I’m not cynical about the intent at all. I actually believe that these schools were legitimately interested in increasing the number of kids from low income backgrounds long before 2020. They just were not very successful in getting them to apply. That’s because getting out the message that a 1350/1400 SAT score coming from a school where 900 is the norm is difficult - especially given the fact that some people working with these kids have a negative view of tests. Add to that the fact that only 25% of low income kids even take the test (and I’m certain it is even lower now) and you are talking about a significant barrier.
Very good point. At my kids school many of the top kids really don’t put a lot of time into studying for AP exams because of exactly what you said. They know that they can get a 4 without much extra work and anything beyond a 4 has little value to them.
This might change that attitude and add to the already pretty intense pressure that these kids live with.
Honestly if you take the time to read this stuff, no, I very much do not believe this to be the case. Like, at all. Something has changed, and not subtly.
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When the college holds all the cards, a little clarity would go a long way. So, say there’s a student who doesn’t reach a score they are happy with on SAT/ACT and has some good AP exam scores they’d like to submit in lieu of SAT/ACT, but let’s say one of the AP exam scores is bad and they don’t submit that one. Yale won’t know whether the student took the AP exam; it’s an absent data point. Maybe Yale can assume the score was not good or would not have been good, and that may or may not be a fair assumption. I think it’s different from assuming the SAT/ACT is low if not submitted, which I think is a correct assumption. There is enough uncertainty in the admissions process without a small dump truck of more uncertainty piling on. If Yale is seeking disadvantaged students, it can’t be lost on them that AP exams are 94 bucks apiece. They owe it to their applicants to make clear what their requirements are.
Apologies for ranting at Yale. I don’t think their policy is bad, I simply think they could do better with the tiniest website language tweak. If Yale isn’t more clear, Yale should be well aware that some will withhold poor scores.
It’s too early to say for sure but this may turn out to be one instance where AOs are thoughtful and well-meaning but a little out of touch with the realities on the ground. It makes sense when the Yale team says on their podcast that in a world where the entire UC system is test blind they wanted to give students the option to submit tests other than the SAT/ACT. But in reality, I suspect that this decision is going to substantially increase the stress levels of a certain group of kids. I’m particularly thinking about kids who attend strong magnet or public schools with robust AP programs. They will need to take lots of AP classes to check the maximum rigor box on their application. But now Yale is also telling them that if they take an AP class it would look odd if they did not submit the corresponding test score, and that they have to submit the scores for all tests they actually took. So in addition to grappling with challenging schedules loaded with AP classes, these students now face the strategic dilemma whether the added rigor of any particular class is worth a potentially low score. Underprivileged kids from schools that offer few or no APs or very privileged kids from private high schools that offer no or few APs seem relatively exempt from these pressures, so it’s not exactly fair. Of course, so far Yale is the only school with this approach, so maybe the answer will be that affected kids shift their applications from Yale to other Ivies.
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I note I find it a little interesting previously Yale specifically called out SAT Math scores and persistence in their STEM majors. Similarly, this time they used Physics as an example of a potentially relevant AP for Engineering majors. But they never (to my knowledge) said something similar about SAT EBRW scores and persistence in their HASS majors, or needing a History AP for a Classics major, or so on.
But what they did say in the new Podcasts, which is interesting, is they are still interested in the question of whether the applicant is really prepared for a liberal arts tradition school.
So this is me reading between the lines again, but I really feel like a lot of this is perhaps being driven by the increasing interest in STEM majors as being prestigious and lucrative career bets, and not necessarily just because of real passion and talent for STEM. And Yale and Dartmouth and others may be finding a lot of those STEM-for-$$$ types are not necessarily doing all that well once they hit the real STEM courses at their college.
And I am not sure they are actually admitting people like this, but maybe they are also not thrilled to be getting a flood of applications from people who want to do STEM-for-$$$ at Yale because Yale is prestigious in general, and who are not really passionate about or likely to thrive when they hit the real exploratory liberal arts nature of Yale.
OK, so maybe they are thinking requiring very high STEM scores AND also at least pretty high HASS scores of some sort is going to help them get just the STEM types they actually want. Which is more or less what MIT has been doing too.
