I hope my son’s application was read, but now I really doubt it. Last night I listened to this interview with Yale’s director of admissions:
The guy not only says that test scores are the most important factor, he says that they must be seen relative to the school where they’re from. So my son’s 34 would have been OK if he went to a HS where the average ACT was 25, but it’s totally unacceptable at an elite school.
He also says that they don’t spend a lot of time on scores, but it’s the first thing that they quickly look at and then move on. That sounds a lot like screening and throwing apps aside.
It’s too late to game the tests now, but would have been easy to do – just need to put the time in. Our prep school said that schools were figuring this out and putting less emphasis on these tests for this reason, but clearly that isn’t the case at Yale.
I wish we had known about this, I feel really bad that my son wasted so much time on that application.