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<p>That wouldn’t surprise me. But the way I’d expect it to work is that the school quietly suggests to a few “hooked” candidates, e.g., recruited athletes, legacies, and development cases, that they might want to submit ACT scores instead of SAT scores. That way they can admit them below the radar, keeping them from affecting the SAT medians that are prominently reported in U.S. News and on their own websites. </p>
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<p>I find this improbable. Geographic diversity is nice, but I don’t think it’s a strong enough “hook” that elite colleges would debase their admissions standards for it; it might tip the balance as between two otherwise similarly credentialed candidates, or give a slight edge to the occasional candidate from Nebraska or Wyoming–but you only need one per state to fill out your 50-state roster, and you’d end up giving the same kind of advantage to some kids from SAT-dominant states as well. Besides, there’s no shortage of top-scoring ACT-takers in the Midwest—nor of high-scoring SAT-takers. I don’t think elite eastern schools are so desperate for Midwesterners that they’d need to dip that deep into the applicant pool for them; they’d take the cream of the crop, not those lower down. </p>
<p>No, the more I think about this, the more I think Papa Chicken is probably right—the low ACT medians are probably attributable to recruited athletes and other “hooked” applicants who are substituting ACT scores for probably even weaker SAT scores, and in the process getting themselves off the school’s SAT-median radar screen.</p>