For English they reviewed essay , citizenship if there was evidence of plagiarism or academic dishonesty and so on. They didn’t list others
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So it was sort of a two-part discussion. They introduced the six basic factors In Episode 26: Should I Even Apply? Here is what they said about that last factor:
HANNAH: All right. Our last necessary but not sufficient criterion is maturity, independence, and interpersonal skills to live on a college campus with other people from very diverse backgrounds.
MARK: Yeah. This one’s a little bit vague understandably but again, sometimes we read applications from students who are just clearly not very interested in using their four year college experience to live and learn with other people from a diverse set of backgrounds. That’s a really important part of the education that we’re offering here. So you need to be interested in that.
You also need to be ready for that. If that seems like something you would rather avoid, there might be a very different excellent school that’s available for you. But you would be again barking up the wrong tree if you’re looking at Yale.
I find that pretty intriguing, actually. How does an application make it that clear the applicant is not interested in, and/or wants to avoid, living and learning from people from diverse backgrounds? Apparently this happens often enough they thought it worth mentioning, but I really wonder what in practice causes them to see this as an issue.
But in any event, apparently such red flags can be spotted quickly by an experienced AO.
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I will rephrase - in the fields in which I have been active that graph would never have been acceptable. I was not aware that some fields have different standards. Well, I knew that there were fields in which much of the research was based on faulty statistics and hypothesis testing, but not that there were fields in which it was acceptable to present means on a graph without error bars.
I feel that Dartmouth, for their own reasons, to meet their own institutional goals, have decided to require SAT scores. I think that this is the way that they wish to justify their decision. So I don’t think that their decision was based on these data and on this particular analysis.
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I am leaning this way too.
Fwiw, our high school doesn’t make a big deal about testing either. They haven’t announced our school-day SAT yet although I know it’s coming up in March because I seek this kind of info out. I swear for the PSAT they sent one email a week before alluding to the PSAT and that was it. No suggestion to do the practice test in bluebook or anything. It’s almost like they try to sneak it in on the down-low so kids don’t purposefully skip school that day!
Our school average is 1073 & state is 986 (SAT not ACT obviously.)
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Sure, that’s possible, but here’s what the new Dartmouth President said they did, from the NYT article:
Last summer, Sian Beilock — a cognitive scientist who had previously run Barnard College in New York — became the president of Dartmouth. After arriving, she asked a few Dartmouth professors to do an internal study on standardized tests. Like many other colleges during the Covid pandemic, Dartmouth dropped its requirement that applicants submit an SAT or ACT score. With the pandemic over and students again able to take the tests, Dartmouth’s admissions team was thinking about reinstating the requirement. Beilock wanted to know what the evidence showed.
(We know the NYT, or at least this writer, has chosen a side on this topic, but that doesn’t change this section.)
So either we believe the President was coming from a neutral perspective, or we think they had an agenda and didn’t really care about the data. I prefer to take the statements as given in good faith.
Alternatively, @MWolf, is there something that Dartmouth could show you that could convince you that they’re making a data-driven decision? Yes, you can nitpick what they chose to show you (and I think it’s nitpicking), but I’m not sure you’re coming at it from a neutral perspective either.
(I’m not trying to create conflict, to be clear, and I respect anyone who will engage in this. I’m just saying that if you begin with the hypothesis that the people who disagree with you are cooking the books or acting in bad faith, it’s difficult to be convinced you might be wrong.)
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The graphs they showed were not meant for an academic journal, nor even for internal discussions among knowledgeable staff. Graphs and associated tables for these audiences should have the number of samples, error bars, R^2 numbers, etc.
However, once that internal decision was made, Dartmouth then had to communicate this decision to the general public, and the additional information would simply be confusing for them. Simple graphs are the right way to communicate with the general public.
But, as an aside, I also have a pet peeve with their graphs. Their Y axis says percent, but has an apparent range of 0 to 1, rather than 0 to 100.
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They are representing percent as a decimal. 0.05= 5%. Happens a lot.
