Why Caltech is now requiring test scores

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I'm going to ask a question and don't want any pitchforks from the crowd.
What's the correlation between doing well on the SAT and being able to even do half-well in the Caltech curriculum? Doesn't Caltech check for AP Physics, Chem, Calc, Bio, etc.-all better measures for if someone can even begin the curriculum? Caltech students should be coming in with advanced material that the SAT just doesn't cover.

Disadvantaged high schools don't offer these courses.

At any rate, Caltech thought they could do without scores and were test blind for three years. They tried. It didn't work out.

Is Caltech reasonably accepting students from disadvantaged high schools now to warrant this? They aren't some great social mobilizer. It's a school producing future researchers who tend to be wealthier or have parents of advantaged backgrounds. I think it's strange to cover up the story by trying to shut down any questioners with claims of not uplifting the poor-the poor are hardly at all in the conversation to begin with.

It's all such BS. Most of the poor kids going to colleges like Caltech or MIT do not attend disadvantaged high schools-they are products of the privileged poor and have access to better educational opportunities than some of our children in this thread. If Caltech cared that much about quantitative skill, they'd make their own exam for admissions that tested it or required 5s on AP Calc BC. It's virtue signalling to pretend that Caltech has any substantial poor kid population.

This seriously needs more coverage. Very few tech schools are accepting anyone from a disadvantage background

Caltech is a Questbridge partner; Harvard (a founding member) is not.

And yet Harvard supports more low income students in its college than the Institute, as a share of population and overall.

yet Harvard has the higher median income

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There were a ton of disadvantaged kids accepted into MIT and CALTECH from my high school (Bronx Science)….

Notice how Bronx Sci is a highly selective once in a lifetime education. Like all poor kids at these top schools, they are accepting only those with elite educations, not actual disadvantaged educational backgrounds

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm going to ask a question and don't want any pitchforks from the crowd.
What's the correlation between doing well on the SAT and being able to even do half-well in the Caltech curriculum? Doesn't Caltech check for AP Physics, Chem, Calc, Bio, etc.-all better measures for if someone can even begin the curriculum? Caltech students should be coming in with advanced material that the SAT just doesn't cover.

Disadvantaged high schools don't offer these courses.

At any rate, Caltech thought they could do without scores and were test blind for three years. They tried. It didn't work out.

Is Caltech reasonably accepting students from disadvantaged high schools now to warrant this? They aren't some great social mobilizer. It's a school producing future researchers who tend to be wealthier or have parents of advantaged backgrounds. I think it's strange to cover up the story by trying to shut down any questioners with claims of not uplifting the poor-the poor are hardly at all in the conversation to begin with.

It's all such BS. Most of the poor kids going to colleges like Caltech or MIT do not attend disadvantaged high schools-they are products of the privileged poor and have access to better educational opportunities than some of our children in this thread. If Caltech cared that much about quantitative skill, they'd make their own exam for admissions that tested it or required 5s on AP Calc BC. It's virtue signalling to pretend that Caltech has any substantial poor kid population.

This seriously needs more coverage. Very few tech schools are accepting anyone from a disadvantage background

Caltech is a Questbridge partner; Harvard (a founding member) is not.

And yet Harvard supports more low income students in its college than the Institute, as a share of population and overall.

yet Harvard has the higher median income

Who cares? Do you call social mobility uplifting a chunk of low income students while there are wealthy people around or 3 in the room while the rest are upper middle class?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I’m on the fence about reinstating SAT. I’m all for moving toward tests as GPA’s can vary widely based on school policies/retakes/ grade inflation and vary even among teachers within schools. However, college board is a racket. It’s a poorly constructed test and frankly any test that signing up for an expensive prep course can raise your score 200 is not an effective test. I wish the US had something similar to the British school model with A levels.

The faculty are missing the mark. Correlation does not mean causation. Test blind or optional occurred at the same time during the pandemic. The sophomores that are so deficient missed foundational upper level math skills spending half their freshman and sophomore years in virtual. They jumped into junior year after 2 years of basically self learning and then crammed to get good scores on their tests and AP exams.

To get into Cal Tech, kids need AP Calc BC, Physics etc. Don’t tell me that a kid who can get an A in those classes and a 4 or 5 on the AP wouldn’t have been able to prep for the SAT.

