I think this definitely happens to a small degree with perhaps a handful of students in each major. There could also be some who took AP Calc AB/BC but had a bad test day and ended up getting a 2 especially if that class was backloaded in the senior year where their classroom performance wouldn’t affect the UC GPA calculations.
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I’ve been trying to update my knowledge on this. In the past, the UCLA admissions dean went on YCBK and said that they leverage AP scores if they are available. I read on here that UCB and UCLA leverage AP scores. I also seem to recall reading about it somewhere else online.
Recently, at a admissions panel at my D’s school, the same dean said they do not leverage AP scores for admission…
Has anyone heard the recent statements re: APs from UCLA one way or the other?
See below
- Other evidence of achievement. This criterion will recognize exemplary, sustained achievement in any field of intellectual or creative endeavor; exceptional performance on AP/IBHL exams, accomplishments in the performing arts and athletics; employment; leadership in school or community organizations or activities; and community service.
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Ah thank you.
(It is however somewhat disappointing that I now feel the need to vet what admissions deans say directly to you…)
Do you know if the scores reported in the Wesleyan CDS are those of all enrolled students (including the ones who didn’t submit with their application) or only the enrolled students that had submitted scores with their application?
It’s my understanding that it they are the scores of all enrolled students who took either or both the SAT and ACT regardless of whether they were submitted or were TO applicants.
Thank you. That makes sense because the top end of their CDS score range seems to line up with their NESCAC peers, but the bottom end is materially lower. Bowdoin is the same. Thus the other colleges are likely only reporting enrollees who submitted scores with their application.
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Similar to our school. The ACT test day was changed this year from its normal April date to a school day in February. The school did a low key announcement of the test about a week before the test occurred.
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Are you implying the CSUs should be holistic (to me a vague word that colleges use to justify who they admit) and include essays and recommendations? That’s not their charter btw, but I’m interested in what you mean by “looking at you, CSUs”?
“I wonder how many are starting in 1A and are not repeating calculus.”
Berkeley COE students, specifically the EECS, have most likely taken Differential Equations or Multivariable Calculus, so their decision is based on whether to take these classes again at a rigorous place like UCB or go to the next level of Math.
I just meant that without test scores, non holistic admission formulas like those used by the CSUs have relatively few data points to work with. Didn’t mean to imply they should be holistic.
So in that case they may already have an AP Calc score from 11th grade, or community college grades, or they attend a high school with known rigor (if these classes are offered at their HS). And UCB probably doesn’t need Math SAT to evaluate this student’s math readiness.
Anecdotally my son’s impression was that most COE classmates either started in 1B, or 53, or already had MVC and did not have to take either. He himself started in 53 and that seemed pretty common.
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Call me cynical, but I believe that it’s all about branding. One of the ways that the magazines that are pandering the wealthy families who attend Harvard and other Ivies is to publish lists of “The Smartest Colleges”. They are all based on the average or median SAT scores of those colleges.
Without SAT scores, how will be able to participate in these games?
To be honest, while the math SATs are challenging to most students, and, again, income strongly affects that, for a student who wants to attend Caltech it’s basic. I still think that it’s a problem. Not because low income students will score low - students who want to attend Caltech should be the sort of students who can learn SAT-level math on their own at the library. The problem I see is that students who are not at that level, but have wealth, can make the same scores without the actual math talents that Caltech wants.
On the other hand, caltech has had issues with recruiting low income students. In the original Chetty article, they had 69% from the top 20%, and 3% from the top 1%, but only 2.9% from the bottom 20%. That was when they required the SATs.
So it doesn’t really look like they actually care about economic diversity. The SAT is back because it is way to let the CB quickly cull students who don’t have the most basic math required for engineering.
However, since a 790 or so on math is the basic requirement, they are still accepting mostly by the same exact factors that people consider more biased than SATs - ECs and LoRs.
That is the exact same thing that will happen with Harvard, except worse. At least Caltech requires that level of math to be able to start, but Harvard doesn’t. By using the SATs as a culling device, they will make sure that the applicants who pass the first cull are already mostly wealthy.
Then the other factors which benefit the wealthiest applicants will kick in. As the more recent Chetty article has shown, even when controlling for tests scores, the wealthiest are getting huge boosts.
So I’m sorry, but reinstating the SATs will not change the importance of the rest of the skewed factors. It will merely ,end a veneer of fake egalitarianism on it.
The percent or the wealthiest people among Harvard’s students hasn’t really budged. The top percentiles by income and wealth are 45% of the students, same as when Chetty wrote his first article. Going TO didn’t change that, and reinstating the SAT requirement won’t change that either.
Reinstating the SAT requirement will not make it more likely that a poor applicant will be accepted. To be perfectly honest, I don’t believe that going TO will change the number who were accepted either.
To take my cynicism a step further - Harvard and Yale and others reinstated the SATs to reduce the number of poor applicants. Fewer low income students will apply, so Harvard and their ilk will actually be able to accept fewer poor applicants while seeming to have more lenient requirements for low income applicants.
