@gardenstategal my comment about ferreting it out was in jest. I don’t think the holistic process ferrets out much truth at all as it is. And I don’t see colleges changing their ways. They fight each other for the highest scores, for the “sure things”, for high scoring URMs. I don’t see them changing that.
I wish they would. I had my own 17 year old basket case right up until he got a few good acceptances. It is frustrating for parents not to be able to protect them from these outside forces.
Someone asked how a college would know about a good charitable work and a resume pad. On the news this AM it was suggested to require a rec from that charity. Less academic rec, more EC recs.
Another good one is when asked “Is it better to get an A in a regular class or a B in an advanced class?”, the response inevitably is “It is better to get an A in an advanced class.”
One of the wonderful things about CC is how informed the posters can be. In this case, @JHS knows better than I do what discussions went on at these information sessions that he/she did not attend.
I keep hearing proposals to limit the number of student applications. I don’t think you can do that any more than you can control the number of applications that colleges can accept. It can’t be legal. Making it harder to apply to many schools will serve to benefit the wealthy and cc posters how know the details of the system. However, it will be detrimental to less informed students and families.
@Zinhead . Nice one. It has been quite a while – about 9 years – since my last information session, but I have yet to see anything quoted from one that I did not hear five, six, seven, ten times in my day. Including the line about “It’s better to get an A in an advanced class,” which had its moment in 100% of the selective college info sessions I ever attended. I also happen to know some of the people speaking at those sessions. Nothing has changed.
The best line I heard about test scores was from a deputy admissions director at Yale, who is now the Dean of Admissions and other relevant things at the University of Chicago: “SAT scores mean a lot less than you think, and a little more than we are willing to admit.”
Elite colleges want elite students; there’s no question about that. If you aren’t an elite student at your high school, the chances you will be one at Harvard or Stanford are pretty low. It’s not a zero chance, because you can be a blazing star in one field and good-not-great in others, but it’s not necessarily that hard to pick out the blazing stars, even if their high school teachers and GCs missed it. At most American high schools, being in the top 10% of the class is not that high a bar, and the schools where it is a high bar tend – surprise! – not to rank their students. (At a lot of those schools, Harvard, Yale, or Stanford may see enough applications from the class to do their own rankings.) Similarly, if you aren’t in the top, say, 5-6% on one of the standardized tests, then you probably aren’t a viable candidate for one of these colleges, at least not without a pretty good, pretty obvious reason why that shouldn’t matter.
But it’s not like elite colleges tell American students that nothing matters more than being in the top 10% of your class or >2200 SATs, because all kinds of things matter more than that. They accept kids who miss those benchmarks – not many, as a percentage of applicants, but probably lots as a percentage of admissions committee time allocation – and they reject the vast majority of kids who meet them.
“How will this effect this year’s (high school class of 2016) admissions cycles? Maybe admissions team will put less emphasis on SAT/ACT score?”
This varies by school. As long as US News publishes it as their primary metric of student strength, some schools are going to rely on it heavily.
Also the comment in the article to the effect that SAT/ACT scores really don’t tell you how much a student knows, but only tell you is how wealthy the family is. That is false. Repeat after me, “Correlation is not causation.”
What these tests are telling us in aggregate is that there is a big disparity in this country between the educational achievement level of the children of wealthy and academically focussed families, when compared to the children of poor and middle class families. Unfortunately, it is much easier to claim that the test is poor, than it is to work to close this education gap and address the real problem.
Maybe the solution is to only apply to schools that you are academically qualified for. There are people that can get A’s in advanced class without much stress (possibly ignoring the situation in places like West-Windsor Plainsboro, which are rare anyways).
An adcom at a select school sold me that they receive about 30,000 application a year. From this amount, 10,000 were cut based on stats alone. Of the remaining 20,000, they would cut 10,000 after an initial read. The remaining 10,000 were qualified to be admitted and do well at the school, but since they could only accept 2,500 to 3,000 to fill their class, they would select the admits based on match and how likely they thought the candidates would accept the offer of admission. The top 10 percent and >2200 SAT helps the candidate get to the final pool, but it does not determine who gets the admission offer from within that pool.
“What these tests are telling us in aggregate is that there is a big disparity in this country between the educational achievement level of the children of wealthy and academically focussed families, when compared to the children of poor and middle class families”
Not really. This debate is not new but the US is filled with families where there is one kid who scores a 2300 and another who scores a 1900 despite having the same amount of resources. Ability and motivation count for a lot. Do access and resources help, sure but unless there is a genuine ability and desire to succeed, you can be tutored up the wazoo and you are not breaking 2000. Whether you grow up in the South Bronx or attend Bronx Science.
