSAT. It didn’t matter. Either you know this stuff or not; you’re not writing an award-winning essay or doing complex math. Sure, you might make a few sloppy mistakes or move through the test a bit more slowly, but the outcome wouldn’t drop you from 99th percentile to 35th percentile.</p>
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<p>You missed my point. The schools do not report “average” scores; they report median score ranges. From their published score ranges it is possible to know what percentage of students have scores on individual tests within each reported range. We don’t have to speculate how many students have scores of 690 or under at a given school – we know because the data is published. At UC Berkeley, which is not an elite private school serving mostly rich people but a flagship public, we know that the vast majority students score 690 or under; the reverse is true at Harvard.</p>
<p>One difference between Berkeley and Harvard is that there is a more vibrant and diverse academic community at Berkeley. Berkeley also has more students receiving Pell grants than all the Ivies put together. See: [UC</a> Berkeley Chancellor Keeps Hope Alive Despite Budget Challenges - NAM](<a href=“New America Media”>New America Media)</p>
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<p>That’s what I mean about the CC bubble, where the SAT test looms very large. It’s not that world I live in. I find it rather “farfetched” that a student would waste time retaking a test with no particular benefit.</p>
<p>Why should the kid retake? She was guaranteed a spot at a UC campus and her strong academic profile made her a likely admit to UC Berkeley. So assuming that she even had time to retake, what benefit is it to her?</p>
<p>If Yale reports 32 -35 as their ACT score 25-75 percentile, it obviously means they have 25 percent of people at or above 35, and 75% at or above 32 (2120 according to a conversion chart).</p>
<p>I am not going to assume the other 25% fell off the turnip truck with 22 (1500) scores.</p>
<p>I completely agree w/Calmom about retaking SAT/ACTs and the CC bubble. When I applied (when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth), the idea of multiple retakes was completely foreign to me and my peers.</p>
<p>My “retake” was to take the SAT despite a strong ACT (which was already generating lots of scholarship offers). And I was still the oddball, even in doing this.</p>
<p>T26E4 - based on who is getting in lately, I am not sure you would have made the cut. :D</p>
<p>" She is the recipient of a National Merit Scholarship. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking, making tea, and learning different languages. </p>
<p>She is the recipient of the Princeton Prize in Race Relations, gold medals for flash fiction and poetry from Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and summer scholarships to Morocco and Korea through the National Security Language Initiative for Youth and Korea-US Youth Network. She lists her favorite subjects as calculus and Arabic, and she plans to pursue a XXXX at Yale University."</p>
<p>“T26E4 - based on who is getting in lately, I am not sure you would have made the cut.” </p>
<p>Oh, don’t I know it. Lucky for me, the admit rate in those days was a workable 16% at my reach school and 25% at my 2nd choice.</p>
<p>The kids I regularly interview leave me agape – yet I know they’re still being turned down my my alma mater in droves.</p>
<p>To add specific numbers, I managed to dig up the UC Eligibility index from the time that the UC’s still required 5 tests, though not as far back as 1999. But I think the index would have been the same. </p>
<p>Here are some sample numbers (I’m not including every possible incarnation on the chart)</p>
<p>GPA 3.45+ SATs - 1858
GPA 3.3-3.34 SATs - 1942
GPA 3.0-3.04 SATs - 2338</p>
<p>Those SAT scores are the cumulative total of five SATs – so any kid with a 3.45 GPA or above could qualify for the UC system with an average score of 380 per exam. </p>
<p>The kid with the low math SAT had well above a 3.45 GPA (more like a 4.18 weighted GPA) - and a combined SAT score of 920. So she needed to have 940 on the three SAT II subject tests combined (averaging 320 per exam). Her bigger problem was timing: she had to sit for 5 exams, requiring a minimum of 2 sittings. </p>
<p>So retaking in that context is not only unnecessary - it’s kind of nutty. It takes time, costs money, and would give no benefit.</p>
<p>The UC admission system has since changed to eliminate the SAT II requirement, in part because of findings that the requirement of multiple test sittings was a deterrent to lower income students. The current scoring system would give her a greater benefit for her higher GPA than the previous system (a 4.0 student would now have a score advantage over a 3.5 student whereas previously they were all lumped together)</p>
<p>Wow, that’s incredible, calmom. The combination of 3.45+ and 5 SAT tests totalling 1858 would get a student nowhere in my state (well, not literally, but not to one of the better schools). Does Berkeley have a separate Eligibility Index?</p>
<p>No, “eligibility” is state wide, but each campus has its own internal selection criteria. A UC-eligible resident is guaranteed a spot at a UC campus, but not necessarily the one they choose.</p>
<p>The whole point of those numbers is that the UC system values GPA very highly. Test scores are primarily of importance to bolster a weak GPA. So if you look at it from a UC ad com’s point of view:</p>
<p>The girl with the low SATs had what they were looking for. (stellar GPA)</p>
<p>Let me ask you this: if you could read all the essays & look the transcripts without looking at test scores (and pretending like you had never seen them) - how would you rank the applications?</p>
<p>Here’s the link again if you want to try that exercise:
<a href=“http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/who/1.html[/url]”>http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/who/1.html</a></p>
<p>calmom, as I recall, Berkeley did an analysis of the GPAs of students from different California high schools. (I think I saw the link on CC once.) I would probably use the information from that analysis as the prima facie estimate of the validity of the high school GPA, rather than taking the GPA as a stand-alone number. </p>
<p>I’ll take a look at the transcript information and essays again, and let you know what I think.</p>