I heavily agree and have been waiting patiently for the pro-Test crowd to begin promoting Harder tests, not just testing for testing. We need a math section that tests beyond pre cal, and there needs to be an associated level of skill with your SAT score (710 means student knows X-level of information would be a great start). Right now, I really don't think there's much difference between a 1400 scorer and a 1570 scorer, one just needs to brush up on their finding a determinant skills or read a little quicker.

You just need to hang out with more pro-test people. And look! Here I am, available. We should do lunch.

The SAT is a *much* weaker test than it used to be, and has been trending worse. Some of the recent changes to the verbal side included switched out longer passages for sentence or two quotations. Also, the SAT doesn't really do the job any more of differentiating between very smart and extremely smart kids -- far too many 1600s. Further, it has been intentionally made more "coachable" to encourage students to take it again and again, boosting the College Board's coffers. And let's not get started on junking the free response and "no calculator" math questions...

However, despite the nonsense, it still has predictive power.

Note that 1400 vs 1570 is more than a standard deviation -- there's going to be a significant difference in academic horsepower between people who score at those different levels.

For what it's worth, I am really looking forward to data released over the next couple of years as the Annapolis-based CLT becomes more established. They're coded as right-wing, but if you actually *look* at their sample tests, instead of going straight to "Ew, Those People" the question variety is good, the reading passages are vastly longer than what's now on the SAT, and thus far there has only been one student who maxed it out.

Other than the CLT, I'm stuck with the hope that some other country's tests gain traction. No need to translate the Gaokao -- the West African Examination Council produces solid test content in English, and unless I am confusing it with the JAMB, they did announce that they would start offering their tests at a location or two in the US.

When I took it and looked at the site a while back there was no scaling - your raw score was what's reported. So when (not if, when) they accidentally make a particularly hard or easy section, the students who take that section would have been unfairly penalized or benefited, respectively. Glad that changed, but it's a bit strange that anyone making a test wouldn't make sure it's scaled to start off with. One issue is that the scaled score is the same format as the raw score (out of 120) which may lead to confusion

Also I didn't find it to be any harder than the SAT, and the harder second half of the SAT is likely to be significantly harder than the overall CLT and thus possibly better at distinguishing among top students. I don't see any evidence that the CLT has a higher ceiling.

Looking through practice questions, it's much easier than the SAT. We need calculus, stats and linear on our standardized exams.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Do people in this thread think that math scores are the main way admissions officers look for promisiing math talent? How naive. Colleges, including MIT, will let you waltz in if you do well on the IMO

Ascribing poor performance in the Putnam to test-optional is a bit rich. The general pool of kids with high SAT scores aren't going to do well in the Putnam. MIT does well in Putnam because the team has multiple IMO medalists or MOP Team Selection Test qualifiers. I guess these kids (about 20/year, with 5-6 seniors each year) aren't opting for Caltech? According to my kid, this year's TST senior pool is largely going to MIT.

Caltech lost the battle for Putnam when they cancelled their merit scholarships. Even Liberal arts college students don't want to go to a college with only 200 students per class. If they did, they'd go to Harvey Mudd. Caltech should greatly consider increasing its size if it at all wants to compete with MIT on attracting IMO students.

They can't do that without losing the extremely low student to professor ratio that makes it perfect for future academics/professors

Just push the students harder. It's not like they need good professors, just give the students difficult problem sets like they have been. Increasing to 2k students would greatly increase demand.

They do need lots of access to professors for research. Caltech is not about coursework, it's primarily about research. The PhD level coursework is just a means to the end of enabling them to do PhD-level research.

Demand is generally constant regardless of size - the students who aren't aware of or interested in Caltech would not be aware of and interested in Caltech whether the annual class size was 100 or 10,000.

[Anonymous]

Interesting that people have this many questions about a college they have no connection to.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Interesting that people have this many questions about a college they have no connection to.

College admissions as a whole is something all parents are connected to, and test-optional at a leading university may be significant for other schools as well

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There were a ton of disadvantaged kids accepted into MIT and CALTECH from my high school (Bronx Science)….

