Let's discuss "Test Optional"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NP. The people who really, really love TO the most are D1 coaches of men’s sports that are played internationally. It means they can now recruit young men who have been semi-pro in their home countries regardless of how paltry their high school education was (and often, it was very paltry) because there is no objective academic measure to be met. No 18-year-old US senior can compete against a 22-year-old semipro who doesn’t have to get a minimum SAT score any more, so TO is changing the face of D1 recruiting very quickly. Men’s swimming, water polo, tennis, golf, soccer, basketball, hockey, etc. are all impacted by this.

This is fascinating. Do you have any additional information or links to articles?

This will also apply to women’s sports as well I’m sure.

Just look at the sharply increased rates of international recruits on D1 teams, particularly the non-revenue sports, that track the rise of TO.

In the past, universities used non-revenue sports admits to bring up average incoming SAT scores for athletes as a whole. Essentially coaches in these sports had to look at SAT scores, which eliminated a lot of international applicants. Now that’s gone. The coaches only have to look at GPA which is almost impossible to ascertain for foreign academies, particularly the sports academies a lot of these folks attend.

TO has significantly changed the face of D1 athletic recruiting for non-revenue sports in particular, especially combined with the changes to the junior transfer protocol. The upshot is that academically solid athletes who used to be D1 material as high school seniors are now only competitive for D3 for men’s sports. It’s not really an issue on the women’s side.

Curious if this specifically applies to international applicants. Strangely enough, for top academic D3 (Chicago, MIT) and Ivies, the coaches demand test scores for at least my HS junior. I thought this was a way for schools to specifically prevent their coaches from allowing all the athletes to go TO. Luckily he plays a sport that doesn't have the type of international competition referenced above.

This is a D1 issue not a D3 issue.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NP. The people who really, really love TO the most are D1 coaches of men’s sports that are played internationally. It means they can now recruit young men who have been semi-pro in their home countries regardless of how paltry their high school education was (and often, it was very paltry) because there is no objective academic measure to be met. No 18-year-old US senior can compete against a 22-year-old semipro who doesn’t have to get a minimum SAT score any more, so TO is changing the face of D1 recruiting very quickly. Men’s swimming, water polo, tennis, golf, soccer, basketball, hockey, etc. are all impacted by this.

This is fascinating. Do you have any additional information or links to articles?

This will also apply to women’s sports as well I’m sure.

Just look at the sharply increased rates of international recruits on D1 teams, particularly the non-revenue sports, that track the rise of TO.

In the past, universities used non-revenue sports admits to bring up average incoming SAT scores for athletes as a whole. Essentially coaches in these sports had to look at SAT scores, which eliminated a lot of international applicants. Now that’s gone. The coaches only have to look at GPA which is almost impossible to ascertain for foreign academies, particularly the sports academies a lot of these folks attend.

TO has significantly changed the face of D1 athletic recruiting for non-revenue sports in particular, especially combined with the changes to the junior transfer protocol. The upshot is that academically solid athletes who used to be D1 material as high school seniors are now only competitive for D3 for men’s sports. It’s not really an issue on the women’s side.

Curious if this specifically applies to international applicants. Strangely enough, for top academic D3 (Chicago, MIT) and Ivies, the coaches demand test scores for at least my HS junior. I thought this was a way for schools to specifically prevent their coaches from allowing all the athletes to go TO. Luckily he plays a sport that doesn't have the type of international competition referenced above.

This is a D1 issue not a D3 issue.

Fair enough...but Ivies are D1 and are actually very competitive in many of the non-revenue sports (squash, fencing, lacrosse, crew, etc.).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Does it mean "Your test scores could help you but omitting them from your application won't hurt" or "admissions stuff presume that your scores were not good if you don't submit them and they will choose someone with decent/mediocre scores over someone who doesn't, all other things being equal"?

I may be skeptical, but I am starting to doubt the line given out by our school's counselors that the scores only matter if they help you. There's a negative deduction to be made there.

Any views?

My HS many years ago had a SWAS program. School
Within a School. Students with parent permission got no grades at all during HS. Only P or F. And also did not take SATs.

It forced colleges to read their applications. Many got into Harvard. Lot of Dead Heads.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Does it mean "Your test scores could help you but omitting them from your application won't hurt" or "admissions stuff presume that your scores were not good if you don't submit them and they will choose someone with decent/mediocre scores over someone who doesn't, all other things being equal"?

