You would have to ask enrollment professionals.
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A better example, then, is if she is just âreally goodâ, not world-class⊠but good enough to be desirable in the eyes of the orchestra director.
Or maybe she is the only applicant from Wyoming â it could be any number of things that make her attractive to the adcoms.
Caltech is a private school that does its own thing.
It is likely that it looks for indicators of academic strength that are beyond what the SAT and ACT can indicate â i.e. the SAT and ACT are not really relevant in that case.
Other elite colleges (including MIT) do not have as high a minimum level of academic strength required.
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Sure. But we have seen ample evidence coming from various private institutions lately that âown thingâ can at times include self-defeating policies that jeopardize their core mission of academic excellence.
Just a few years ago it was the received wisdom that standardized tests, and anyone who does not outright condemn them, are inherently racist.
It is good to see that even NYT is increasingly recognizing that the tide is starting to turn.
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The MIT experience suggests that there isnât truth to the statement that institutional priorities canât be met if SAT scores are required. I havenât looked at the diversity numbers at schools like GaTech, Florida, Georgia and Georgetown but the Ga Tech AO did talk about the success of their efforts to increase diversity based mostly on outreach to rural, lower income highs school at the information session I attended. Frankly, I find the argument that test scores can be used to effectively to select among disadvantaged students to determine who is most likely to succeed at college level academics pretty compelling. The goal should not only be increasing diversity but also making sure the students have the best chance of success.
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A great article, @hebegebe , that many participants in this thread would do well to read.
"Given the data, why havenât colleges reinstated their test requirements?
For one thing, standardized tests are easy to dislike. They create stress for millions of teenagers. The tests seem to reduce the talent and potential of a human being to a single number. The SATâs original name, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, implied a rigor that even its current defenders would not claim. Covid, in short, created an opportunity for American society to cast off a tradition that few people enjoyed.
But another part of the explanation involves politics. Standardized tests have become especially unpopular among political progressives, and university campuses are dominated by progressives."
This is NYT, folks! Change is in the air! Follow the Moskva. 
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Again anecdotal reports from r/professors but it seems like many colleges that have offered these types of remedial programs in the past are dropping them due to cost cutting or because lowered admissions standards means that there are so many more students falling into this category that theyâre just encouraging professors/lecturers of first year courses to provide support or to lower the rigour of their courses.
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Last I checked, DE Shaw and similar firms require scores, even if itâs not your first job.
In my case, I have. To several. But as with some others on here I choose not to say more because Iâd rather not dox myself. Oh, and in the future, when commenting dismissively about something Iâve said, please have the courtesy to quote me.
Thatâs interesting and very different from our rigorous private school where writing - a lot of it - is the norm. English obviously, but also foreign languages, history/government and most social sciences, etc. Our kids basically donât have multiple choice as a thing, by and large.
Iâd amend to say a kid who couldnât ace the math SAT in 8th grade or thereabouts!
This is both a tragedy and something that Iâve heard directly from some horses mouths.
One huge caveat. The SAT world is big business. No surprise that the propaganda war is going on to save a cash cow.
What amazes me is the splitting of hairs between an SAT of 1500 and one of 1450. Like kids with the 1450 are made to feel like fell below the bar. Geez. The problem is that the volume of applications has made it difficult to vet students.
Just beware. There are kids in the world being trained for SATs like Olympic athletes. That is all they do. So be careful. Schools need to find some way to get a handle on the âsoft skillsâ of a student. Moving back to test required is going to open up a Pandoraâs box.
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Quoting the NYT article being discussed (highlighting is mine):
"The tests are not entirely objective, of course. Well-off students can pay for test prep classes and can pay to take the tests multiple times. Yet the evidence suggests that these advantages cause a very small part of the gaps.
Consider that other measures of learning â like the NAEP, a test that elementary and middle school students take nationwide â show similarly large racial and economic gaps. The federal government describes the NAEP as âthe nationâs report card,â while education researchers consider it a rigorous measure of K-12 learning. And even though students do not take NAEP test prep classes, its demographic gaps look remarkably similar to those of the ACT and SAT.
