What’s interesting is that their data shows that SAT scores are best predictor of performance and it’s fairly linear. And, relative performance vs. your school isn’t a predictor. It’s the absolute performance on the SAT.
So, the conclusion is: yes, they can admit 1400 kids from disadvantaged, but they are likely to perform similarly to a 1400 from ‘advantaged’ background. Now, because of Kahn Academy, disadvantaged kids can prep as well as anyone.
The reason? SAT performance is highly associated with IQ and a high IQ person will perform well regardless.
In the short-run, schools may admit based on ‘relative SAT performance’ but will ultimately revert to admitting high SAT due to pressure to maintain marketing and the desire to enroll and graduate kids from the upper right hand corner of the graphs.
Having worked at a similar school I can say any school receiving federal funding is required to have the profile but counselors may not send certain information to colleges (for instance, class rank at a small school or SAT scores). However if most colleges eliminate test optional I suspect counselors will add SATs to their profiles…
Take this with a grain of salt since the study was done by ACT but I will say at our private school no student has achieved a perfect 4.0 in 20+ years while our local public school had over 50 valedictorians last year because 52/500 kids had perfect 4.0/5.0 GPAs…
As a follow up, it just sunk in with me that the Dartmouth Working Group Report more or less provided a generalized form of what I was seeing in SCOIR and an argument for the same sort of conclusion.
Here again is the report:
The relevant information is in Figure 6, and here is the relevant surrounding text (emphasis mine):
Figure 6 reinforces this conclusion, drawing on a specialized subsample of applicants in the test-optional cohorts who initially submitted scores but then asked Admissions not to consider them in the admissions decision. The figure plots admissions probabilities for more- and less-advantaged students (panels a and b) and by first generation status (panels c and d) by SAT score and whether or not the scores were revealed to Admissions officers. Consider students with a score of 1450-1490 from less-advantaged backgrounds. These students increased their admission probability by a factor of 3.7x (from .02 to .074) by revealing their score. The test-optional policy thus led to Admissions not identifying these high-achieving applicants as highly prepared. This pattern does not hold for applicants from more-advantaged backgrounds; students from more-advantaged backgrounds had similar admissions probabilities with and without submitting their scores. This may be because Admissions has more experience reading transcripts from the schools these students attend.
Our high school’s applicants would largely be on the right, and you can see how admissions chances take off around 1480 (as an aside, they convert ACT scores to SAT scores for this study). And you can see what they are saying–below that point, use the score, don’t use the score, it didn’t really make any difference for those applicants.
Interestingly, it didn’t really matter much above that point either! But I wonder how thin the data gets (like how many people with a 1550+ really asked for it not to be considered?).
But anyway, for less advantaged students, starting around 1400 and then above, it seemed to obviously help to report.
None of this is really new, but this is much more detailed confirmation than we usually see. Applicants from my sort of high school typically can prove what they really need to prove academically to Dartmouth through the transcript, because Dartmouth trusts our transcripts. Indeed, there are actually very few people in SCOIR with a GPA in Dartmouth’s range and a test score NOT in Dartmouth’s range. I personally think it is clear the hit rate for those applicants is lower than the ones who have both the grades and the test score, but it just isn’t many applicants like that anyway.
But in other contexts, lower-but-still high test scores become pretty important.
That is a big question and I don’t have a great answer.
Interestingly, at least for Dartmouth, we had more high-enough test score/too-low GPAs than the other way around. And then most of the rejections were both.
So maybe this will cut out a few future applications, but I am not sure how many. Because people were already disregarding GPA.
Super insightful. Also interesting that MA schools seemed to do pass/fail for the freshman year of 2024 grads. Our public school was also predominately remote for that entire school year, but kept to standard grading. The local private schools were in person. This is why I find it difficult to glean much info from GPAs, especially with the variance introduced with covid.
I note you have to be cautious with statements like that. They tend to say it is the best SINGLE predictor, and will sometimes specifically explain how it is better than raw GPAs.
But that of course is not how they actually use grades and transcripts. They instead look at grades and transcripts in context, including using at least the school report, but potentially all sorts of other data, to better understand transcripts. That is not one predictor, it is many different types of information.
And in fact, Dartmouth specifically recently confirmed that once they are past the initial screening, they stop really caring about test scores and instead focus on the individual story told by the transcript.
So Dartmouth wants to use standardized test scores as part of its initial academic screening. But to my knowledge it has no plans to adopt ranking and admitting by test score.
GPAs vary widely, and are a thorn in my side TBH! Some of the public high schools by us have a repeat-test policy, allowing students to retake the same test up to 4x until they achieve the grade they want. As far as learning the material, I have no problem with that approach. Our high school however does not have such policy.
From first hand experience, I know quite a few students in our friend circle at public school whose children have high GPAs - they also take remedial classes, have legitimate reason for IEPs/extended test times, and a couple have kinda questionable reasons for accommodations but parents are in the school system/therapists and know their options better than most. Additionally, again first-hand, know several boys that scored over a 1500 and have GPAs below a 3.5, but are in advanced subjects. Our school also does not rank. Given all this, it takes much more analysis to decode the GPA for me than it does the SAT.
These students are usually extremely bright but there is a learning curve writing a 12 page paper or using resources like office hours, and even study groups. Affluent kids, often from private schools, come in prepared for this. The difference is not unexpected. I wouldn’t be surprised if the gap closes significantly after the first year.