I may be skeptical, but I am starting to doubt the line given out by our school's counselors that the scores only matter if they help you. There's a negative deduction to be made there.

Any views?

My HS many years ago had a SWAS program. School
Within a School. Students with parent permission got no grades at all during HS. Only P or F. And also did not take SATs.

It forced colleges to read their applications. Many got into Harvard. Lot of Dead Heads.

Or colleges could have just decided it wasn't worth their time and immediately denied them. It sounds like your classmates were lucky that didn't happen, but I bet if too many schools were like that, it would.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Does it mean "Your test scores could help you but omitting them from your application won't hurt" or "admissions stuff presume that your scores were not good if you don't submit them and they will choose someone with decent/mediocre scores over someone who doesn't, all other things being equal"?

I may be skeptical, but I am starting to doubt the line given out by our school's counselors that the scores only matter if they help you. There's a negative deduction to be made there.

Any views?

That's a good way to put it. "Optional" doesn't mean all apps are considered equal. It just means your app will not be rejected because of missing test scores. Everyone knows kids with good/high test scores will definitely include them so, if it's missing, well, it creates more doubts in adcom's mind. Human nature.

Maybe, but TO applicants ARE getting accepted. It's zero sum.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Some info from AO and URM perspectives

It depends. Factor in the school, department, major, % applicants submitting, and stuff like how many athletes, mathletes, FGLI, AP & IB-heavy transcripts, yield rate targets, AO's personal preferences & biases, the weather, interest rates, sleep deprivation, yadda yadda

Do NOT overinvest time, money, stress on tests. Like GPAs, the jury is still out on how effective they are. Very unlikely currently optional schools will jump back to required for all in next 2 cycles.

College Board needs to either a) fix the innate privilege problem of SAT, LSAT, etc. or come up with hard data proving their testing model is worth it.

What does matter are AP test scores and IB High Level course grades (diploma scores don't matter in US). Good grade in summer college course for credit in subject your DC loves would also be more informative than SAT.

Breadth over depth. Same goes for ECs. Better two or three highly personal or unique ECs than laundry list of teams and clubs.

There's no magic formula

Encourage your kid to explore and take risks in things that matter to them. Somewhere there is a school that will appreciate and empower them.

It's not worth the emotional damage of trying to game a system with no rules.

CB might also consider not letting kids take the test 6X. Those are the kids whose parents pay for test prep and for multiple tests so they can superscore. Or make the tests free so it's not just rich kids who can take the test 4X. It's hard to figure out how to make this equitable with the tests or not. I worry without the tests, the process is completely not transparent and there is no way to compare student across schools (except using the college's own internal ways of comparing schools based on students they have seen in the past.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think if you have you good scores you always send them to bolster your case, and if you don’t then you don’t. My DD applied TO last year because she was below the mid range for all her schools and we didn’t want to give them a reason to say no. She had good grades and GPA so we wanted them to judge her off of those. We also aimed for schools she was qualified to attend and no real reaches. She got in everywhere.

The problem with TO (and will continue) is the fact that the acceptable “range” continues to skyrocket to a ridiculous high level. It used to be a 1400 SAT or 32 ACT was a great score-not anymore. Nowadays you need a 99th percentile score (1500 or 34 plus) to be “comfortable” at a top 25 school. This is wrong and indicative of a broken system, particularly for kids coming from the DMV.

This is true. Some of the schools my DC was looking at had average SAT scores close to 800. They did not have this a few years ago.

[Anonymous]

HS virtual session on this recommended submitting test scores for (I may not be remembering everything 100% correctly):
- merit aid
- athletes
- competitive majors
- if test scores are high and grades are not tip top

For test optional, they recommended:
- Look at how many applicants in the prior cycle were accepted test optional
- Are students' grades/EC strong enough to make a case for admission

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:More work and burden to students
Now they have to compute whether to send or not send score to each of the school they apply.

My son applied to 10 schools. He just looked at the SAT ranges for each school (easy to find) and saw that his SAT scores fell below the lowest score in the range except for one school. He didn't send scores to any of them and got into all 10 EA. It wasn't a lot of work. It took maybe 40 minutes to find these score ranges.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:More work and burden to students
Now they have to compute whether to send or not send score to each of the school they apply.

