Your post is about test scores. MIT admits about 600 men and 600 women out of their large applicant pool. I expect they all have top test scores. This is a university where the middle 50% score range for Math is 780-800 SAT or 35-36 ACT.
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I think that is true to some degree. With Duke, on the link I posted before, they said that 12% of their admitted students in that most recent class were FGLI. My guess would be that is the bulk of their test optional applicants (along with athletes, the kids of famous people & the kids of major donors).
If you aren’t FGLI or an athlete, and your dad isn’t Seinfeld (whose son is at Duke and whose daughter just graduated), you really need to focus on getting at or above a 1520 SAT or 34 ACT.
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Common app (and other apps) still do ask for ethnicity, but schools can’t use it in the admissions decision (so suppress the answer to that question). The DOE will still require schools to report ethnicity data to IPEDS.
With that said, I don’t know of any school that releases test scores by gender or ethnicity, although they would have those data.
At the macro level CB releases average test score by ethnicity on page 4 here: https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2022-total-group-sat-suite-of-assessments-annual-report.pdf, and ACT here on page 10: https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/2022/2022-National-ACT-Profile-Report.pdf
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I don’t think this is necessarily true for MIT.
With that said, most schools have an abundance of female applicants, and some, including some highly rejective schools, have stated that male GPAs are relatively lower.
Regarding test scores, your D has to weigh the trade-offs of trying for a higher score…will it impact her grades? Her sport/athletic training? Her recruiting process? Scores have trended up because so many students are applying test optional…the test submitters tend to only report relatively higher scores. These schools still reject the majority of students with ACT 34-36 too.
Your D’s classes, grades, and rigor will be relatively more important than her test score in the admissions decision.
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This. Seems a little early to decide that a student is unlikely to score any higher. I’d try again some time between now and fall, probably on the later side. There doesn’t necessarily need to be any trade off beyond a Saturday morning.
Has she tried the SAT? Some kids do better on SAT than ACT and vice versa.
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There are a lot of D3 schools that are very highly ranked academically- NYU, UChicago, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie-Mellon, WUSTL, Tufts, Williams, Swarthmore, etc. just to name a few. Has she pursued athletic recruiting at these schools. An athletic hook would help with admissions at most of these.
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@Strannik , you can look up the 2019-2020 pre-TO data set from Duke(ie the cohort that enrolled and started fall 2019) which shows admitted student scores. If you dig in to the details you will see the %accepted females was lower than males. Our HS counselors have been saying for years that females are over-represented in the applicant pool, and schools who try to balance male and female overall often accept a lower % of females. All the schools you list seem to have data sets that confirm.
Her 33 ACT does not rule admission , but it is low , especially that math: the 31 is below the 25th%ile from the pre-TO Duke data, which makes Duke likely out of reach for an unhooked kid. You would have to look up the same for the other schools you mention, but my guess is they are all very similar as far as pre-TO data on scores.
For Duke and Penn and all similar schools(we toured almost all of them, though not cornell and rice), they say that rigor of courseload is most important. They look for kids who have challenged themselves across all 5 core courses, as much as possible.
Duke, UPenn, others in that group allow a up to two yrs before declaring a major, and freshman classes are not restricted by major: they admit kids who could be successful in any major, so they want the breadth and depth of HS rigor shown.
I have a kid at Duke and one at Penn and changing areas of study completely is very common: friends have done English to CS, or started in Arts&Sci and added an Engineering school minor or moved entirely to Engineering.
What courses has your kid taken each year? What is offered at their school that they have not taken? Do an honest assessment: it could be that your kid is not quite on the path to make them a serious contender, and that is ok! There are so many excellent schools that are not Duke/penn/vandy/cornell and the like.
Courses are far more important than GPA, but gpa/rank matters in context of the HS. A 4.4 weighted gpa could be top10% or could be barely top 1/3. It really depends on the school and on weighting. The elite-tier schools you mention admit unhooked who have taken the hardest courses AND gotten top grades, barring certain feeder/boarding schools where 1/3 of kids go to T10s and there is slightly more course and rank flexibility . Those schools, though, often have half of kids with 98-99th%ile scores and 75% of kids taking piles of APs or equivalents, so they are not fully comparable to above -avg private or publics.
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We didn’t like the way the SAT tests critical reasoning. The “which choice provided the best evidence” type questions are counterintuitive and can be confusing. The ACT is more like the old SAT in that respect and makes more sense. She probably would score higher in math on the SAT but less in English/Reading so it wouldn’t benefit us.
33 is probably good enough to check the box, but if she is willing to put in the prep tine, she probably could increase her score, especially in science, math, English. At tjis point, it is do old test sections, and then correct them and relearn the content where she got a mistake.
The data would not be helpful, even if you could find it. You can assume that the test score range was skewed lower in the past because of holistic admissions favoring all the nonacademic criteria and hooks.
