@droppedit I don’t know the answer either. I’m a little biased because I did exceptionally well on the SAT decades ago but I believe that I would not be able to make a dent on it today. I had excellent logic, reading, analysis and vocabulary skills but fairly poor math skills. Back then, the “math” version of the test was designed so very little actual math needed to be learned if that makes any sense. Now, I wonder what happens to kids like me? I suppose, I would be one of the kids applying to test optional schools.
I’m not saying the old way was better. Only that I can understand how a college could believe that the standardized tests might miss some worthy students.
Perhaps we should have both? A test for knowledge learned in HS so colleges can compare applicants from different HS, and another test for applicants’ innate abilities that wouldn’t be affected much by test preps? This would be controversial and opposite of where we’re heading on standardized tests.
@1NJParent I think that was what the old system strived to do. The SAT was supposed to measure innate ability, but there were also subject matter tests where students could demonstrate mastery. I don’t know if they were called SAT 2’s back then or something else. The real problem is that it is probably impossible to design a test for innate ability to begin with. There was always controversy about bias on the test. And of course, it WAS possible to study and increase your score even then, which suggests it never did what it was designed to do.
I hate to be the one to bring up what seems to be getting LOST in all these discussions about how to "read the
“tea leaves” and figure out what colleges want. The statistical fact is that ANY student applying to one of the highly selective colleges that has a 5-25 % acceptance rate is MOST likely going to be REJECTED . Period. Regardless of how hard working or smart or incredibly accomplished their child is AND how wonderful their essays are.
Because there are THOUSANDS of equally smart, hardworking, accomplished students from around the world ALSO applying to those colleges. And there simply isn’t room for everyone.
Admissions officers keep on saying that they are forced to decide who to reject, NOT who to accept, because there are plenty of kids who “deserve” to be accepted. I really wish everyone would believe them.
The applicants who are recruited athletes, children of faculty, legacies, URM’s, WOW’s [ the truly walk on water kids] are going to get first dibs at spots those colleges, as long as they have are not a** holes and have the stats and GPA’s that are high enough to pass the “good enough” test. After MOST of the spots go to those kids , there are very very few spots left over for anyone else.
Parents need to fully grasp that their child should EXPECT to be rejected at those colleges. And NOT let them “fall in love” in the FIRST place with any college where rejection is the most likely outcome.Then they won’t be so disappointed in the first place…
@menloparkmom I don’t think anyone is disputing that. Trying to maximize chances is not the same as believing you can control the uncontrollable. Nothing in this thread should be read to suggest that students don’t need real safeties and a reasonable list of schools.
^trying to “maximize chances” means the continuation of the delusion that the almost certain outcome of “non-hooked” students applying to highly selective colleges could somehow be altered, imho. Putting in all that effort , when the odds are stacked against you, leads to disappointment.
I think Ill say no more…
@menloparkmom I don’t think disappointment is a terrible thing for an 18 year old to experience, especially if she goes in with eyes open. I also think there is a real difference between a school that accepts 5% and one that accepts 25%. For a high stat kid, rejection from a 25% school which matches her needs is certainly not a forgone conclusion.
I heard one admissions officer at a highly selective LAC say just the opposite. He said probably 80% of applicants to his school were well-prepared, highly talented, and would clearly flourish if admitted. But that meant there were at least 5 times as many “deserving” applicants as they could accept. When he began in admissions, he would tie himself in knots trying to decide which of the many “deserving” applicants to reject, because he felt he was doing a grave injustice to each of them. But over time he came to understand that his job wasn’t to decide which applicants to reject; it was to decide which of the many “deserving” applicants to select in building the kind of class the school wanted. And he didn’t need to worry about those who weren’t selected, because they were all so well prepared and talented that he was confident they’d all get into very good schools, and they’d be just fine.
A lot of wisdom in that, I thought,but applicants and their parents don’t always see it that way.
The acceptance rate is only an average. Some applicants chances are greater than the average as they have a better HS “resume” than their peers. I see no problem having some reach schools on your college list as long as you are realistic on your low chances and have several match and safeties as well.
@menloparkmom Please don’t perpetuate the myth that URMs with “good enough” stats have first dibs. It irks me to no end and is false. Every year most URMs with good enough stats get rejected. Yet they keep hearing that they have a good shot and apply blindly, when they actually have no chance. Just this year I worked with a low income, first gen, black student that had “good enough” stats who was told she had a great chance at elite schools. Unsurprisingly to me, she was rejected to all of them. I know many with excellent stats at my D’s high school who are rejected/waitlisted every year. Please stop it.