@MotherOfDragons
College applications are expensive and Common App provides an excellent way to apply to multiple colleges for a low price. After all, there are some students who do not have the funds to apply to the colleges they truly want to go to. And why should a student have to really want to go to a college to apply? Every student needs safety schools, and a large number of colleges applied to may make a student unsure if they will get accepted or not feel more secure.
That would not scale to well to tens of thousands of applications if one wants to make the interviews consistent enough to be used as more than an expression of interest and to reveal extreme outliers (the few with extremely good or extremely bad interviews). Also, applicants who have lived in upper middle class environments would “naturally” have the expected upper middle class mannerisms with no additional effort (i.e. a built in advantage), while others may have to work to act that way in the interview.
The UCs and CSUs do that (up to 8 semesters’ of +1 points for AP and honors courses in the recalculated GPA), although that still does not prevent “pressure cooker” environments from forming at some high schools in California.
@Zinhead I heard both, “it’s better to get an A in the advanced class” and “but that doesn’t mean we expect you to take every AP your school offers”. The Vassar rep said it, but there were nods of agreement from Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth and U of Rochester who were all at the same table.
My kids did not take every AP offered by a long shot, they took the ones that interested them, plus a selection of other ones. So older son took who had accelerated in math and science took most of the math and science APs (not Environmental) plus APUSH, and Latin. He had extra math and science as well. Younger son took all the history APs and Calc BC, and two science APs. They got into great (top 20) colleges and slept 8 hours every night. It did help that they are great test takers so did not need to worry about the SAT much.
Well of course it doesn’t because not everyone wants to go to them. As long as HYMPCS are playing by the existing rules, there’s no incentive for many kids to get out of the arms race.
MIT does have mandatory interviews (or nearly so anyway!) because they really do want to make sure you are social enough for MIT.
Actually, the vicious sorting you are describing is an effect of the greater open access to higher education for students across a much wider spectrum of academic ability since the 1960’s and '70’s as the high ability students feel a greater need to sort themselves into the 30+ very selective schools to differentiate themselves from other students so they could stand out for hiring/promotions/social networking purposes.
Especially considering the greater expansion of college access in some public colleges like the ill-conceived and implemented open-admission policies at CCNY/CUNY meant that such institutions rapidly changed from being schools which provided a rigorous college curriculum and graduated well-prepared students to being institutions focused on remedial education and graduating students many local/regional employers regarded with some dubiousness as to their basic academic skills and educational level*.
This was to some extent mirrored briefly in Mainland China during the Chinese Cultural Revolution when selective academic admission exams were replaced with admission on the basis of good peasant/worker backgrounds and conformity with Maoist ideology. Got to the point universities were effectively shut down due to student protests driven from above(Mao and Gang of 4) and because they were admitting students so ill-prepared for the college curriculum that no meaningful teaching/education was able to take place. This horrified the post-Maoist Mainland leadership so much they brought back the national college entrance and academic prep high school exams with a vengeance and many Mainland companies/public sector agencies with selective hiring policies refuse to acknowledge college degrees obtained during the Cultural Revolution years.
Several older friends and teachers/Profs who attended HS/college in the tri-state area during the late '60s/early '70s recounted how within a few years after 1969 CCNY/CUNY went from being regarded by students, employers, and the larger public as an academically elite institution turning out high ability graduates to being an academically dismal one turning out graduates with a degree/educational quality many regarded with some dubiousness. The process of high or even slightly above-average students voting with their feet by transferring out accelerated when CCNY/CUNY eliminated free tuition in 1975.
@seekingpam “Not really. This debate is not new but the US is filled with families where there is one kid who scores a 2300 and another who scores a 1900 despite having the same amount of resources.”
Of course, individuals vary within a family. There is no question about that. However, on average, you can tell a lot about the typical families of students at most high schools, just by knowing the schools average ACT score.
@seekingpam "Ability and motivation count for a lot. Do access and resources help, sure but unless there is a genuine ability and desire to succeed, you can be tutored up the wazoo and you are not breaking 2000. "
I am not suggesting that access and resources are the only variables, of course ability and motivation count for a lot. The family that you are raised in can make a huge difference. Having food, clothes, shelter, and a safe environment to live in can make a huge difference. Parents that value education and make sure that your homework gets done can make a huge difference. An adult who believes in a kid can make a huge difference.
We know many of the steps that can be taken to close this gap in low income areas: extend the school day; shorten the summer break; spend more time on English, math and science; get rid of ineffective teachers; increase pay for the most effective teachers; increase parent involvement. The problem is that no one is willing to do what it takes to help these kids. Special interests have both political parties in their pockets. Ugh.
Of course test scores correlate with family income. Both IQ and education correlate with family income. I do wonder if anyone who has ever made this claim has ever bothered to control for parental test scores and/or IQ. I know some very average people who make lots of money, but their high income hasn’t caused their children to have high test scores.