Of course. Test-optional doesn’t mean test-not-valued. A test score within range is more valuable than no test score IMO. And there have been many threads with users parsing the data that seems to indicate that many / most TO universities are still filling the class with more students who submitted scores than didn’t
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If you look at the CDS, many TO schools, including Princeton and Dartmouth, never moved tests out of the “very important” section.
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I’ll just add that Dartmouth was pretty revealing about its internal data in the course of explaining why it was going back test required.
And at a high level, that data suggested it was never an obvious problem to submit a test score within their standard range (including down to around their enrolled 25th). To be sure, in many cases it didn’t appear to make a difference either way, but it rarely seemed to actually hurt. And conversely, more often if it did make a difference, it helped. So it seemed an easy to decision to include such scores.
I think the more interesting question is whether you should actually submit scores below their standard range, but not a lot below. I think in those cases, you have to carefully self-assess your overall context, the overall strength of your application, and so on.
But personally, at this point, I would not spend a lot of time worrying about submitting scores that are anywhere in a highly selective college’s standard range, even if they are on the lower side of that standard range.
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More interestingly, did Harvard and Princeton see their apps further rise? Where did those 14% go? For the most part, I think those schools are somewhat natural overlaps with Yale.
ETA - Duke, as it turns out, appears to be the most popular ED school from our BS this year, but not sure who went TO. I am pretty certain the kids I can specifically name have 1500+ scores.
I think that, generally… if your score is within the published range of admits or enrollees, go ahead and submit it – even if it’s around the 25th % score.
That way you remove any suspicion that you scored badly for those schools. If you don’t submit, human nature (as far as I understand it, anyway) is to assume a relatively poor score.
ETA:
Where it becomes more of a difficult decision is this: What if a kid scores, oh, 1450, and the 25th % score is 1500? Do you go ahead and submit the 1450? How low would the adcoms assume your score is, if you didn’t submit? I figure there are probably a lot of kids out there with scores in the 1400s and otherwise competitive applications.
Harvard also moved from TO, so I expect those applications will also drop. As to where those applications went, I don’t think that can be answered. The Common App allows for 20 colleges. Not applying to a reach school like Yale if you’re already applying to a bunch of reaches doesn’t necessarily result in an additional application elsewhere. Or it might. Nobody knows.
That’s an interesting question, although I do wonder if the sort of applicant who would have applied to Yale test-optional but is not applying test-flexible might already be applying to Princeton anyway.
Of course if they are one of the sorts of kids who feel like the 20 Common App slots are a goal and not a limit, maybe they will find another. But if, say, they are one of the sorts of kids who were “shotgunning” “all the Ivies”, they may just be removing “Ivies” that become test-required, without necessarily replacing them with a “non-Ivy” (I am putting this in quotes because I am not sure all such kids are really clear on the strict definition of Ivies in the first place).
Based on what Dartmouth published, and also what Yale and others have said more qualitatively, if I was 50 points under the 25th, I would probably submit if I were a disadvantaged student at an under-resourced HS, probably not submit if I was an advantaged student at a highly-resourced HS. Although I am honestly not sure it would actually matter to the second sort of student.
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Just to clarify, this number is only for REA. Presumably these kids “took their shot” early elsewhere.
Oh, sorry, I get it now.
Yes, if we are thinking specifically about REA, I could see a Princeton going up as Yale is going down.
Memory lapse. But yeah… I wouldn’t be surprised if Princeton REA goes up by a significant bit. Its unfortunate they are unlikely to share those numbers.
S25 applied to Princeton SCEA… He did submit his score though… we’ll know in a month
The article noted the largest drop was from international students, down 30% vs 9% for domestic. Also the number of REA applicants are still up 17% vs pre TO. I agree that some of the REA apps likely went to Princeton or other selective TO schools for REA/EA or ED, but I suspect the vast majority are “lottery” submissions – high GPA but question marks on rigor and other indicia’s of academic excellence.
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What exactly does this mean to you? I do not want to speak for you, but I presume that it would not include the student at an under resourced school that took every academic course possible, although the course selection in breadth and depth falls far short of a highly resourced school.