Historically, colleges like Dartmouth focused on visiting schools with high volumes of applicants, meaning high end private schools and public schools in high SES areas. Of course, virtual visits cost less, but will they actually spread the word to every other school, including public schools in lower SES areas?
I think this is why they are putting in the requirements.
Everyone wants to have the disadvantaged, the diverse, etc. but TO is letting in kids who are not qualified.
They actually say this:
Importantly, these test scores better position Admissions to identify high-achieving less-advantaged applicants
The kid may be a great kid - but if they’re at a school where they’re just getting passed through or aren’t getting taught to the level of an elite kid, then they can’t keep up.
Schools know this…they can’t fail them (will lower the grad rate) so they need to do a better job of figuring out who truly belongs - no matter their resources.
It’s basically an acknowledgement of what they’ve been trying to do from a diversity POV - and by that - I don’t just mean racial. It’s not fully working.
Yeah, I am probably not sanguine either though I do think that at strong schools, plenty of courses are covering more now (or at least pre-pandemic) than when I was a student. Heck, just a large number of kids doing BC calculus and above as 9-11 graders was unheard of when I was a student at least.
However, my response to my kids reflects who I want to be as parent, the values that I consider most important for my children to internalize, and how I want them to think about themselves as learners --I want them to focus their energy on the learning and not on comparing themselves to other people. I have a lot of reasons for believing that in the long run, my kids will be happier and healthier if they mind their own business, but I think those are a topic for a different thread.
However, I am not above thinking dark thoughts about kids getting grades that I (in my infinite wisdom ) have decided they don’t deserve. Sure, the part that I don’t say aloud to my kids includes some misgivings about grade inflation (not a huge problem at their schools, but I know there has been some creep). For one, I think that grades in non-STEM courses tend to be more compressed at the top, which means that if you are an unusually strong literature student but a relatively weak math student, at my D22’s school, that strength is less likely to be reflected when comparing your GPA with a strong math student who is a weak literature one. I also think that inflated GPAs can weaken the resilience of some students and more importantly, it can warp the behavior of parents who begin to believe than anything less than an A is unacceptable. I sent my kids to private schools but there is something obscene about the entitlement at times.
This article from the Atlantic a few years ago gets at a dynamic that I witnessed at one of my kids’ middle schools. If you are an underpaid teacher asking your students to write poetry, of course you will cave about creative writing assignments and probably analytical writing assignments as well in the face of rageful parents. Math teachers still got pressured to change grades as far as I could tell, but the nature of the field is that grades are considered less subjective in quantitative areas and therefore parents are more willing to accept the teacher’s assessment as “objective.” Sorry, I don’t have the gift link, and in any case the article was more about the pandemic and virtual schooling than about grade inflation, but I have definitely seen similar parents in their day schools --it is probably lucky that I don’t get to see the parent-teacher dynamics at their boarding schools.
But my very first year, I came into the crosshairs of a mother who still flashes through my nightmares. Her kid was a strong student—a solid, thorough student—but he was also aggressive and mean. Furthermore, I felt that his concerns did not lie with the muses and poets.
One day I gave him an A– on a creative-writing assignment. Soon after, the mom called, and she was pissed. I explained that this grade wouldn’t lower his average, but she didn’t care. She wanted to come to the school with her husband and meet with me. I assumed that I wouldn’t have to agree to such a preposterous request but it turned out that I did. For 45 horrible minutes I sat in a borrowed office with the father (clearly mortified) and the mother (rageful) discussing the merits of this 10th grader’s poem, each of us locked into the same kind of intractable positions (they wanted me to change the grade; I wanted them to drop dead) that led to the fall of Saigon. They were coming in with force, and I wouldn’t budge.
just looked up our local public CA HS profile and yes, test medians are still reported, and yes, it reports the # of the class that took the SAT or ACT. (obviously, some double counting in this number).
This is my takeaway as well, and I almost want to thank them for the vaguely transparent nature of this gesture – explaining exactly what “context” means – rather than continuing the “admissions is magic” approach to public-facing comments from AOs. I assume I am not alone in resenting the paternalism of “we have a blackbox, and your job is to guess what’s in it” style cultivated by college reps.
It’s one thing if a university is actually giving a free-ride to qualified disadvantaged students. But there are many heartbreaking stories about first-gen/disadvantaged students who have attended pricey schools, gotten unmarketable degrees, and are now saddled with a mountain of student debt that they can neither discharge or pay off. There is a predatory element that disguises itself as altruism.
Of course, using the SAT or ACT in this subjective manner in the context of holistic admission practices seems to be the opposite of what some SAT or ACT advocates seemingly want to see.
) have decided they don’t deserve. Sure, the part that I don’t say aloud to my kids includes some misgivings about grade inflation (not a huge problem at their schools, but I know there has been some creep). For one, I think that grades in non-STEM courses tend to be more compressed at the top, which means that if you are an unusually strong literature student but a relatively weak math student, at my D22’s school, that strength is less likely to be reflected when comparing your GPA with a strong math student who is a weak literature one. I also think that inflated GPAs can weaken the resilience of some students and more importantly, it can warp the behavior of parents who begin to believe than anything less than an A is unacceptable. I sent my kids to private schools but there is something obscene about the entitlement at times.