In any event, to suggest that Wesleyan is up to some nefarious purpose by providing a comparison between its admitted students and the class that remains after the traditional “summer melt” (which btw doesn’t make it look like HYPMS have anything to worry about) seems to argue oddly in favor of less information. And that’s not Wesleyan.
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Okay, guys, Wesleyan is not being nefarious and more information is better. I agree. And I actually like Wesleyan, so I don’t want to malign them.
Let’s get back to the poster, who has a kid with 1470 on his SAT and is worried that it’s too low to send, which is ridiculous. 1470 is a great score and will enhance his application.
Wesleyan admitted 42% of their applicants last year without any standardized test score. That’s how important they think the SAT is. Here’s the problem. If your kid went to Milford Academy, or Choate, or The Dalton School, or Regis, or Hotchkiss, or Greenwich High School, or Scarsdale High School, Wesleyan doesn’t need your SAT. They know what the rigor of the curriculum is at those schools and who the other students in those schools are. But if your kid went to XYZ Public High School, they just might want something else to validate your valedictorian status to assure them that you can match up with the other students in a Wesleyan class room. That’s where the SAT comes in. It gives them that independent verification of your achievement.
So, who is a better group for Wes to compare your SAT to when they want that reassurance? The 65% of applicants who better dealed Wes for a HYPSM or other Ivy, or Public Ivy, or for Williams, Amherst, or one of the Claremonts? Or the 35% of applicants who actually came to Wesleyan and are in their classrooms doing the work?
Wesleyan tells us that rigor is what’s most important to them and that they’ll look at gpa to see how you handled that rigor - if you have it. After that, the SAT is supplementary information, backup in case they have any lingering questions.
If anyone views Wesleyan’s application process as a horse race to see who can submit the highest stats, then go for the 1500, or even better the 1550. But that’s not what they care most about.
Wesleyan want to know who the applicant is and that’s not a test number. They want o know if you can handle the rigor in their classrooms. And a parent who worries about submitting a 1470 because it’s less than a 1480 doesn’t understand that statistically, the two are indistinguishable. The 1470 is just as good at reassuring them that your 4.0 gpa is legit and that you can do the work.
Wesleyan does a holistic review. What they care about beyond rigor + gpa & class rank is essays, recommendations, and anything else which will reveal an applicant’s character & personal qualities, his talents & abilities, and his interests + whatever else makes him tick. That’s where an applicant’s energy should go in deciding what to submit to this kind of school. Interestingly, they also want to know if you’re first generation college, which I suspect tells us that in general they want to know what kinds of obstacles students had to overcome to get there. Overall they want to know what an applicant can bring to their community and what he will contribute. They’re not interested in splitting hairs over test scores which are a few points apart.
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I’m not sure we can conclude that. As has been discussed at different points on this thread, the CDS very likely includes the scores of all matriculating students, including those who applied TO.
ETA: I got distracted while drafting the above and am just now seeing your most recent post, with which I agree! Wes is not going to split hairs over test scores.
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Agreed. The “submitted”/”not submitted” ratios are clearly confounding factors.
It’s a dynamic situation. Among those mentioned, only Wesleyan can claim to have expanded the most over the past half-century (largely due to co-education in the early 1970s) and clearly has room for word-of-mouth to catch up with its reputation; it’s already experienced more than one admissions cycle where they’ve over-accepted the targeted first-year class size by nearly a hundred seats. My hunch is it’s anyone’s guess as to which cohort group future applicants should be paying more attention: the ivy overlaps or the matriculated class?
One thing everyone seems to agree on is that a half-century of holistic admissions has served Wesleyan well and I would even go so far as to say that it is better suited to weathering any pressure from the federal government to change its policies than some of its R1 university competitors.
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[quote=“Collegequestions5, post:65, topic:3687272, full:true”]
Are you saying that Wesleyan asks students who were accepted without test scores to submit test scores after the fact? I hadn’t thought of that.
I leave near Wesleyan, so I’ll go over to Admissions and ask them this week in an attempt to clear this up.
