This past Friday, students who took the SAT on November 5th received their scores. That moment when teenagers open their score report has long been one full of anxiety. Now, it seems to torment them even more. That’s because when so many campuses are test-optional, the score has lost a lot of its former meaning.
“SAT and ACT scores have long commanded an enormous amount of signaling power for students in the admissions process,” I wrote in a lengthy feature for New York magazine, which also arrived on Friday. “The pandemic, and the mass pivot to test optional, has made that test score’s signal much weaker. And even when a student does have a test score, there is much more noise in interpreting it.”
The piece—which I’ve been working on since the spring with several drafts in-between then and now—was pegged to MIT’s decision last March to require the SAT/ACT for admissions this cycle.
My three takeaways from the story:
1️⃣ MIT is indeed an outlier. Who knows if other highly selective colleges will follow and require the test again at some point in the coming years. (My take: I doubt it. As one dean at a highly selective university told me, test-optional “gives you more degrees of freedom in selection.”)
For now, MIT is mostly alone in requiring the test in part because of how the campus decided to return to the policy. Instead of taking a few years to study current undergrads who enrolled without test scores—as most other colleges are now doing—MIT looked backwards at 20 years of its own data, when the institution used to enroll students with a wider range of math scores in particular. And what they found is that too many students with lower scores—at least by MIT standards—didn’t make it to graduation.
—“MIT remains in the minority in its claims about the predictive power of the SAT.” As Stu Schmill, MIT’s admissions dean “pointed out to me repeatedly, MIT’s undergraduate curriculum — its focus on mathematics especially — is unique even among its elite peers.”
2️⃣ Test-optional is rewriting the old rules of admissions. This is particularly true for edge-case students and at less selective colleges and universities, which seem to want to use this moment to bolster the average test scores they report to the public.
—“In the spring, Hannah Wolff, a former college counselor at Langley High School, a top-ranked high school in the wealthy suburbs of Washington, D.C., heard from admissions counselors at several public universities that a few Langley seniors who were rejected might have been admitted if they had not submitted their SAT scores, which were in the 1350 range. While a 1350 would have been considered a good score in the past at those schools, now, when the only applicants submitting scores are mostly those well above the average, the expectations of admissions officers have risen with the scores — especially for applicants from wealthy academic powerhouses like Langley.”
3️⃣ As a result, there is no good advice—even from counselors and admissions deans. “Two years in, counselors have no idea: What is a good score? Do I submit a score or not? And if so, should all colleges on my list get my score?”
—”Even Schmill told me he gets those same questions from friends whose children are applying to other colleges. ‘I never had a good answer,” he said. “Like, I have no idea.’”
—As Jeff Makris, director of college counseling at Stuyvesant High School in New York, told me, “‘the more we tell [students] what to do, the more we become scapegoats when they don’t get in.’”
By the numbers: “While we spoke, Makris pulled up the admissions results for his students going back to 2016. He rattled off a bunch of college names. About the same number of his students get accepted at the usual suspects in the Ivy League now as six years ago, though many more apply too. What might surprise students and parents from a few years ago, however, is the next set of colleges Makris mentioned: Northeastern, Case Western, Boston University, and Binghamton University. In 2016, 298 students applied to Northeastern, and 91 were admitted; last year, applications to the Boston school jumped to 422, but only 49 were admitted. Last year, 129 Stuy students applied to Case Western, about the same number as in 2017, but admits were almost cut in half to 36. In 2016, the acceptance rate for Stuy’s students who applied to Boston University was 43 percent; last year, it was 14 percent.”
—”Normally, Makris said, about 50 to 75 graduates enroll at Binghamton University, one of the state’s top public universities but a safety school among many Stuy students. This fall, 124 students went there.” |
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