Hey! So, should I submit a 1450 (700 math and 750 r&w) to Middlebury, Colby, and Bowdoin?
Outside of that, I have a 4.0 UW/4.75 ish W. I also have decent extracurriculars but nothing truly crazy (raised over $30k in auction items for fundraising committee at extracurricular I started, NSA funded language program, run Instagram for extracurricular, and have Congressional Award where I pursued 100s of hours of activities in different areas for personal growth).
Yes. It is a decent score.
Yes! That’s a great score! The world of TO has skewed IMO what many students believe is a very strong score. Submit and know that no single factor is going to be the deciding variable. You seem to have put forth a strong application profile, good luck!
Yes! So many factors involved but that is a solid score. My son was admitted to Colby last spring with a 33 which I think is around a 1450-1480. He was waitlisted at Bowdoin. Work on your essays. Do the optional videos and interviews if you can. Best of luck!!
I mean 33 ACT score
Exactly !
As an example, I see on the Bowdoin College web site: “Fifty-four percent of students in the most recent incoming class chose not to submit their scores.”
It is possible that some applicants to Bowdoin did not take the SAT or ACT. However, it is more likely that the students who did not submit their SAT in most cases had lower scores compared to what the college has reported.
I am quite confident that the Bowdoin College admissions staff understand this. A similar argument could be made for just about any test optional college or university.
I am sure you are right. Bowdoin has been TO since 1969, and for quite a while, they did collect scores from enrolling students (even if they hadn’t submitted them as part of their application.) Few were disastrously low. One would assume they had some other reasonably accurate proxies for whatever the test was measuring.
1450 is an extraordinarily good score. Top 1%. I should think you’d want colleges to know that about you.
By the way, great job! 
Yes. Submit.
Midd yes. Colby and Bowdoin no as you are below the 25th percentile.
Now if you are a minority, first gen, or from a poor performing hs, then maybe yes.
It’s a great score but these schools aren’t looking to lower their ranges. Bowdoin starts at 1470. Midd 1440. Colby 1470.
That’s how I would handle anyway.
Good luck.
To put this question of “Should I or shouldn’t I?” In some perspective . . .
All 3 of these colleges are test optional, meaning that many applicants don’t even submit test scores. At Middlebury, the majority (51%) of admitted applicants didn’t submit any (either SAT or ACT) standardized test scores in the most recent year published (2022-23). At Bowdoin, 42% of admitted applicants didn’t submit any standardized test scores. Colby doesn’t publish this information, but I expect that their profile is similar, i.e. that 40-50% of successful applicants don’t submit any standardized test scores.
So what does this mean? Bowdoin tells us that standardized test scores are not a “very important” or even an “important” factor in their decision making. They’ll be “considered” if you want to submit them but that’s about it. Bowdoin has been test optional for more than 50 years, so they’re very experienced at making admissions decisions without relying heavily on SAT scores.
Middlebury says that standardized test scores are “important” but not “very important”, so they do say that they give them more attention than to just be “considered”. But again 51% of their successful applicants are admitted without them, so they are obviously not decisive.
Colby doesn’t tell us what priority they give to standardized test scores, but I expect that they have a similar policy to the other two especially since they too have been test optional for years, having made that decision in the pre-Covid era.
At least in my family you could have predicted test scores relatively accurately (including but not limited to my “gap” between Math and English scores) by just looking at our high school grades. In our case the SAT scores were essentially redundant information. I understand that this is not always the case, but a 4.0 unweighted and a 1450 SAT score are also providing consistent (very favorable) information.
I doubt that it will make much difference one way or another in this particular case. However 1450 is a very good score, and I don’t see how submitting it can hurt.
With that GPA I would submit.
User Group Percentile is what top schools use to rate and 1450 is top 4%.
For 2022-23, 36% of students submitted SAT scores for Colby.
And still an extraordinarily good score.
The 3 colleges in question are nit among those that use user group percentiles, so I fail to see the relevance of your comment to this thread.
Could you please cite your source for this information?
Just to show how much grade inflation there’s been with SAT scores, I started at Middlebury (late 80s) with a 1400 SAT, which placed me over 100 points above Middlebury’s average, and I think over U Chicago’s as well. Today, a 1400 seemingly isn’t worth submitting. Not a good trend!
@OregonDad24 , you can give yourself a bit of a break on that as the scores have been recentered a few times since then…
In the 80’s the scoring system for the SAT was different. In the 80’s the verbal had 75 minutes for 85 questions. The math had 75 minutes for 60 questions. Today’s digital version has 64 minutes for 54 questions in the reading and 70 minutes for 44 questions in the math.