How important is 1500 SAT for Top 50 schools (national/LAC)?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For the love of God. Abolish the SAT already. It’s absurd the amount of wasted time and money people spend trying to score well on the test. Unless it’s the top Ivies, it truly does not matter at all. The amount of hoop jumping and “me I’m unique and special” essays and activities and test scoring nonsense is insane and not useful. There are families not willing to play this game anymore.

Your suggested alternative?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is SAT of 1500 an important score to achieve (or exceed)? Or is 1480 or 1490 interchangeable? 1500 appears to be 99th percentile.

Does it matter if it's one sitting or is superscore as good (for schools that are not not MIT/georgetown)?

1500 is not needed for most of the T50. T15 yes usually needed.

It depends on your HS, your major, what else you have going for you.

When you say it depends on you HS, what type of high school would help? One where the average score is very low or a private feeder that the college knows well?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Depends on the specific college, major, and what else your kid has on EC/awards (if they have national-level accolades, it matters less; if all they have is school clubs and leadership, it matters more).

For example, know several kids who got into Vanderbilt ED last 2 years from our private TO (school president leadership) bc a 14xx is not submittable there, but they had the other leadership that Vanderbilt desires.

Vandy loves test optional, I would not assume this applies to any other T20.

Agree.
In T25, the only schools I wouldn't submit a 1480/90 to would be Vanderbilt and WashU (only because both came out and said not to when the kid asked regional AO about a 33 directly).
Would submit to all other T25.

My kid got into Vanderbilt with a 1490. Submitted. But he was a class president kind of kid and an athlete - though not recruited at the D1 level, only D3.

I think the general rule is 1500 or a 34 gets you a look everywhere. But I would submit anything north of 1400 or 33, provided the rest of the app is great. Stanford too takes a lot of students that don't hit 1500. They look for other things once you hit a baseline.

I have no idea why Vanderbilt persists in being test optional. Pre-Covid, they had some of the highest scores in the country. Cynically, I'd say it's because they want to juice the number of apps. And they like the flexibility.

Is it from anecdotal evidence that you say Stanford takes a lot of students with scores below 1500?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For the love of God. Abolish the SAT already. It’s absurd the amount of wasted time and money people spend trying to score well on the test. Unless it’s the top Ivies, it truly does not matter at all. The amount of hoop jumping and “me I’m unique and special” essays and activities and test scoring nonsense is insane and not useful. There are families not willing to play this game anymore.

My DS was happy with the TO and test blind choices available to him and got admitted to several Top 50 schools including a Top 30 reach.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not to hijack, but I read that the test was recalibrated in January 2025 and it is now more difficult to get 1500+. Is this true?

yes that is why so many people are going mental about things now that tests are becoming increasing more relevant and/or required.

crossing 1500 seems like an important differentiator in the application stage.

25 percent of the class of 2026 scored a 1500 or above at our private. I don’t think thus is necessarily correct.

is your private academic, and competitive academically to get into? that may be skewing your scores upward. your private may have majority strong students so 25% hitting 1500 of a curated group of high-achieving, smarter than average students isn't really representative of the larger population.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For the love of God. Abolish the SAT already. It’s absurd the amount of wasted time and money people spend trying to score well on the test. Unless it’s the top Ivies, it truly does not matter at all. The amount of hoop jumping and “me I’m unique and special” essays and activities and test scoring nonsense is insane and not useful. There are families not willing to play this game anymore.

I do think there's too much stress put on getting a high score, but I also think it's good to have some kind of standard scoring occuring in junior/senior year. there are kids who develop later in HS (mainly boys but some girls too) and it's nice to have something that can counter grade 9 or 10 gpa. I personally think they should abolish grade 9 gpa. who cares how they did at 14 given how much their brains and skills are changing and developing by 18!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For the love of God. Abolish the SAT already. It’s absurd the amount of wasted time and money people spend trying to score well on the test. Unless it’s the top Ivies, it truly does not matter at all. The amount of hoop jumping and “me I’m unique and special” essays and activities and test scoring nonsense is insane and not useful. There are families not willing to play this game anymore.

