This may sound extreme, but it’s one of the reasons we left MA in S24 middle school. We lived in Cambridge for 12 years. I grew up in California and we realized after seeing so many good candidates get rejected from great colleges in MA that the pool was too saturated and they would be looking elsewhere. At least in CA the UCs give preference to their residents and so we thought it was a better option. And at the extreme that he doesn’t even get into a top UC, the cc to UC route is solid.
I had a kid accepted by MIT and Caltech EA waitlisted by Rice RD.
I guess they just had too many “qualified applicants” 
He was also waitlisted by Princeton. They took an “ordinary excellent” football player from his high school class that year. That ball isn’t gonna throw itself. 
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I think a better way to say is that CalTech applicants are a subset of MIT applicants. These are the ones that are ready for much more rigorous coursework than MIT. Now, most of the students who are capable of that will also apply to MIT, and if accepted to both, usually choose MIT.
As someone else above said, plenty of students with a math SAT above 750 will apply to MIT, whereas those applying to CalTech were likely getting those scores in middle school (it used to be common to take the SAT prior to age 13 for some talent searches, such as Johns Hopkins SET).
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Rice and Princeton have a different definition of “academically qualified” compared to Caltech. With the lower (relative to Caltech) bar to be “academically qualified”, they can then select from the pool based on other priorities (including football).
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You can only improve your test score a little no matter how much “prep” your parents pay for. Meanwhile, I know kids whose parents paid THOUSANDS to arrange unique ECs for them.
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I actually don’t have a problem with holistic admissions - the schools have the right to enroll who they want - to have a class that meets their institutional needs. What I find ridiculous is the idea that, suddenly, these schools need tests again to find students who will excel academically. Considering the vast number of high stats students that are rejected every year, I find the idea that there is a shortage of highly capable students to pick from unbelievable.
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Well, in that case, I hope the reason is because a merit scholarship is the only way that the child can attend college. Because for the many selective colleges that practice holistic admissions, focusing purely on test scores is waste of time and money.
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For many of the most selective universities, adding the SAT/ACT to the GPA screen reduces the number of “plausibly academically top-end” applicants to a more manageable number than using GPA alone as the screen of “plausibly academically top-end”. I.e. it reduces the overloading of the admissions process.
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And it doesn’t really work anyway.
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Hard disagree. My son (straight A student taking all HL IB and AP classes - Top 5% of his class) improved his SAT score by 200 points from his first practice test to his final superscore. All due to grinding it out with a tutor for 6 months and learning better test taking strategies. That’s an advantage that underpriveleged kids just don’t have.
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Not sure the reason for the unsubstantiated speculation on why Cal Tech doesn’t use test scores, when Cal Tech tells us the reasons, with my bolds added:
The current decision to extend the testing moratorium to five years is supported by a rigorous internal analysis of the academic performance of the last seven undergraduate first-year cohorts, representing classes that matriculated before and after the moratorium went into effect. The study, conducted by members of the Caltech faculty supported by professional staff, indicates that standardized test scores have little to no power in predicting students’ performance in the first-term mathematics and physics classes that first-year students must take as part of Caltech’s core curriculum. Further, the predictive power of standardized test scores appears to dissipate as students progress through the first-year core curriculum. The extension will allow for the collection of additional data from students enrolled under the moratorium, including one class that will have graduated from the Institute, and will facilitate a more extensive examination of academic performance and its relationship to standardized test scores.
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Why is this necessarily bad? There are high schoolers training 24/7, hiring private coaches, joining travel basketball/baseball teams, attending football camps, all in hope of winning an athletic scholarship to a D-I school. That is all they do, day in and day out, and no one bats an eye. So why is it cringy when it comes to prepping for SAT/ACT? Like the athletes, the kids want something meaningful to them and are willing to work hard for it. Isn’t that commendable?
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I think the real purpose of the tests is to screen out students that won’t excel academically.
The reality is that if your child attends a well-known and academically challenging high school, the college will get all the information it needs from the transcript. If your child excels in high school, they pretty much know your child is likely to thrive in their college. The SAT’s ceilings are too low to indicate if your child has any special talent, so it can’t be used for that.
The additional information from the SAT comes from a child who is significantly outperforming in a high school not well known by the college. An excellent student getting a 1400 from a high school with an average less than 1000 is noteworthy, whereas a student with the same GPA and an SAT of 1000 is worrisome.
But it would be completely unfair to say to that kids from well-known schools don’t have to take standardized tests, but that kids from unknown (and usually poorer) school districts have to take them.
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A private tutor, no, but there are a gazillion of free resources on test prep that anyone can access if they want to put in the “grind”. (I’d even speculate that your kid would have scored equally well without the tutor if said kid put in the grind.). Heck even the CollegeBoard’s own data show that a 200-300 point gain is not unheard of with prep. And yes, even free prep takes time which can be hard to do when one is working as a grocery bagger to help the family pay bills.
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I thiink writing papers in the history/gov/social science classes could be possible if not for AP. With AP classes kids are writing but it is practice FRQ’s and SRQ’s and likely some other Q. Lots of practice MCQ. Private schools that have gone away from the AP class grind have a lot more leeway to work on substantive papers.
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Yes this is our school. Hardly any APs at all (some kids take them anyway).
omg… and tutors 2x a week all year don’t help kids with their grades? Parents sending their kids to Latin America to volunteer in a hospital or violin lessons since they were 5 don’t help their ECs?
This war on the SAT is so misguided and not remotely based on data.
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Seems like writing skills for longer papers and such are not something easily tested with time-limited standardized testing, which attempts to proxy some sort of ability and/or achievement. Of course, when standardized testing is important, there is incentive for schools to teach to the test, rather than the achievement that the test is trying to proxy. The result is that students become more skilled at the test, but make less progress at the achievement that the test is trying to proxy.
Old SATs tried to proxy English skills with vocabulary, but that meant that vocabulary was focused on in test prep. The three part SAT with the writing sample eventually had the writing sample grading reverse-engineered by test prep companies, causing the writing sample to lose its value.
Because there is more to life than that and more to university life than that.
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What war? I think the entire thing is overblown. A majority of applicants to elite schools are still sending scores and, anecdotally, kids with scores seem to be getting in at a higher rate. Kids who aren’t submitting scores (like some recruited athletes) used to be admitted with low scores anyway so I’m not sure what difference it has made. Every aspect of the admissions process favors wealthy kids - from ECs, to paid counseling, to SAT prep, to tutors - that was the case before TO and it will still be true if tests become required again.
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