<p>I started through the essays, and in file #1 ran into the problem that I really do not know how to evaluate an applicant whose first language is Spanish. Applicant #1 either had a lot of typos and errors in the essay, or else had a hand-written essay that was poorly transcribed. I can’t tell which. Also, assuming that the student is a prospective music major, the quality of the person’s music performance is probably the over-riding factor, rather than any particular academic aspects of the record. So I would have to pass on assessing applicant #1 at all.</p>
<p>I will go back later on to look at the others–not ducking the question, just busy at the moment.</p>
<p>Berkeley doesn’t have an audition-based music performance program, and applicant #1 wrote that she took up the flute in 4th grade but that her school lacked a program. The only music-related EC was singing in her church choir. So that wouldn’t have been a factor or an admissions boost. It’s possible to apply to Berkeley and other UC’s as “undeclared” – so it probably make sense to assume all but the kid who was applying to EECS (the engineering school) to be undeclared apps to Letters & Science (the liberal arts college)</p>
<p>Neither Berkeley nor any other ad com, Harvard included, is evaluating essays based on minor grammatical or spelling errors, typos, etc. – they are reading for content. You are right that it is very possible that a 1999 submission could have been handwritten. At the time the app probably asked for 1,000-word “Personal Statement” that would answer 3 specific questions – I don’t remember what those questions were, but at least one would have been a diversity/ hardship focused question. All of the essays have a kind of rambling structure, but that’s probably an artifact of the specific instructions for Personal Statement. </p>
<p>Here’s the review process that was in place in 1999:</p>
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<p>See BERKELEY’S COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW METHOD FOR MAKING FRESHMAN ADMISSIONS DECISIONS:AN ASSESSMENT (2004) <a href=“http://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/committees/aepe/hout_report_0.pdf[/url]”>http://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/committees/aepe/hout_report_0.pdf</a></p>
<p>mygosh. are you guys still discussing this? Here’s the summary. Some think admissions is a complete crapshoot. Others think it’s well planned, efficient, and the best way to force creativity, and diversity into top schools. That’s it. For those of you that just joined this thread, apparently it will be ongoing forever. Just come back in a few weeks…and they’ll still be circulating the same arguments. Whichever position you take will be trumped, and refuted by the admissions professionals, and researchers on the other side.</p>
<p>Hey, MitchKreyben, one doesn’t reach 3,415 posts or 9,963 posts without saying the same things in a few different locales, on occasion.</p>
<p>Actually, I think that the comments by the admissions professionals and those who understand how admissions currently operates are enormously helpful to students in understanding their true chances of admission at “top” schools, and in knowing how to enhance their chances while retaining their integrity. CC has advanced a lot over the years in the information that it provides (when read sensibly).</p>
<p>On the other hand, there are some, who to varying degrees and for varying reasons, think that the current admissions process is not the best of all possible processes. I don’t agree with all of the concerns about it, but I do agree with a few. For example, I support affirmative action, which some do not; but I think that it is important to see what a student can get out of a school, as well as what the student brings to it.</p>
<p>Thanks for the commentary, calmom. I will make some time to look at the other Berkeley applicants.</p>
<p>I respect your opinions on this, and certainly your right to continue the discussion…no question. And will conceded that the lengthy discussion may bring value to some. And this is truly no offense intended. But the value that this thread brought to me was to in essence prove that the process is so byzantine, that the code is not crack-able, by mere mortal applicants who don’t spend as much time studying the application process as they did studying for finals, standardized tests, and writing their essays.</p>
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Actually, I found it relatively straightforward, but it differs from one college to the next. The problem is that many applicants persist in seeing different colleges as if they are all the same – as if Princeton and Harvard and Yale and Columbia all have an identical admissions process, and as if those are the only colleges on the planet worth aspiring to. So people don’t do the basic research that should be the starting point, well ahead of preparing an application. </p>
<p>People also conflate the idea of preparing a targeted application with guaranteed admission, which obviously is not possible in a competitive process. There is always going to be someone else who has the potential to win out over you, whether you are applying to college, applying for a job, or running a race.</p>
<p>calmom, I am interested in how you perceive the differences between Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, in terms of what they are looking for in applicants, and what the differences are in their admissions processes.</p>
<p>I think that the situation with applying for a job is really quite different from applying for college. When a person is applying for a job, there may be a single opening. There might be more openings, but with a number in the single digits. In those circumstances, it is not realistic to expect to be selected for a particular, individual job. However, it is possible in my opinion for a student to realistically be among the top 1000 high school seniors.</p>
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<p>Mitch is right, this is getting repetitive. I already posted that info upthread when I first weighed in. It’s detailed in my post #483 about “Factor X” – see <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/15988559-post483.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/15988559-post483.html</a></p>
<p>Each college has its own set of needs. It might vary from one year to the next, but there is a lot of data readily available to ascertain what priorities might be for that college.</p>