This seems in line with what was discussed on the Yale Admissions podcast in terms of who they found was favored in the process by TO due to the kinds of evidence of academic preparation present in the application (evidence such as known high school and advanced coursework). @NiceUnparticularMan might be able to find it in a podcast transcript?
Penn has already announced it will remain test optional for another round too.
Looks like both Duke and Brown had been enrolling about 1/4 of their classes without submitted test scores. I would be surprised if as you suggest Duke doesn’t follow suit but likely too late for this year.
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No transcripts yet for the new podcasts! Very annoying.
But my impression is also that going test optional was not really making much difference for kids from trusted high schools who had very high grades with high rigor. That’s very apparent in the Dartmouth data and the Yale commentary struck me as consistent.
But it is a zero sum game, so to the extent a few more kids from less advantageous high schools get in, presumably that means a few less kids from more advantageous high schools. Given the likely scale, however, I am not sure it will be easily noticeable.
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I know, but IME Yale/Brown seem to have more overlap with Princeton/Harvard. Brown to Penn, while it happens, is more of a stretch. As it stands, lots of kids apply to HYP without a distinct preference. They just pick one to apply REA.
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I think this is true, but I also think it won’t be (and wasn’t) the same when the numbers are in front of them.
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So what Dartmouth’s data implied to me was a pretty high correlation between test scores and other academic markers among advantaged students, because disadvantaged people with lower but unused test scores were admitted at a lot lower rate than people with higher but unused test scores. It was almost like Dartmouth could predict the hidden test scores, but much better with advantaged kids than disadvantaged kids.
I kinda see that in our SCOIR data too, like we just do not have a lot of people with very high GPAs but lower test scores. Interestingly, off hand the opposite seems more common, high test scores but lower GPAs.
Anyway, this doesn’t suggest to me it really mattered to Dartmouth whether or not they could see the test scores of advantaged kids. Obviously that is a broad sample–a large majority of applicants were classified as advantaged. So possibly in subsets of advantaged kids it made more difference.
I can’t speak to your Scoir reports, but many people seem to be saying the opposite: high school grade inflation has meant there are plenty of high GPAs out there but not all of those high GPAs have good test scores, and that is a reason why some of these schools are going back to test required.
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So those would be not-trusted high schools, in the sense these colleges would not trust high grades in the highest available classes to indicate sufficiently high academic qualifications.
I think in general this was clear in the Dartmouth data and also in things Yale and others have said: there isn’t a general rule about the importance of test scores, it very much depends on context, including the nature of the applicant’s high school.
How many applicants come from “trusted” vs “not-trusted” schools? Genuine question— not rhetorical as I have no idea. The breakout has to be different than the “advantaged” vs “disadvantaged” bucket, as there are many “advantaged” students who I assume go to “not trusted” schools, although I guess that depends upon how each category is defined, which seems to be unclear. Is every student considered “advantaged” if they are not “disadvantaged”? What does it take to be a “trusted” school vs a “known” but maybe not fully trusted school. Does trust level change in an environment in which kids don’t take standardized tests? In other words it seems plausible that Dartmouth can predict the SAT scores of kids now when there was a full data set in the not too distant past on which to correlate SAT and GPA from certain schools. Does that change 10 years into a TO environment?
So Dartmouth only identified high schools in the top 20% of the College Board’s index for challenge as disadvantaged, although disadvantaged students would also include any first-gen or students from below-median-income neighborhoods.
Even with such a loose definition of advantaged applicants, they found test scores were not really relevant to those applicants. As they put it:
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.
I think this is getting to your question:
It really just takes Dartmouth being able to apply its experience reading transcripts from these schools to identify the sorts of applicants it actually wants to seriously consider for admission. Which leads to:
We don’t know, because that didn’t happen, and almost surely won’t. Plenty of people were still applying to Dartmouth with test scores during their test optional phase, and indeed apparently they were also getting test scores from people who ultimately asked Dartmouth not to use them for admissions. So Dartmouth was still collecting a lot of data.
I think in the end, the high schools that want to place kids in colleges like Dartmouth, Yale, or Brown on a regular basis are likely to keep doing whatever it takes to help those colleges distinguish their best candidates. It is more the type of high schools that do not place a lot of kids in selective colleges at all, or if so mostly just in lower-selectivity publics with relatively unnuanced treatment of transcripts, that tend not to be giving these colleges what they need.
So many threads where I could post this…UT Austin reinstating testing requirement with Class of 2025:
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FWIW, we have (and have always had) this exemption too. What counts as “unable to test”, and how one demonstrates academic prep in the absence of a test, is the key question.
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Parents or students can request their schools become testing centers.
It likely involves fewer logistics than hosting a home football game.
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Particularly now that its online.
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A few years back the school nearby tried to become a test center but it was actually pretty complicated in terms of logistics (and now that it’s online it’d require some centrally-controlled system to authorize the CB system then remove it, on a weekend). There would have been lots of potential test takers but it just couldn’t be set up because the administrative obstacles couldn’t be overcome.
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What does that mean? One of the stated reasons for the online switch in ease of access. The tests are usually taken on a personal device and simply require the Blue Book app and an internet connection. If the school is able to administer the PSAT there is no reason they can’t do the SAT.
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One example…Many school IT systems do not allow the downloading of apps like Blue Book…seems like schools have had plenty of time to figure these things out, yet plenty of sites have had problems, including this past Saturday.
I’ve posted this before but counselors estimate that running a Saturday administration takes at least 30 hours of their and/or admin time, plus it’s difficult to find proctors. Most schools don’t have dedicated college counselors and/or a testing coordinator position, so this is often in addition to a counselor’s social emotional responsibilities. So maybe some schools will do one school day administration per year (of course some are required to), but that’s it…no Saturdays.
Many counselors and school admin have a low opinion of CB and ACT. Not to mention the anti-testing bias that exists among some counselors/admin.
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Interesting that UT is taking the opposite approach to LoR’s, wanting LoR’s from outside of HS:
" * Narrowed scope for letters of recommendation. Applicants submitting letters of recommendation will be strongly encouraged to provide those letters from sources outside of their high school. This reduces the burden of this work on high school teachers and counselors and allows University staff to better leverage other materials."
I question how much this will help HS counselors and teachers. I would think most applicants aspiring to UT are also applying to other schools requiring LoR’s from HS teachers and counselors. Now those students have to round up additional LoR’s for UT.
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Excellent point. And there are plenty of kids that wouldn’t be able to turn somewhere else for a LOR. Not to mention LOR writing is a skill. Asking an “unusual” source is often less valuable than students realize.
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