Then my question on this is:
Does this mimic TO decision where counselor will check the box for the very top student and leave blank for everyone else?
If the College Board can figure out a way to make testing easier- particularly in low income urban and rural HS’s-- it’s a win for everyone. Despite the teeth grinding that testing is so stressful. But they cannot do that in a vacuum- they need the colleges to re-up and to declare that tests yield useful information (not determinative, not the be-all and end- all of existence- but useful).
So perhaps Dartmouth, MIT and the few other colleges are going to start the rush to the exits.
I’m willing to bet dinner that 5 years from now, TO longitudinal data will show that low income kids were the most impacted by TO; the kids who benefited the most were the ones with “fancy” EC’s which in most cases means a parent to chauffeur, the time and money to supervise, etc.
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It took a team from Harvard and Brown to come up with something I thought would be commonsense.
I just saw the line about dinner…
I think that schools are learning as they go along. MIT and GaTech both claim to have made progress on diversity even after reinstating testing requirement.
I also think we are getting a half explanation. I have no evidence other than Selingo and others generally referencing it, but my opinion is that some schools aren’t happy with the performance of their test optional admits compared to those that take the test. For various reasons, they don’t want to say this publicly. They do however want to continue to encourage minority/first gen applications with test scores on the lower side of their average to apply.
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Not sure, I personally haven’t seen that, but suppose some counselors might do that.
CT (afaik) still offers the SAT to grade 11 students statewide at no cost. It’s actually required instead of the former mastery tests that were given.
One reason for this is to take down the barrier of having to pay for and go take this test. It’s done on a weekday…at school.
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Dartmouth will continue to gets its applicants from California privates and Questbridge, which will guide the FGLI thru the process. If it misses some FGLI in Cali, it will take more from another state
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Dart also participates in the Posse Foundation
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That’s exactly what I had in mind in the post above. In its push to increase equity by going test blind, CA might have inadvertently disadvantaged these “diamonds in the rough.” But I don’t know the size of this group…
I agree with you on this point. At least at our CA HS, students are not encouraged to “waste” their time on standardized tests like the SAT because (as my son’s counselor told him) “these tests don’t matter any more.”
Our HS actually announced that they would discontinue offering the PSAT at our school this year… but I guess some parents complained and they changed their mind and are offering it again. Even so, only juniors are allowed to take it, and they don’t have enough seats for all juniors, so the seats are allocated by lottery (it’s been that way for ages, my S23 wasn’t able to take the PSAT due to the lottery system).
Same in Indiana and a few other states. I recall reading an NYT article on this recently. What’s also great is that it achieves multiple objectives in one step.
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True, but they will miss out on the QB students who apply TO (at a minimum), roughly 45% last year…so a limited pool compared to most of their peers.
Doesn’t that have an adverse impact on the National Merit competition and the benefits that come from being named a Semi-finalist/Finalist (including free rides to some schools)?
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When the school announced that they were discontinuing the PSAT, they included a little blurb about the alternative way to qualify for National Merit.
“Last year we found that juniors wishing to qualify for National Merit Scholarships could do so by validating that they were unable to take the PSAT and submitting an SAT score taken during the school year for scholarship consideration.”
Students and families really must have their act together to think about this, though. And most kids we know (even high stats kids) aren’t thinking seriously about National Merit because the cutoffs are quite high here in CA.
From my perspective the biggest problem with limiting / discontinuing the PSAT at our school is that I feel it discourages students from taking the SAT, which in turn limits the colleges and universities they consider applying to.
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That’s unacceptable for a public HS, IMO. I hope by the time my grandkids are in that HS the situation is different!
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Colorado does this, both for PSAT (9/10/11) and the SAT (all free, all during school days). At least in our district, if you miss the state-sponsored SAT day, you’re required to make it up (which we found out after D23, having already decided to use her far better ACT score for college apps, thought she would just skip the SAT day, with our approval, but the school decided otherwise!).
Ohio does this with the ACT.
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So assuming Dartmouth does want to admit more academically-qualified disadvantaged students, the question is going to be whether going test required will lose more applicants who would have applied AND qualified under test optional than it will gain by being able to qualify a higher percentage of disadvantaged applicants.
And I don’t know how that will actually work out in terms of the net effect, but presumably they have a lot more data about things like their outreach efforts, application dynamics under test optional, and so on that they can use to model such things.
And the important point, at least in what they are communicating, is it doesn’t really do them or the applicant much good to apply if Dartmouth cannot identify them as qualified. So even if they lose some volume of disadvantaged applications, if those applicants almost all could not have gotten admitted anyway, it isn’t going to really hurt their efforts.
All that said, I agree the plausible scale of any net effect, even charitably interpreting the data they published, is really small in terms of percentages of their total class. Which doesn’t mean they are not interested in incremental progress wherever they can get it, but I agree with those who suggest this is unlikely to radically transform who actually goes to Dartmouth.
I think NYC publics all do it for PSAT and SAT. I think many if not all also have a schoolday when 10th graders can take a practice PSAT in spring—PSAT10.
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