I’m not trying to be argumentative, and am genuinely interested in what that phrase means, to you and those on CC. The term rigor is used frequently and I’m curious.
I am thinking of kids in schools (often well resourced) with a history of grade inflation and AP scores that don’t correlate to the grades granted. The academic type of EC’s (math, science, CS, debate, writing, arts etc…) don’t show high levels of achievement. The essays are not well written and are relatively shallow. The LoR’s don’t indicate that the kid is one of the “best” that the teacher has ever had. On the other hand, it is the kid from the under resourced school who stands the most to gain from submitting a score that is an outlier relative to that school – anything close to 1400 is most likely a big plus.
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An unhooked advantaged student (a common demographic on these forums) applying to a highly selective private college is probably seen as less competitive with either a lower test score or no test score.
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Exactly. That was basically the logic behind my next sentence in that post (“Although I am honestly not sure it would actually matter to the second sort of student.”). That thought is also supported by the Dartmouth data, meaning if you were an advantaged student who only had a lower test score to submit, it appears your odds were going to be equivalently low whether you submitted or not.
And in fact, significantly lower either way compared to a disadvantaged student who submitted a test score, down to around the lower 1300s. There was then an actual uptick in advantaged admissions rates, but not disadvantaged admissions rates, at the bottom of the reported ranges. Could just be noise, but I also wonder if maybe we are looking at a hook effect. Meaning if you are an advantaged student applying to Dartmouth with a 1250, maybe it is particularly likely you are hooked.
And all this is why it appears Dartmouth is basically just hoping by going test required, it will be able to admit a few more disadvantaged students who didn’t realize they had test scores that would help them. But when you dig into the actual numbers, there are so few such applicants that it was at most going to have a very small effect on Dartmouth’s enrolled class.
Anyway, interestingly, it also did not appear to matter much if you were an advantaged student with a test score comfortably in Dartmouth’s range. Again the data is probably noisy at that point (how many people with a 1550 are actually going test optional?), but I do suspect Dartmouth is right that for advantaged students, there is typically so much correlation between higher test scores and other reliable markers of academic excellence that the marginal value of submitting your high test scores is typically quite low.
Of course, this is all just Dartmouth, but it also seems plausibly more general to me. I would not actually advise someone with a competitive test score not to submit it, but if you are an advantaged student with excellent grades in rigorous courses at a well-resourced secondary school, it probably is not going to really make a difference to also submit a competitive test score. And if you don’t have a competitive test score to submit, that is not good, but it then probably won’t really make a difference whether you do or do not submit your not-competitive test score.
But plausibly, there are a few cases where an advantaged student has the other typical markers of a highly competitive applicant and yet simply cannot get a comparably high test score to go along with all that. The Dartmouth data suggests these are cases are sufficiently rare such that you can’t really see any obvious evidence of them in the overall data. But if you believe you are one of those cases–I would probably not submit.
But again, in the back of my mind, I agree there is a good chance it simply does not matter. Not if you are an advantaged student.
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It’s interesting that we talk about “advantaged” vs “disadvantaged” so casually as an admission chance driver…I can easily see a future class action lawsuit similar to the one Harvard lost but this time for discrimination based on socioeconomic status.
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Socioeconomic status is not a protected class.
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Indeed. And it would be nearly impossible to show that putting academic qualifications into a socioeconomic context did not have a “rational basis”.
For that matter, these are in fact supposed to be “charitable” organizations. It turns out under US tax law, you can qualify for that status as long as your primary missions are things like education and research, even if you are mostly educating higher SES students. But I think it would be hard to convince a court it was actually illegal for a “charitable” organization to choose to provide more of that educational benefit to disadvantaged students.
And as relevant to this discussion, I do think it is important to understand these colleges are under no obligation to take standardized test scores at face value just because they may require them. They may instead fold them into some sort of contextual academic review, which in turn is just a component of an overall holistic review, all of which is designed to serve the institution’s goals and priorities as they define them.
And so exactly what that means in practice for any given test-required/-flexible college may not in fact be what any given individual proponent of standardized tests being used in college admissions had in mind.
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