@gallantjill I think I would have had near perfect score on SAT if I had to take it again at the age I was then because that is the equivalent score for the corresponding percentage of 99.9%. I remember thinking “Wow, I have the score of top 1 out of 1,000 kids even though I just immigrated to U.S. 6 years ago. Now, why is my GPA only 3.0?” lol I just studied back then off the Barron’s SAT book I bought 1 to 1.5 hour per day for 2.5 months during summer. That was my only chance to go to a decent college because my GPA was bad even though I had good sports ECs. I got too carried away with my great SAT score and even applied to Harvard which rejected me. But why not? I was a poor (financially) URM then and had a great SAT score, so I felt I had a chance to get in anywhere. I know I could have graduated from Harvard or Yale without any problem even though I skipped 50% of my classes because simply put, it’s not that hard to graduate from an Ivy in 4 years. I went to Cornell.
Because of my own experience described above, I am personally not that impressed by perfect test scores but more by the student’s character, perseverance and the desire to contribute to his or her community. To be frank, HS level courses back then (even AP or Honors) did not really test true smartness but the ability to trod along or grind through, which I must say I truly lacked (which I admit is a real important attribute for success) because I could not put my butt on the chair and keep it there for more than 10 minutes. I really don’t think I studied longer than 30 minutes at one time during college.
But it would be a mistake for those who can perform well academically to think that those who don’t have good grades or test scores are less smart or will not be able to grind through in non-academic settings. I was able to work very, very hard after school and do very well relative to how they thought I would do after seeing how lazy I was in college and graduate school.
The problem with attempting to measure raw intelligence is that it is difficult to do so without some assumption of previous learning, and influence thereof. For example, older SAT verbal sections were mostly vocabulary based. Some argue that they test raw intelligence better than the current SAT reading/writing sections. However, the questions were mostly based on whether you knew the words – they were quite easy if you knew the words, but difficult if you did not (the “harder” questions used more obscure words that high school students were less likely to have encountered). Hence the tendency back then for high school English teachers to give and test on weekly vocabulary words (probably chosen from a book of supposed SAT words).
Similarly, older SAT math sections were easy if you knew your algebra and geometry well, but not if you did not (whether because your math ability was weak, or because your high school math courses did not teach it well.
General test taking tactics also help (e.g. guessing tactics).
The names of the those tests were Achievement Tests, SAT II Tests, (currently) SAT Subject Tests. Most of the subjects are the same ones. Math Level 2 was, then and now, a test where a fairly large percentage of test takers scored 800, probably because of self-selection (stronger-in-math students who were a year or more advanced in math were the ones taking that, as opposed to Math Level 1).
I don’t think innate abilities is the it. Top colleges aren’t looking for potential as much as what’s shown, to-date. It’s not a guessing game, like some lower school testing to id kids.
@websensation I agree about grades vs smarts. My kids’ friends who went to a variety of less known colleges are all thriving based in their own drives and savvy. Some in some rather neat jobs. Grades are just one of many life contests.
Btw, agree with GJ that scoring well in the past doesn’t mean you’d do as well now. Tests, how they measure what they measure, have evolved.
Yes, when you factor in ED or SCEA admission rates, the posted rate is actually lower. So for an unhooked or undistinguished applicant applying RD, the odds of rejection are likely even greater than the admission rates would suggest.
It is true that the applicant pool also includes some wholly unqualified applicants – meaning that the well qualified have better odds. But I think that rationale works only for less selective colleges. That is, if a student has stats in the upper range and the college accepts 45% of applicants -it’s probably fair to assume that it is also receiving applications from students with weaker stats, including some who are unqualified and will definiteliy be rejected-- so that strong student’s odds of admission are probably much higher – possibly 80-90%.
But when admission rates are in the single digits – there just aren’t that many spots left in the RD round. Sure, Harvard is getting some application from clueless students who have -0- chance of admission – and every -0- means a somewhat higher chance of admission for qualified students. But there just aren’t enough of them to offset the impact of the hooked or highly distinguished applicants and the impact of early acceptance.
Harvard accepted 4.59% of applicants this year – so some might think that means roughly a 5% chance of acceptance.
But Harvard’s EA admit rate was 14.5% and Harvard has a very high yield overall, so safe to assume that 90% of those EA admits will attend.
For the RD round, the admit rate was actually 2.43%. That includes all of the students deferred from the EA pool. There were 4,882 students from EA deferred – by definition all of those students are qualified for admission, because if not, they would have been rejected rather than deferred. There were 6630 EA applicants this year, 964 of whom were admitted – the deferred students represent 73% of the EA pool – so actually only 784 were outright rejected. That suggests a liberal deferral policy – but it also gives us a good sense of how many clearly unqualified - or 0 chance - applicants Harvard might see – which appears to be under 12%. (EA stats from https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/12/964-gain-early-admission-to-harvard-college-class-of-2022/)
So… more math-- now we have 41,000 students in the RD round (including the prescreened, deferred EA group) competing for 998 seats. Let’s be generous and assume that 25% of the 36,119 new RD applicants with have -0- chance of admissions. That leaves us with around 31,970 students under consideration – which translates to a new, improved RD admit rate of around 3.1%. What if fully half of those new RD applicants have 0 chances? That results in an applicant pool of around 20,850 students competing for roughly 1000 seats, which boosts the RD admit rate all the way up to around 4.8% … which still is less than 5% chance of acceptance.
