<p>^^I agree. It’s pretty meaningless. It’s used as a reason to reject top students by saying, “Well, everyone we take is academically qualified” as if there is no difference between a 3.5 UW gpa student and the val who has won state academic competitions. They should just say, “we don’t care how smart you are as long as you are capable of passing (or getting a “B” in) our classes. Beyond passing level, we just look at your EC involvement, etc.”</p>
<p>Why do you think that means “average”?<br>
In any given year, about 1 million students take the SAT and 1 million take the ACT. This means around 2 million students are headed to college; about 100,000 apply to HYPS (and that is overstating the number since there is a good chance that they will apply to more than one college). The SAT median scores are in the low 500s. There may be outliers who have one (but not all) scores in the upper 500s, but they constitute a small percentage of the students who are admitted. I also suspect that there are very few students with low SATS and GPAs who apply–self-selection is at work. I remember the skepticism that greeted Marilee Jones’ claim that MIT looked for applicants with SAT scores 600 or above. I don’t think that students with scores in that range rushed to submit an application. In fact, I’m not even sure there were students with those kinds of scores at the info session.</p>
<p>Marite,</p>
<p>If you think the term qualified has meaning then define it in some way that someone could actually test whether or not a particular student was or was not “qualified.” If it can’t be defined and measured, the phrase is just so much smoke. If the definition is “good enough to graduate” surely you would agree that hundreds of thousands of students would meet that standard even at HYPS. </p>
<p>For those who think this is a straw man I just visited another thread in which someone was arguing that legacy preferences were OK because the beneficiaries were all “qualified.” This argument is used all the time as though it had some substantive meaning, which it clearly does not.</p>
<p><a href=“Northstarmom:”>quote</a>
At some highly competitive colleges, that graduation rate for black students is higher than that for white students at those colleges. There’s no evidence that students of any color who don’t graduate from the below colleges are not qualified for admission.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Actually, your list makes the point nicely about different admission standards showing up in the (non)graduation rates. Have you noticed that the first 3 schools on JBHE’s list, out of a grand total of 4-5 where blacks graduate at a higher rate than whites, are women’s colleges? This increases the black vs white graduation for two reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The difference between male and female graduation rate is much higher for blacks than whites, so one expects any natural gap in the black/white rates to be narrowed.</p></li>
<li><p>Varsity athletics at women’s schools, other than basketball, is in sports that are overwhelmingly white (to a lesser extent Asian, and in any case not black). The white graduation rates are dragged down by athletic preferences.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>
</p>
<p>If the numbers are contaminated by transfers, then we really only know the rates at the top schools where few transfer out. For those schools, your numbers have blacks NONgraduating at two, three or more times the rate of whites (and a larger discrepancy relative to Asians, the last time I saw the data broken down by race).</p>
<p>"I think collegealum has stated the definition that adcoms tend to mean when they toss the term around. My point is that by that standard there are hundreds of thousands of students who would be “qualified” at HYPS. "</p>
<p>You are right. Admissions officers at those schools will agree with you. From those hundreds of thousands of qualified potential applicants, admissions officers wish to select the most well rounded class possible meaning there are students in all majors who are able to graduate with degrees in those majors, including obscure ones, the colleges’ hundreds of student-run ECs are flourishing, and the campus has students from a variety of socioeconomic, regional, racial, religious, political, etc. backgrounds.</p>
<p>In a way, you are right, as long as “qualified” means “able to do the work at HYPS” rather than at some institution where the reading assignments are not supposed to exceed 25 pages per week.<br>
Another way of thinking about it is that in 2003, the enrolled class at Princeton had SAT scores 25%-75% 1380-1560 and a 98% freshman retention rate. We don’t know why 2% left, but let’s assume it’s because they could not do the work. First, in order for the bottom 25% to have scores of 1380, it means that about 200-250 must have had at least one score below 700. Second, 98% of an entering class of 1,000 is 20. If we assume that the 20 who dropped out all came from among the 200-250, it means the rest could do the work. In Princeton terms, they, as well as those who scored 1380+, were qualified.</p>
<p>Or take the University of Chicago. Its 25-75% SAT range was 1300-1480 and its freshman retention rate was 94%. I am a bit leery to ascribe its lower retention rate to the lower SAT score of the bottom 25% as I know that some students realize, once they are there, that the Chicago Core is not really their cup of tea. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that they turned out not to be qualified. Again, the Chicago entering class is about 1,000, meaning that 250 or so had SAT scores in the 650 range in both M and V. A 6% drop out rate would yield 60 students, not 250. </p>
<p>So, whether at Chicago or Princeton, it seems to me that Marilee Jones was not in error when suggesting that students who scored 600+ in both parts of the SAT could do the work–and thus were qualified. Unless one wants to argue that the workload and level of difficulty at Chicago is a joke, then I think “qualified to do the work at Chicago” is a pretty high standard. I do not know how many SAT takers scored 1300 in 2003, but I assume they were numerous.</p>