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I’m actually curious about where Dartmouth got the SAT info for rejected kids from under represented communities who did not submit scores (who they suggest could have been accepted had they submitted). Did they go back and ask them for their scores as part of their research or did that sample consist entirely of kids who initially submitted scores and then asked them not to be considered (how many could that even be). Or is this some kind of estimate they made using publicly available data.
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Per the paper, they had a subsample of people who originally submitted scores, but then asked Dartmouth not to use them for admissions purposes. I do wonder how large this sample could possibly be, particularly in the 1500s.
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It is probably very small - especially if you add on the filter of being from an under represented group.
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Being an active part of the college community (academic and social) is a big deal in Yale’s decision rubric. It is a specific prompt in our interview report. In the Yale specific essays and short answers, the Why Yale essay may lead to insights. Two of the three optional essays, one on an opposing view and the other on community, would also give them insight as well as some of the EC’s.
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Agreed. Also this one, re why most schools will not undo TO:
“at most colleges those concerns are secondary to those tied to meeting enrollment targets”
That’s pretty much been my thesis all along.
I guess my question is how can they get to a negative answer so fast such that this is part of the initial review? Like off hand at least, what you are describing would seem to be mostly matters for full holistic review.
But to be clear, this is not a rhetorical question, I am just curious.
Probably the absence or superficial indicias of valuing community and interacting with different people and opinions. Is the focus of the app a bragging sheet about the applicant’s accomplishments or are there elements of teamwork and working/interacting with others outside their immediate circle? I would agree that there are very few if any that would get auto-rejected from this alone – they were probably weak in one or more of the other 6 factors.
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Yeah, as I understand it, the initial review result is pretty much a simple yes/no for full review. So while all of the six factors may be on their mind (and in fact they didn’t say that was an exhaustive list), there would not necessarily need to be a “failing grade” on one in particular, just a collective judgment that the applicant was not competitive.
By the way, I know this is a Dartmouth discussion, but I do think it is relevant for context, because as I understand it, Dartmouth is NOT doing the same thing at the initial cut phase. They seem to be much more focused on just the academic question, which they seem to believe is more amenable to an automated approach, and in turn that could explain why they are relatively eager for more data to throw into the machine for that purpose.
Which is not to say I know that Yale won’t follow suit in terms of actually requiring tests, but my point is there are in fact differences in process that may lead to different colleges going different ways.
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Same thoughts. It would be nice if these “initial review filtering criteria” were better explained. Anything involving filtering via essays sounds like a massive undertaking for just a subgroup within the admissions office. Leveraging automation for that task makes me nervous as well. If they do indeed have a solution, it would be cool to understand how.
I would suggest that the same is true for all highly selective private schools, unis and lacs, including Dartmouth. They just have different ways to assess participation.
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Maybe we should put together a group letter of friendly questions for the Yale Admissions Podcast . . . .
Honestly the Dartmouth thing I get. After watching the Holy Cross video (linked above), looking at documentation on Landscape, and so on, it made intuitive sense to me that today’s technology could be used to automate that specific part of the process, and indeed improve it in the sense of making it more standardized than a cohort of humans could achieve.
The Yale thing I sorta get too, but not so clearly. I feel like they are all but saying there are certain types of applications they are getting a lot of these days that these senior AOs can quickly identify as not what they are looking for. And that makes sense to me conceptually, I am just less confident I really know what that means in practice. I mean, I could speculate, and it would be informed speculation in the sense I think they are pretty good about explaining what they are looking for generally. But that is still less concrete in my mind than what I envision Dartmouth to be doing.
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For instance, Columbia adcoms are very turned off by ‘Why us’ statements that boil down to “I’ve always wanted to live in NYC and you’re an Ivy so, duh” - as a result they are very efficient wrt this, but it’s never “1st round”.
Before the pandemic led to the TO trend, some universities like Middlebury or NYU had an interesting approach: submit any sort of external test/exam. Middlebury wanted 1 STEM, 1 Humanities&Social science, 1 your choice, for instance. So, it could be SAT or ACT scores, or AP stats+APUSH+AP Spanish (or Ap calculus Ap PhysicsC and AP Human Geography…)
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