This similarity âis another piece of evidence that the SAT is picking up fundamentals,â said Raj Chetty, a Harvard economics professor who conducted the recent Ivy Plus study with Friedman and David Deming. âIt strengthens the argument that the disparities in SAT scores are a symptom, not a cause, of inequality in the U.S.,â Chetty said.
To put it another way, the existence of racial and economic gaps in SAT and ACT scores doesnât prove that the tests are biased. After all, most measures of life in America â on income, life expectancy, homeownership and more â show gaps. No wonder: Our society suffers from huge inequities. The problem isnât generally with the statistics, however. The relatively high Black poverty rate is not a sign that the statistic is biased. Nor would scrapping the statistic alleviate poverty."
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But at these tippy top schools you have the state level oboe player from Wyoming competing with the tuba player from South Dakota and the trombone player from Idaho etc etc. Or now youâve encouraged lots of test optional applicants, more likely you have 6 kids applying from Wyoming rather than one. Is it wise to choose between them based just on a nice essay (or the degree to which they are hooked) without additional information on their âeducatabilityâ?
More to the point, test optional is being used to give privileged kids two bites at the apple: they take an SAT, see how they do and then choose to either target schools that do take SAT scores seriously (if they do well) or those that still admit large numbers from the test optional pool (if they do poorly).
Whereas poor kids without guidance no longer bother to take the SAT and if they are unhooked find themselves at a disadvantage when competing in the test-optional pool against privileged kids who are poor test takers but have lots of ECs.
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But how many unhooked privileged kids are actually getting into elite schools TO? Iâm sure there are some, but Iâd be very surprised if there were significant numbers given that unhooked students have such a low chance of acceptance regardless of test status.
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"The strongest case against the tests comes from educational reformers who want to rethink elite higher education in fundamental ways. To them, the countryâs top colleges should not be trying to identify the very best high school students; instead, these colleges should use their resources to educate a diverse mix of good students and, in the process, lift social mobility.
âŠ
The SAT debate really comes down to dozens of elite colleges, like Harvard, M.I.T., Williams, Carleton, U.C.L.A. and the University of Michigan. The people who run these institutions agree that social mobility should be core to their mission, which is why they give applicants credit for having overcome adversity. But the colleges have another mission, as well: excellence.
They want to identify and educate the students most likely to excel. These students, in turn, can produce cutting-edge scientific research that will cure diseases and accelerate the worldâs transition to clean energy. The students can found nonprofit groups and companies that benefit all of society.
Administrators at elite colleges have justified their decision to stop requiring test scores by claiming that the tests do not help them identify such promising students â a claim that is inconsistent with the evidence. The evidence instead suggests that standardized tests can contribute to both excellence and diversity so long as they are used as only one factor in admissions.
As it happens, most Americans support using standardized test scores in precisely this way. The Pew Research Center has asked Americans whether colleges should consider standardized tests when making admissions decisions. A large majority of people, across racial groups, support doing so.
In todayâs politically polarized country, however, the notion that standardized tests are worthless or counterproductive has become a tenet of liberalism. It has also become an example of how polarization can cause Americans to adopt positions that are not based on empirical evidence."
New. York. Times, people.
And it only took the firing of a couple of Ivy presidents for them to begin to see the light. Or it could be, I dunno, a coincidence?
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Presumably, that is more stress on high school students, if they know that employers in the future after they have graduated from college and perhaps worked for years or decades after will be looking at their high school SAT scores.
Besides a few outliers like Caltech, âthe countryâs top collegesâ are not actually trying to identify the very best high school students for anywhere close to all of their classes. Much of their classes are made of students who are close to the ceilings of such academic measures like GPA and SAT/ACT, but are not the âvery bestâ among this group, because they fit some institutional priorities other than pure academic strength (including âhooksâ). In other words, they are plausibly âtop studentsâ by ordinary measures (GPA and SAT/ACT), even if they are not actual top students.