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@Bill_Marsh Yes, if you are able, please shed some light into this and ask admissions. In my research and S26’s communication with admissions, Wesleyan’s Class of 2028 freshman profile (on the website) shows stats of students who actually enrolled (I’m assuming the numbers reflect scores from those who sent their test scores only. Worth getting a confirmation). On their CDS, the scores show lower SAT/ACT because Wesleyan requests from all its enrolled students to submit their SAT/ACT scores to Wesleyan regardless if they sent their test scores or went test-optional.
It’s a little confusing on their website because if you scroll further, you’ll find a second set of SAT/ACT scores that are higher. Apparently, this set show stats from accepted students.
My takeaway from this? Use the stats of accepted students as that will give you an idea of who they choose to admit.
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Yes. My kid was admitted test optional, and he was required to submit his test scores before enrolling.
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I’d be really curious as to why Wesleyan wants this type of data. Since they’ve been test optional for so long, what are they hoping to glean from the information?
And to clarify, I’m not against data collection, but I always like to think there’s a reason someone is asking for it. I wonder what Wesleyan hopes to learn.
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Interesting. How did they know he even had scores to submit?
I think the answer to that question depends on how you think they’re going to use the test scores for determining admissions decisions:
- If you think that it’s a race to see who can achieve the highest test scores, then yes, use the scores of all accepted students.
- If you think that they’re using test scores as additional information to verify that the applicant is capable of doing Wesleyan-level college work, the use the test scores of enrolled students because they are the ones who are actually at Wesleyan doing the work while those who never enrolled are irrelevant
One can’t matriculate to Wes unless they first get an offer of admission. Applicants are competing for a finite number of spots with plenty of students for whom Wes isn’t their first choice and who won’t choose Wes if offered admission, for whatever reason.
The admitted student data reflect the full set of students who were selected thru the holistic admission process, so is the most relevant set of data we have when deciding to submit or not.
None of this has anything to do with how I think Wes uses test scores in their decisions. Because they publish the admitted student scores we can see the result of their process
Exactly.
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The instruction was to submit any ACT or SAT scores, if you had them. If you didn’t, you would tell them that.
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So, @Mwfan1921, you would recommend that the poster’s son not submit his SAT scores?
What poster are you talking about?
Thanks. 
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I’m guessing it’s for institutional research purposes. Whitman College struggled with TO - whether to do it or not - for years. At one point, an internal memo on the matter was leaked, wherein it discussed its tracking of kids with strong GPAs and low’[er] test scores and concluded that GPA + rigor was a strong determinant of future success. It’s valuable information, both for the school and for academia at large, to keep a database of those stats.
Otherwise, asking for the scores is just being nosey.
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It’s also a pretty good defense against the pervasive suspicion that the only motive a college has in adopting TO is to inflate its standardized testing stats by cherry picking which ones get published; we’ve all read the innuendos; the Ivies eventually caved to them. A lot of people simply won’t accept the idea that socio-economic backgrounds are confounding factors in the results.
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I don’t have a dog in the fight; my kids had good scores.
The uncomfortable truth of the matter is that these test scores are for many students and their parents an accomplishment that makes them feel like they’ve achieved something that sets them apart and they want the privilege that comes with achieving something that sets one apart.
It’s a bit like the legacy discussion. Some of the most logic-driven posters in this forum all of a sudden seem to drop logic almost altogether for that one and it’s plain to me why that is.
Similarly, on this topic, I rarely get a thoughtful response to the question about what to do with those kids who show a great deal of academic ability and promise through other means, and there are those kids and I suspect more than people want to let on. It’s a high stakes test at a time in life when some kids just aren’t up for it. And of course there are a million other criticisms that are routinely leveled at the tests but the one that gets it for me is that it’s a one-shot thing. Some people are ok with that and others, me included, are not.
Of course it’s just anecdata but we are connected to several kids who scored poorly and wound up being great students.
I’m a cynic by nature. I think people like feeling elite but few admit it. And people, many at least, just don’t like seeing another student get to the same place they or their kid got to w/o the same test score achievement.
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Having raised and observed two kids with very different standardized testing outcomes but very similar academic and life outcomes makes clear to me how silly it is to see these tests as determinative. Testing is just one thing!
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For someone visiting this thread at a later date, I wanted to give an update regarding our dilemma with submitting my son’s SAT scores of 710 Math/760 English. He applied Early Decision and included them. He was accepted FWIW. Thanks for everyone’s input previously.
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