So yes – it is “only an average”-- but in the realm of elite admissions… most of the high state kids looking at that number are probably on the lower end of that average.
Obviously the solution is to apply ED or SCEA – because that is the best thing a strong student can do to boost chances – but the student can do that at only one college. If the student applies REA to Harvard and is one of the 85% who ends up rejected or deferred… that does nothing to boost chances at Yale or Columbia. So the student whose heart is set on a single-digit admission school is going to have to make a decision early on as to where to cast their die.
@calmom i guess my point is that kids should compare their “resume” with the historical stats of that top college to see if they are in the top quartile, middle 50%, or bottom quartile and adjust expectations accordingly.
As i have posted before, close friend’s D was rejected SCEA by Stanford but during RD was accepted to three ivies including H and also Duke, UCB regents scholar, etc. even though all of those schools are reacheds or everybody, the family was pretty confident that she would be accepted to some of these elite schools based on her stats 36 ACT, u4.0, all 5s on AP exams, great ECs, #2 in graduating class, etc. she’s an outlier but had a better chance than sub 5% at H. It would be interesting to know how many kids were rejected with her stats, doubt its 95%.
The fact that she did well at super-selective schools probably means that the parts of her application (e.g. essays, recommendations) that are difficult or impossible for outsiders to compare to those of other applicants were strong enough that she was an attractive applicant to those schools, even in comparison to numerous other top-end-stat applicants that she was competing with.
^^i agree with you, I’m sure her LORs and essays completed the package that this is a stellar kid that would thrive at their school. It also didn’t hurt that she was a non-STEM major (political science / government).
EA deferral means different things for different colleges. For example, a few years ago Princeton and Stanford had the following stats for their early applicants. Princeton only rejected 1% of applicants and deferred the rest, while Stanford rejected 81% and only deferred 8%. Sure it’s possible that Princeton thought 99% of their early applicants were qualified students who had a reasonable shot in RD, and only 1% had 0 chance. However, if this is true, such a stat is near meaningless because of the tremendous variation in deferral rate between different colleges
The degree of ED/SCEA/REA boost also differs significantly between different colleges. In some cases, I expect it is notable. In other cases, I expect it is negligible. Earlier in the thread someone said colleges provided all of the information about their decision process. This is the kind of thing I’d appreciate more detail on from specific colleges. Knowing more detail about the decision process better helps specific sub-groups of students estimate and understand their chance of acceptance, which can impact their chance of applying or chance of applying EA/ED vs RD.
While statements about fit on websites are nice and in some cases quite helpful, I’d also appreciate more CDS style stats about the process. As an example, earlier in the thread someone linked to the video on Berkeley admissions at https://youtu.be/M-4pi-zlk8g . This is very helpful for understanding admissions decisions. They list the specific criteria on which students are rated 1-5 and the distribution of 1-5 scores among both applicants and accepted students. Berkeley provides many other types of documentation – reports in the style of https://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/hout_report_2005.pdf , separate acceptance rates by GPA+score for different groups that some believe have different admission thresholds and evidence to the contrary , clear understanding about how they recalculate GPA, etc.
Selective private colleges have different motivations. For example, publishing information that causes notably fewer students to apply is generally not desirable. As such, it is often not practical for selective private colleges to publish the type of Berkeley report linked above; but more can still be done to demystify the admissions decisions process . For example, Duke’s Dean of Admissions, Christoph Guttentag, goes in to more detail about their admissions process in the letter quoted at http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1632160-christoph-guttentags-letter-demystifying-admission-process-at-duke-p1.html . I find this type of explanation helpful, and seeing how it fits well with other sources gives a lot of support behind the statements. For example:
Guttentag says
FERPA says
Duke’s website says
Duke’s CDS marks variations of those same 6 qualities as equally important like Guttentag said + “character/personal qualities,” which Duke has used as one of their 1-5 rating categories in the past, and Guttentag’s letter hints about how they are still important today, even though Duke stopped rating them on a 1-5 scale.
Duke’s website still makes the usual fit type comments, like “We like ambition and curiosity, talent and persistence, energy and humanity.” or “We especially appreciate students who love thinking hard about things and who like to make a difference in the world.” However, Guttentag’s letter combined with FERPA, Duke’s website, and Duke’s CDS give me a better understanding of how those characteristics fit in to the rest of the criteria used for admission decisions and the relative importance of the different evaluation criteria than do the vast majority of selective private colleges.