Test optional is a disaster

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Stop being dramatic. Lots of schools have been test option for 10+ years and are doing fine.

Yes, but most kids used to submit scores. That’s now changing and causing problems for admissions officers, like too many applicants and an inability to fairly judge student records. Tests are coming back.

What makes you think that the goal of admissions officers is to "fairly judge student records". It is not. it is to advance institutional priorities. They couldn't care less about the students.

X100000

Now you are getting it!!

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:My kid scored 1590 on the first try. Also NMS We love that there are many candidates who go TO. It does not harm us or them.

You are naive. My child with a similar score got waitlisted for HYPSM last year. If it wasn't test optional, I'm fairly certain they would have been accepted. The school has a small waitlist, and some TO kids have been accepted instead of my kid.

Maybe those TO kids were more interesting, wrote a better application, had better recs, or overall seemed to be a better fit for the school.

I'm not disputing they must have nice application, otherwise they would not have been accepted. But my kid also had a nice application, otherwise they would not be able to make it to a small waitlist. At the end, it is a number game. All I am saying, if TO acceptances revealed their scores, you would think SOME of those acceptances would become rejection. Why is this so hard to grasp

And that doesn’t translate into your kid getting in. Face it they were judged to be subpar. How hard is that to grasp.

NP: how hard is it to grasp that those who would not have been accepted if TO never existed would have allowed other more capable students to be admitted. PPs child might be one of them…

“capable” by one measure (test scores) but apparently not others. The colleges have decided that test scores are not significant enough to gate keep on that measure. Sounds like the other kids were more capable on other measures.

I think this makes some people here happy to believe this, but the vast majority of kids being admitted to T20 are still being admitted primarily on the basis of test scores and grades. The data absolutely supports this.

where is this data?

Common data sets that show how school rates importance of test scores and percent of admitted students who submit test scores. Also sometimes can be found in press releases last spring about class of 2026 stats.