Swarthmore officially test optional for rising seniors

[Anonymous]

This is interesting. Swarthmore was holding out on this decision and "looking at data" (per its admissions office) because first semester grades are pass/fail and they were looking at correlation between scores and grades of incoming students. Just last week they were saying they might require standardized tests for the next admissions cycle, which would have made them the only selective liberal arts school to do so. They've now announced they are test optional, suggesting there is little/no correlation between grades of incoming students who submitted scores and those who didn't.

[Anonymous]

SLACs have no choice. In this day and age they need as many applicants as they can get. Especially for liberal arts colleges, requiring high SAT's would destroy supply of applicants.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:SLACs have no choice. In this day and age they need as many applicants as they can get. Especially for liberal arts colleges, requiring high SAT's would destroy supply of applicants.

This.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:SLACs have no choice. In this day and age they need as many applicants as they can get. Especially for liberal arts colleges, requiring high SAT's would destroy supply of applicants.

Yes, because God forbid their admissions rate goes from 7% up to 20% with fewer applicants.

[Anonymous]

They need flexibility for athletic recruits and other institutional priorities. Swarthmore admits a very high percentage of non-white/Asian and FGLI students.

[Anonymous]

It seems all SLACs are TO now.

What is the application strategy? Which lacs are most friendly to high scorers?

[Anonymous]

None of these schools have ever "required" a good SAT score although the majority have very good scores. A few kids with relatively low for the school SATs have always gotten into these schools because they are otherwise impressive kids. Also folks act like Test optional means there is no impact to test scores in admissions - you know that's pretty false if you know the outcomes of kids that have gone through this recently! A choice to go TO provides a data point about the applicant, and the schools are using this data point.

I think people look at this the wrong way - it's something like "If I make an assumption that all the kids who go test optional have an SAT score at the 25th percentile of scores for their GPA and school, can I make a good admissions decision, or would i need more data?"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:SLACs have no choice. In this day and age they need as many applicants as they can get. Especially for liberal arts colleges, requiring high SAT's would destroy supply of applicants.

Please elaborate on your theory if you want it to have any credence. Swarthmore has a 7% admission rate. When it required SAT scores pre-Covid, its and its WASP peers average SAT scores were routinely in the Top 20 - 25 of all universities and colleges.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:SLACs have no choice. In this day and age they need as many applicants as they can get. Especially for liberal arts colleges, requiring high SAT's would destroy supply of applicants.

Exactly. This is why Wake Forest went TO long ago.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It seems all SLACs are TO now.

What is the application strategy? Which lacs are most friendly to high scorers?

No doubt TO makes the application a lot more competitive!

It's like women's colleges, which requires the applicants' gender to meet certain threshold. When you cut down roughly half of the applicant pool, admission to women's colleges becomes relatively easier.

When a school is test required, its applicant pool gets cut down a lot. Admission rate increases.

If your DC is a high scorer, avoid SLACs and apply to Test Required schools. Georgetown is a good example.

[Anonymous]

The whole point of a bottom 25% number (rather than the complete range) is so that you can hide the legacy/athlete/etc test scores if you want.

They can require tests and still admit whomever they like. Including, for example, first gen who scored high relative to their high school, but lower on an absolute scale. It would be nice to have realistic SAT scores in admissions data again.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It seems all SLACs are TO now.

What is the application strategy? Which lacs are most friendly to high scorers?

They all still report submitted SAT scores, so high scores are still beneficial.

[Anonymous]

We were waiting on this news to see if our legacy low-1400s scorer with an otherwise excellent application should retake. Now he'll just go TO, and has a reasonable shot with an ED application. The unfortunate part of the TO thing at the super selective schools is that kids who get less than a 1500 don't submit so it's a race to the top.

[Anonymous]

Just receive an email from Bowdoin this morning. I can't copy the image here, but basically the email is about:

"What we look for in a college application:"

Academics (white color); Heart (light blue color); Income (orange); Test scores (Green).

The image shows a bar chart with half in white color, and another half in light blue.

My takeaway is that yes you can still submit the scores to Bowdoin, but no they are not going to consider it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:SLACs have no choice. In this day and age they need as many applicants as they can get. Especially for liberal arts colleges, requiring high SAT's would destroy supply of applicants.

I'm fairly certain that Swarthmore has no shortage of applicants. You are probably right with regard to most other SLACs, but Swarthmore, Amherst, Williams, and Pomona will not be facing a shortage of qualified applicants anytime in our lifetimes.