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Another option: they can send a mass mailing to all Title I schools and tell them “if you have a student who scored 1300 or higher/1350 or higher/650 in either Math or English…, encourage him or her to send us their application, here’s a fee waiver.”
(Yes I know the students would automatically get one anyway but a study has found it encouraged low income students to apply).
Then they can do the same with scores of their choice for various types of schools and students.
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I’m of the view that anyone who thinks test required policies are going to change the general make up of the classes at Dartmouth etc. is overly optimistic. I find the argument vis a vis preparedness to be pretty weak —especially knowing that these schools have been admitting students with low relative scores for years (recruited athletes etc)
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One thing to keep in mind about the Chetty article is that the data is from decades ago. My sense is that Caltech didn’t care about economic diversity decades ago; I know enough of their staff to think they do now, and are trying to figure things out.
Our Chetty data was pretty good nationally speaking, even when we required the SATs (and the subject tests until 2020). I was also looking at some ASEE data the other day, and it turns out that from 2012-2022, we graduated more Black, Hispanic, and/or Native engineering students — in absolute terms — than any other private school in the country, and all but 19 (out of ~500) universities regardless of public/private/HBCU/etc status or size of enrollment.
(Yes, I did start looking into this because Jon B was arguing on Twitter that we reinstated testing to keep out URM students, which I knew wasn’t true, but also turns to be way, way off in terms of actual outcomes in the ASEE data)
I think it’s possible to use the testing to diversify economically (and prior to SFFA demographically); the thing is you have to counterweight testing vs. everything else. It’s not going to fully counterbalance the underlying educational inequality (and I cannot express enough how unequal American K-12 education is, nor how quickly the educational inequality is accelerating between the affluent schools/families and the less affluent).
That’s what worries me the most: not the testing driving inequality, but the inequality driving itself.
I mean, before SOPIPA and the various state AG lawsuits, we just recruited the URM and low income students directly, without needing to go through schools as a proxy. Starting in 1969 — led by future MIT President Paul Gray, then a professor, and future RPI President Shirley Ann Jackson, then a graduate student — we would buy the names of every URM student with strong PSAT/PLAN scores in the country and individually mail them information about MIT; this was later expanded to rural students and all women interested in STEM.
That was the backbone of our strategy for the last ~50 years, and it was the only strategy shown to work (you can’t work through schools, especially the least well-resourced e.g. Title 1; they just don’t have the spare administrative capacity to do this kind of advising, only the affluent schools do. Many Title 1 schools have no one to pick up the phone or answer email when we try to arrange an in-person visit, and I’ve visited Title 1 schools where the guidance counselor introduced me to the assembled students as “this is Chris Peterson from MIT, none of you are smart enough to ever get in there, so just try to be polite.” )
However, new privacy laws (and new interpretations of old privacy laws) have effectively ended this practice with no replacement or alternative, which — given that these laws and initiatives have been strongest in states/areas most concerned about diversity — is just a massive counterproductive own goal, however well-intentioned.
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So, if privacy laws block most of the direct communication, the mass mailings to schools hoping to reach someone with a “did a student score 650 on a section of the SAT” (where only the first 5 terms appear at 1st/are scanned or seen) might be the only way to register with that student if the overworked GC sees it?
Or could the test score requirement exist not for the score itself but just for the ability to purchase ways of contacting these students wherever/however possible?
I don’t understand this rationale. With test optional policies, school’s average scores have gone up. Mandating testing would make them look worse on “smartest colleges” lists.
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I wonder if they are doing this already to some degree. Both my kids attend (or attended)Title I schools in NYC (we are not low income). Both kids got high test scores… and a ton of recruitment mail/email. It could have just been the scores, or the colleges do this for everyone. But I got the sense that my kids were getting the mail esp from the Ivies bc they were at Title 1 high schools. But I don’t know – in NYC, Title 1 schools can offer a lot of good college support, and have a lot of very high performing students.
That’s a pretty bold statement not supported by any evidence I’ve seen. Yes, the schools will have fewer applicants overall, but 1) I don’t know why you would assume a disproportionate number of them would be poor - all we’ve heard is that the schools want to discourage very weak applicants who just were taking a stab in the dark, and 2) even if there were fewer poor applicants, it doesn’t mean they would accept fewer of them, if the applicants they are now discouraging weren’t being admitted anyway.
By the way, my hypothesis is that the stab in the dark applicants were disproportionately international and wealthy - this is somewhat implied in the Yale podcasts but is otherwise just a hypothesis.
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But if students don’t test… see the problem to find them?
Hence a possible use of a testing requirement: getting them on mailing lists so colleges can reach out if they opt-in.
In NYC, all public schools (as far as I know) offer the SAT free to juniors in school in spring – no school, just tests that day. My kids’ schools also offered the PSAT for National Merit qualification in fall of junior year, and both schools did practice PSATs their sophomore years. I think this is also pretty common (but maybe not universal).
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