But maybe there is no corresponding concern about HASS types, because there is not a similar flood of HASS-for-$$$ types to begin with, and likely more HASS types are already on board with the liberal arts tradition.
When I taught undergrads (2006-2014), mostly freshman/sophomore classes, we definitely had the same complaints and complained vociferously at times behind closed doors, comparing them very unfavorably to when we had been undergrads ourselves. I would not be at all surprised to learn that my college professors had had the same complaint sessions as well. I do not believe this to be new at all, although we could argue about the degree to which it is true then vs now.
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Yes, you should. 
“Should” sounds to me like advice which can be taken or not taken. “Must” and “shall” leave no room to interpret the action as optional.
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What do you exactly mean “benchmark”? Like is <700 math an automatic reject?
Imagine how stressful for the kids who can’t pay for the AP tests (many HSs don’t pay for their students to take the tests).
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I recall fondly a two-hour call I sat in on back in the day in which a gaggle of attorneys debated the use of “will” vs “shall” in a particular clause.
Definitely was not referring to you 
Not sure whom if anyone you’ve taught since 2014, but I think what’s changed is the trajectory and rate of change (to be clear here, I mean decline).
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We have to look no further than mental health statistics to know that the current generation of middle/high school/college students is not doing well. I personally have seen enough research to be convinced that smartphones play a major role in this trend, but I know that many people question this claim (or, in the case of my kids, would label me a “boomer” for making it). (Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown, has a very good presentation where he goes over the research evidence on smartphone use and mental health.)
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And when dinosaurs roamed the earth (and a family member was a tenured faculty member at a “highly rejective” college- even then, although they rejected fewer than now), the complaint was that protesting the Viet Nam war and hanging Lyndon Johnson in effigy on the college green was distracting students from their academics.
And don’t forget the thousands of undergrads who put their pencils down to enlist during WW2. That was some distraction…
A beautiful cemetery close to the Yale campus where the Yale undergrads who walked away from their studies to enlist during the Civil War. Bet there were some “rioting” professors back then as well.
It’s always something as the late, great Gilda Radner liked to remind us.
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I could be wrong, but I feel like a possible subtext in all this is they want way more internationals in IB or A-Level or similar systems to also at least take the ACT/SAT, or alternatively some APs. As I understand it, they can still use predicted grades as grades, they are just saying they won’t satisfy this test requirement.
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Hold on: I’ve been thinking of this policy only for those not submitting SAT/ACT, but glancing back at the page, an all-AP-score policy would apply to SAT/ACT submitters as well, assuming they want to submit some APs, or did I miss something? Would this not stand out among test submission policies of elite schools, if SAT/ACT submitters have score choice for SAT/ACT but not AP scores? Essentially, it would all AP scores or none, so I suggest we construe the language against the drafter.
Who else requires all APs? I guess it would be similar to Georgetown, which requires an official AP score report to consider AP scores, and that official report would include all of them.
This is such a can of worms.
I concur - both in general and about the smartphone/iPad aspect.
Some people though have clearly decided that nothing can have changed in any meaningful way from the past.
ETA: the smugness inherent in that attitude really chafes.
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The AP/IB option should be helpful to some (not necessarily all) California applicants who have skipped the SAT/ACT because of the prevailing practice in California
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Given that SAT scores vary with income, you could just consider both at the same time.
Maybe for some, but only 26.7% of Cali students had at least one AP score of 3+ in 2022. I doubt that many of those were the most disadvantaged URMs though.
As is often said in Econometrics, rarely is the direction in doubt, it is usually the magnitude.
So, right, if test scores positively correlate with GPAs, then it is likely the test submitted population is going to skew a bit higher in GPA distribution than the test optional population. The important question is more the magnitude, and that was actually not all that impressive in the Dartmouth data, and Yale’s statements sound similar. But again, the critical bit is they apparently both got there by using alternative evidence for test optional applicants that favored highly resourced applicants who were more likely to have such alternatives.
Exactly. And I note being “statistically significant” doesn’t mean it was a big difference, it just means whatever difference it was was very unlikely to have been produced by random variation. So you can have differences which after careful empirical study are statistically significant, but would be impossible to discern with normal human direct observation.
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