Michigan State Honors Program vs. University of Michigan

[goldenboy8784]

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@bclintonk

I don’t think this is evidence that Brown is more “holistic.”

Alas, we already know that Brown is more “holistic” bclintonk since its more selective than Vanderbilt and ranks high on most Revealed Preference Surveys (usually right behind HYPSM) so high school seniors value it more than Vanderbilt.</p>

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@bclintonk

Except we don’t even know that, because we don’t know that they’re reporting either grades or test scores the same way. Brown might be reporting weighted GPAs while Vandy is reporting unweighted. Or, one or both of them might be reporting “recalculated” grades according to their own formula. Vandy shows higher ACT scores, 30-34 middle 50% compared to 29-33 for Brown; but Vandy may be reporting superscored ACTs and Brown not. We just don’t know. These so-called “objective” statistics are not necessarily comparable, and not at all transparent.

Don’t you think the CDS standardizes all of this? Obviously, all of the reported GPAs on the Common Data Set are unweighted. As for the test scores, only Notre Dame superscores the ACT and “superscoring” has almost no effect on score ranges since people don’t magically score higher on one section of the ACT and lower on another during a particular test date when the opposite was the true the examination before.</p>

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@bclintonk

Bottom line, such fine parsing based on so-called “objective” stats is a fool’s errand, because we don’t know the figures are comparable.

You’ve ignored the part of that section in the Common Data Sets that are transparent and not manipulable: the percentage of students scoring higher than 700, 600, etc. on a particular section. These statistics give us a rough idea of where the student body at certain schools fall in the score ranges of these standardized tests. Vanderbilt has 7-10% greater number of students scoring 700 or above on these tests than Brown. The difference in the number of students scoring 30 or higher on the ACT is even further skewed in favor of Vanderbilt-88% vs. 72%.</p>

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@bclintonk

Brown’s average ACT score is 31. As Alexandre has explained, that’s probably the average ACT score for Michigan engineering.

My claims are always substantiated bclintonk. You simply can’t compare ACT scores between Brown and Michigan since Brown is primarily a SAT school and Michigan is mainly an ACT institution. The weaker students at Brown tend to submit ACT scores while sending ACT scores is the norm for Michigan applicants.</p>