That some of them want to use the SAT/ACT again likely has to do with the top end of the GPA scale producing too many potential applicants to winnow down to a class, due to grade inflation increasing the number of students at the top end of the GPA scale. Adding the SAT/ACT would reduce the number of applicants with top end ordinary measures to a more manageable number that they can still fulfill their institutional priorities with.
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I donât buy the idea that they care that much about identifying kids who are going to excel - if they were, S24 (a gifted student with a 1580 SAT and a very strong overall application) and kids like him wouldnât be getting rejected from these schools at very high rates. And, for what it is worth that was the case before TO. At the end of the day elite schools want interesting students, FGLI students, kids of donors, athletes, artists, and truly exceptional academics (like the 100 or so kids that Harvard rates a â1â) - the market for the ordinary gifted student isnât that great (and itâs even worse if you come from a state like MA).
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So I was out for the morning enjoying the now and come back to nearly 50 new messages. Didnât expect that.
Actually using it in context can be as simple as looking at this studentâs score and subtracting the mean score for the school. If studentâs score is more than 300 points higher and coupled with strong grades, that suggests this student wasnât really challenged that much at this high school and is likely to initially survive and later thrive at an academically challenging college. This isnât perfect, but then again no metric on the application is perfect.
There are a few different sources that are emphasizing test scores, and not all are just talking about first year GPA. MIT very likely isnât because first semester is pass/no record and second semester is ABC/NR. Hereâs their statement on this:
Our research has shown that, in most cases, we cannot reliably predict students will do well at MIT unless we consider standardized test results alongside grades, coursework, and other factors. These findings are statistically robust and stable over time, and hold when you control for socioeconomic factors and look across demographic groups.
Likewise, I believe that Yaleâs statements referred to grades overall, not just first year. And Brownâs statement also refers to grades overall. Here is a statement from Brownâs president in mid-2023:
Standardized testing has been criticized as an inaccurate predictor of student success. Yet, data show that these tests do reveal useful information about whether students will, on average, be academically successful at Brown. Careful statistical work by one of Brownâs faculty members shows that students with higher SAT or ACT scores are less likely to encounter academic difficulty at Brown. And standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades, which are exceptional for the vast majority of Brown applicants but also carry the complication of being increasingly subject to grade inflation.
And from the UC STTF paper, this first graph does look at UC freshman grades, but finds that the SAT by itself is better predictor than high school grades by itself. Note that this was from the period 2010-2012, which was before grade inflation really kicked in.
We can also look at failure to graduate at UC and see how that varies by both SAT and HSGPA, and you can see that SAT scores are valuable in predicting which students in high-risk groups actually graduate.
Thanks for sending your link. Having looked at it briefly, it appears to contradict what the UC Academic Senate concluded and what others I mentioned above have concluded. To me, the interesting part will be figuring out why, but that will require a thorough read.
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Another thought - what I really object to is the idea that these schools are somehow unable to identify academically excellent students that will excel - there are plenty of them applying- and plenty with excellent test scores - every year. The vast majority are summarily rejected so I find the idea that there is some kind of shortage of students who can succeed (regardless of TO) to be preposterous. If the schools want to go in a different direction - as is their right - it is a choice.
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There are test blind schools out there like the UCs which are elite to most people. And there are examples in this thread and many others of test-optional successes where (mostly privileged, judging by the CC population) kids got into better schools than they felt would have been the case if SAT submission had been required, and their test results were worse than the remainder of their application.
Certainly at my kidsâ HS there are some kids who do better as a result of test optional or test blind and by definition therefore others who do worse. One controversial issue is that it has led to a significant shift towards girls being more successful in applying to the UCs than boys, because the girls are more mature in HS and do relatively better in grades and dedicating themselves to ECs.
Given, there are some people who are smart but are lousy test takers. I happen to be one of those. But that doesnât mean I canât study more to improve my grades or test scores. But donât throw out the baby with the bath water.