<p>For me, “qualified” means smart enough and motivated enough to get some benefit out of the resources and opportunities offered by a particular university that might not be available generally, and of a personal character to make a positive contribution to the student community at that university. So, for me, the minimum SAT score for an elite university is relatively low, but it would have to be accompanied by some very positive other qualities for the student to be “qualified”. </p>
<p>It’s completely artificial to argue that the obviously correct statement that many students with 600 SATs can do the work at Harvard equates to the silly proposition that all students with 600 SATs are qualified to attend Harvard. SATs in the 600s are not a disqualification, but they aren’t sufficient either.</p>
<p>
Herein lies the problem. Selective colleges have foregone a “test” as the definition of qualified for how long now? Most on this thread are in agreement that there is not a single test or series of tests which can accurately calibrate qualified.</p>
<p>If you want to talk meaningless, let’s look at the notion that a test can calibrate qualified. Let’s say we agree on a cutoff, as I believe the OP would like. Let’s say we agree the cutoff, using the SAT, is 650. By that reckoning, an applicant with a 649 (if they measured it to that degree) or 640 (and they do measure to that degree) is “unqualified.” Now <em>there</em> is an embodiment of meaningless. There is more than ample evidence that the difference between a 650 and a 640 is meaningless. Which is why the whole notion that there could be a test, with a cutoff point, which establishes qualified is a non-starter.</p>
<p>In addition, studentscould get test scores below the so-called qualification because the students were ill, the test administrators timed the test incorrectly, etc.</p>
<p>“If we assume that the 20 who dropped out all came from among the 200-250, it means the rest could do the work.”</p>
<p>I know that Marite, who posted the above, was making a point, not posting out of a belief that all 20 drop-outs were students who couldn’t hack the academics. </p>
<p>After all, Bill Gates is a Harvard drop-out.</p>
<p>NSM: Yes, I was assuming, for the mere sake or argument. There are many reasons to drop out of college after freshman year. during the financial crisis of the late 1990s, students dropped out of colleges in droves because their parents, who had been paying full freight, became suddenly unable to do so. Harvard was one of the colleges that stepped into the breach and forked out $8 million to keep students from dropping out for financial rather than academic or other personal reasons.
To follow on jmmom’s argument, I have argued elsewhere that adcoms do not want to box themselves in by drawing hard and fast lines. There are talents and skills that cannot be judged by numbers, in particular artistic talent; there are students who are enormously lopsided.</p>
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<p>If you insist, you can look at SAT scores from the CDS’s, the most easily quantified and least useful measure: the Ivies always have 2-3% of their admits with at least one section score on the SAT in the high 500s (and a quarter of the class or more with at least one score in the 600-690 range). So by that single measure, maybe the bar doesn’t look very high.</p>
<p>But, c’mon . . . . surely it goes without saying that, in the real world of elite admissions, previous “raw” academic achievement is not the only factor. The vast majority of the admits are from the top of the admissible pool; those few for whom the question of the “admissibility floor” even comes into play will be under consideration because they bring some unique off-setting talent, ability, experience, background (or wealthy relative) to the mix. And who’d want to attend a college that, year after year, failed to admit those artists, athletes, URMs, quirky, angular students, international students, and even big development prospects?</p>
<p>It is not impossible to have a quatifiable test that does not use the SAT’s. Able to graduate is a quantifiable test. It is just a very low bar.</p>
<p>If you think that being able to graduate from Chicago is a very low bar, then yes, it is.</p>
<p>I already told you I excluded caltech and chicago and a few other schools like them. But I do include HYPS.</p>
<p>I think we actually have a consensus. “Qualified” means being able to graduate. You can think of it as a high bar, if you want to. From now on I would appreciate it if those who use the “qualified” argument would just substitute the words “able to graduate” for “qualified” and see if the argument still strikes you as particularly impressive.</p>
<p>I can see excluding Caltech but why do you exclude Chicago? It has the least quantifiable standards since it puts more weight on essays than on scores. </p>
<p>I am glad, however, that colleges admit individual students, not bundles of statistics.</p>
<p>I only cite the SAT’s with some frequency because it is the only objective data we have to work with (adcoms have SAT II’s, AP’s, and GPA’s normed by the HS’s grade distributions and SAT’s). I exclude Chicago because of its reputation for academic rigor, which is the same reason why I exclude Caltech.</p>
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<p>It may be true that U Chicago puts more weight on essays than many other schools do, but data indicate that SAT I scores are hardly irrelevant to their decision process.</p>
<p>According to the SAT I data listed on the 2007 USNWR (soon to be updated), the Univ. of Chicago’s 25-75 spread is 1350-1530. That is higher than some Ivy schools (eg U Penn), is not all that far behind HYP (30-50 points) and is within 10 points of Stanford.</p>
<p>I am not a big fan of relying on the application essays as a basis for admission (since they are so easily ghost written or coached). But that is another debate.</p>