My DS was happy with the TO and test blind choices available to him and got admitted to several Top 50 schools including a Top 30 reach.

TO is still the best play for schools that are TO!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is SAT of 1500 an important score to achieve (or exceed)? Or is 1480 or 1490 interchangeable? 1500 appears to be 99th percentile.

Does it matter if it's one sitting or is superscore as good (for schools that are not not MIT/georgetown)?

1500 is not needed for most of the T50. T15 yes usually needed.

It depends on your HS, your major, what else you have going for you.

When you say it depends on you HS, what type of high school would help? One where the average score is very low or a private feeder that the college knows well?

In my experience, the latter for humanities majors in particular.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not to hijack, but I read that the test was recalibrated in January 2025 and it is now more difficult to get 1500+. Is this true?

yes that is why so many people are going mental about things now that tests are becoming increasing more relevant and/or required.

crossing 1500 seems like an important differentiator in the application stage.

Yes, it is true. The digital SAT launched in 2023 (so what the current college class of '29 took as HS juniors and submitted last fall) is "adaptive" meaning it grades as you answer. The first modules of questions include easy, medium and hard questions. If you do well on this module you are steered to the harder second module, if you don't you are steered to the easier module. The max combined score for the easier module is around 1200 (I am not an expert but I think that is approximate). To break 1500 student has to be answering the harder questions correctly throughout to keep getting the hard questions.
I also think this could have implications for what submitting TO means with the digital SAT, i.e. will admissions officers worry that the score is 1300? Only the class of '29 applied with digital SAT and we don't have CDS data yet so keep that in mind when looking at TO data from prior years.

I think this is an important point. I didn't realize that last year's graduating class was the first with digital. It will be interesting to see if score ranges change.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For the love of God. Abolish the SAT already. It’s absurd the amount of wasted time and money people spend trying to score well on the test. Unless it’s the top Ivies, it truly does not matter at all. The amount of hoop jumping and “me I’m unique and special” essays and activities and test scoring nonsense is insane and not useful. There are families not willing to play this game anymore.

says the person whose kid didn't score well on it. be thankful there is test optional these days

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is SAT of 1500 an important score to achieve (or exceed)? Or is 1480 or 1490 interchangeable? 1500 appears to be 99th percentile.

Does it matter if it's one sitting or is superscore as good (for schools that are not not MIT/georgetown)?

Georgetown?? Hmmmm

Georgetown cares A LOT about scores. They require students to report all scores and do not superscore. They have always been a pro-test outlier.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My DC's dream school has mean SAT of 1510 and median SAT of 1520. DC scored 1510.

Is 1510 submittable or should she retake again? She doesn't want to if possible to move on. Her GPA is 25th percentile for the school, and SAT seems close but just a hair below 50th percentile.

She definitely will not go TO but she is just tyring to figure out if she's done now or needs to retake another time?

That's something she should decide for herself. Both GPA and SAT below the 50%, without awesome hooks, seems to be a low probability play.

[Anonymous]

I don’t think anyone knows the answer to this question this year. It is a big year for top schools transitioning back from TO to test required. A lot of us think that will mean that average test scores start to come down again at top schools making that transition. I doubt what is now conventional wisdom about a specific milestone score level will be a reliable predictor under the unusual circumstances this year. It may continue to apply at the top schools that are TO though.

[Anonymous]

Vandy and WashU had higher test scores before TO, why are they so keen on it? Can say the sane for ND as well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For the love of God. Abolish the SAT already. It’s absurd the amount of wasted time and money people spend trying to score well on the test. Unless it’s the top Ivies, it truly does not matter at all. The amount of hoop jumping and “me I’m unique and special” essays and activities and test scoring nonsense is insane and not useful. There are families not willing to play this game anymore.

So, tests are stupid (not sure I agree) and essays are stupid (with AI, I definitely agree). GPA is non-standard and pretty meaningless with grade inflation. How should those schools that are in such high demand select students to admit? Lottery? Should there be any floor as to who is allowed a lottery ticket?

The system stinks, but it's hard to imagine a more practicable one.