My son applied to 10 schools. He just looked at the SAT ranges for each school (easy to find) and saw that his SAT scores fell below the lowest score in the range except for one school. He didn't send scores to any of them and got into all 10 EA. It wasn't a lot of work. It took maybe 40 minutes to find these score ranges.

Which schools?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:More work and burden to students
Now they have to compute whether to send or not send score to each of the school they apply.

My son applied to 10 schools. He just looked at the SAT ranges for each school (easy to find) and saw that his SAT scores fell below the lowest score in the range except for one school. He didn't send scores to any of them and got into all 10 EA. It wasn't a lot of work. It took maybe 40 minutes to find these score ranges.

My DD did the same and is in to 7 and has 2 deferrals so far. She ended up going TO everywhere, even though she was in range for a couple of schools. E are from CA and many in her class did not even bother to test. She got in to her #1 choice so she’s happy.

Not top schools because I know someone will ask.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:More work and burden to students
Now they have to compute whether to send or not send score to each of the school they apply.

My son applied to 10 schools. He just looked at the SAT ranges for each school (easy to find) and saw that his SAT scores fell below the lowest score in the range except for one school. He didn't send scores to any of them and got into all 10 EA. It wasn't a lot of work. It took maybe 40 minutes to find these score ranges.

My DD did the same and is in to 7 and has 2 deferrals so far. She ended up going TO everywhere, even though she was in range for a couple of schools. E are from CA and many in her class did not even bother to test. She got in to her #1 choice so she’s happy.

Not top schools because I know someone will ask.

Your last sentence is the critical point.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:HS virtual session on this recommended submitting test scores for (I may not be remembering everything 100% correctly):
- merit aid
- athletes
- competitive majors
- if test scores are high and grades are not tip top

For test optional, they recommended:
[/b]- Look at how many applicants in the prior cycle were accepted test optional[b]
- Are students' grades/EC strong enough to make a case for admission

This is info people want to know. Why can’t school college counselors be candid about this?? Give some real statistics one way or another.

[Anonymous]

Even the experts struggle to answer whether to submit test scores:

“Amid the confusion, high-school counselors are struggling to find new signposts to guide their students. One problem, counselors told me, is that the information they get from colleges isn’t standardized. Some report the percentage of applicants who applied without test scores but not the percentage accepted; others report the inverse. And while colleges report the SAT and ACT score ranges of enrolled students, they don’t indicate which percentage of the incoming class submitted those scores, leaving students to wonder how much the figures have been inflated by those with high scores who bothered to submit them. 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? Schmill tells 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.”

From https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/what-does-an-sat-score-mean-in-a-test-optional-world.html

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Some info from AO and URM perspectives

It depends. Factor in the school, department, major, % applicants submitting, and stuff like how many athletes, mathletes, FGLI, AP & IB-heavy transcripts, yield rate targets, AO's personal preferences & biases, the weather, interest rates, sleep deprivation, yadda yadda

Do NOT overinvest time, money, stress on tests. Like GPAs, the jury is still out on how effective they are. Very unlikely currently optional schools will jump back to required for all in next 2 cycles.

College Board needs to either a) fix the innate privilege problem of SAT, LSAT, etc. or come up with hard data proving their testing model is worth it.

What does matter are AP test scores and IB High Level course grades (diploma scores don't matter in US). Good grade in summer college course for credit in subject your DC loves would also be more informative than SAT.

Breadth over depth. Same goes for ECs. Better two or three highly personal or unique ECs than laundry list of teams and clubs.

There's no magic formula

Encourage your kid to explore and take risks in things that matter to them. Somewhere there is a school that will appreciate and empower them.

It's not worth the emotional damage of trying to game a system with no rules.

CB might also consider not letting kids take the test 6X. Those are the kids whose parents pay for test prep and for multiple tests so they can superscore. Or make the tests free so it's not just rich kids who can take the test 4X. It's hard to figure out how to make this equitable with the tests or not. I worry without the tests, the process is completely not transparent and there is no way to compare student across schools (except using the college's own internal ways of comparing schools based on students they have seen in the past.)

Non-asians loved the holistic process and loved that it wasn't all about gpa and test scores. I read it here over and over. Any time someone complained that a kid with high gpa and test scores didn't get into a school over a kid with lower scores, someone would quickly chime in, "it's not just about test scores, you know." But now, as the process moves even more holistic to test-optional, funny, I hear a lot of complaining.