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Her GPA is on point for these top schools and her ACT is maybe one point low to be in their mid-50 range. With her stats she absolutely has a shot at any of these schools. But they all have single digit admission rates, so admission is unlikely for just about everyone. Most of these schools have a higher ED acceptance rate but by “higher” I mean about 15 percent, so still unlikely for all.
Do these schools typically admit students from your high school? For example, my kids’ school typically gets kids into Penn and Rice and occasionally Cornell. We haven’t gotten anyone in to Vandy, Duke or Dartmouth in a at least 5 years.
Pick you favorite, show lots of interest. Retake ACT if you think you can bump it up even a point, which would bring it into mid-50 range. But overall you have a shot at any but it’s a long shot, like it is for everyone else. Good luck!!
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For universities at this level, I think that you can pretty much only attempt to figure out whether your student is competitive for admissions. If yes, then figure that something like 80% or 85% of other applicants are also competitive, and judge your chances accordingly. They are all reaches for nearly every student.
Someone who is a strong athlete puts another unknown into the mix. For MIT or Caltech I would assume that being an athlete is really just another EC (although a good one). For most other universities a student’s chances of admissions might be helped if a coach in the sport (whatever the sport is) takes a liking to the student.
And I do understand that some sports are sufficiently specialized that you might not want to say what the sport is. As one example, when in high school one daughter knew a student who was actively setting the state records in a sport – If the student had been active on CC then naming the sport would straight out name the student (and defeat the “confidential” part of this web site’s name – and yes he did get into a very good university).
Some smaller colleges are very, very good academically. In my corner of the country Bowdoin, Williams, Amherst and Wellesley College are some examples (and there are more). In other parts of the country of course there are quite a few more. Graduate school admissions understand the high quality of many of the LACs. One daughter attended a small school (the Canadian equivalent of a LAC) and we saw one advantage: You get to know your professors well. This can for example be helpful in getting research opportunities and also later when you need references (whether for job hunting or for graduate school admissions).
I am not a big fan of ED. I think that a student should only apply ED anywhere if there is one college or university that is both clearly the first choice and also is going to be affordable. Otherwise I would just apply normally (EA where available if you can get the applications done in time) and then get to compare offers when they come in.
And I would be very cautious about “name recognition” as a grounds for choosing a university. There are a large number of very good colleges and universities in the US, and more outside the US. I would look for a good fit. Finding a good fit can be more difficult than just looking at rankings, but is worth the effort.
I just take the admissions statistics as a vague guidance regarding whether a student might be reasonably competitive for admissions, or whether the school is just obviously out of reach.
And yes there are a LOT of universities that are very good for economics.
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I would not waste time with the SAT. If anything, retake the ACT, but it still won’t move the needle if her courses are not in line. Using her athletic hook and aiming for schools where she is recruitable may make the most sense.
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Thank you, this is very helpful. The school is ranked in the top 5% in the state academically. I think good course rigor (AP Calc, AP Lit, AP History, etc. - 8 AP classes through junior year).
Sounds like a minimum 34ACT is almost a must, oh well 
Remember most of these schools are test optional and I would guess only about 1/2 to 2/3 of applicants submit scores (you can check this). So…there are definitely people who get in with a score below mid-50. My D24 chose to submit her ACT score which was one point below the mid-50 for her top schools, just to show it wasn’t any lower. 33 is a great score!
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The number APs is not really what will matter: it depends which APs in the context of what is offered and what the top group takes. For example 25% of our HS takes 8+APs, and most of those have BC Calc(rest have AB only). Most but not all of them get into the flagship. But the small group who get into elites (without a major hook like athlete) may have the same total of APs but have done 3 of the 4 hardest APs(or all 4). Talk to your school counselor. It is very hard to know how your kid compares without asking specifically at your school.
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It’s hard to quantify “much more qualified” when MIT’s admittance rate is in the single digits and the majority of people applying have near perfect test scores and GPAs. The one and only factor that MIT marks as “very important” on the CDS is character/ personal qualities. They expect candidates to stand out in some way as they all look very similar when only going by the numbers.
For the most selective D3 LACS, 33+recruited athlete (highly recruited, not just having some interest) is a different ball game than 33.
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With a 31 math/sci and 36 english score…would you say it would improve admission chances if one indicates a desired major in the social sciences vs. a more quantitative one like economics? Generally speaking.
MIT isn’t lowering its standards for female admits, however, all else being equal it is slightly easier for a woman to be admitted (although still very difficult) because fewer apply (last I saw about 12,000 female applicants compared to 21,000 men) and they want to keep a gender balance. Typically, however, it is female applicants that are in the majority at highly selective schools (and at all colleges, period).
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We are not even considering MIT…it was just an illustrative example for what one could imply, with some assumptions, based on provided admission data
It could matter to a small degree, but probably not. As I said above these schools do not admit by major and allow changing subjects, adding minors, etc. AOs look to admit kids who could be successful in any area. Also, the AOs can typically tell if the activities and interests point Econ/etc but the applicant clicks areas of interest they think will be “easier”.
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