Notice how Bronx Sci is a highly selective once in a lifetime education. Like all poor kids at these top schools, they are accepting only those with elite educations, not actual disadvantaged educational backgrounds

If a student isn't disadvantaged according to you unless they're unqualified to attend Caltech, how on Earth could Caltech admit disadvantaged kids, other than admitting them just to say they did and not caring about how poorly they perform (which would be especially sad given how well they could do at just about any other university)?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do people in this thread think that math scores are the main way admissions officers look for promisiing math talent? How naive. Colleges, including MIT, will let you waltz in if you do well on the IMO

Ascribing poor performance in the Putnam to test-optional is a bit rich. The general pool of kids with high SAT scores aren't going to do well in the Putnam. MIT does well in Putnam because the team has multiple IMO medalists or MOP Team Selection Test qualifiers. I guess these kids (about 20/year, with 5-6 seniors each year) aren't opting for Caltech? According to my kid, this year's TST senior pool is largely going to MIT.

Caltech lost the battle for Putnam when they cancelled their merit scholarships. Even Liberal arts college students don't want to go to a college with only 200 students per class. If they did, they'd go to Harvey Mudd. Caltech should greatly consider increasing its size if it at all wants to compete with MIT on attracting IMO students.

They can't do that without losing the extremely low student to professor ratio that makes it perfect for future academics/professors

Just push the students harder. It's not like they need good professors, just give the students difficult problem sets like they have been. Increasing to 2k students would greatly increase demand.

They do need lots of access to professors for research. Caltech is not about coursework, it's primarily about research. The PhD level coursework is just a means to the end of enabling them to do PhD-level research.

Demand is generally constant regardless of size - the students who aren't aware of or interested in Caltech would not be aware of and interested in Caltech whether the annual class size was 100 or 10,000.

Do you think most students are aware of what caltech's focus is? Many students are searching for the kind of research training Caltech is looking for but aren't really aware that that's what the school is for. I remember applying for college and feeling uncomfortable applying to Tech institutes, because they attracted all the douche guys in my lab groups and seemed hell bent on exclusivity (they still are). The acceptance rate of Caltech is 2%. There is clearly demand for a research environment, and they have a ton of researchers on that tiny campus.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There were a ton of disadvantaged kids accepted into MIT and CALTECH from my high school (Bronx Science)….

Notice how Bronx Sci is a highly selective once in a lifetime education. Like all poor kids at these top schools, they are accepting only those with elite educations, not actual disadvantaged educational backgrounds

If a student isn't disadvantaged according to you unless they're unqualified to attend Caltech, how on Earth could Caltech admit disadvantaged kids, other than admitting them just to say they did and not caring about how poorly they perform (which would be especially sad given how well they could do at just about any other university)?

More excuses. If the goal is tapping into "diverse talent." They don't need to give these students admissions boosts-they already have more resources than most of the applicant pool and know about caltech more than the average applicant. No I don't think a poor student at Stuyvesant or Groton needs admissions boosts-just take them in by merit, they have privilege.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m on the fence about reinstating SAT. I’m all for moving toward tests as GPA’s can vary widely based on school policies/retakes/ grade inflation and vary even among teachers within schools. However, college board is a racket. It’s a poorly constructed test and frankly any test that signing up for an expensive prep course can raise your score 200 is not an effective test. I wish the US had something similar to the British school model with A levels.

The faculty are missing the mark. Correlation does not mean causation. Test blind or optional occurred at the same time during the pandemic. The sophomores that are so deficient missed foundational upper level math skills spending half their freshman and sophomore years in virtual. They jumped into junior year after 2 years of basically self learning and then crammed to get good scores on their tests and AP exams.

To get into Cal Tech, kids need AP Calc BC, Physics etc. Don’t tell me that a kid who can get an A in those classes and a 4 or 5 on the AP wouldn’t have been able to prep for the SAT.

No, the faculty petition addresses that. They say the top students are still well prepared despite the pandemic; the increasing number of failing students is due to lack of skill as indicated by SAT Math score.

No, you don’t understand. Cal Tech is still very competitive. You aren’t getting in without As in AP Physics,, CALC BC, high AP scores, math and science competition winners. This is the floor not the ceiling! You can have all those things and still not get in. There is no way that any of those students wouldn’t score 700 on the SAT math section. Heck my humanities kid, has a 700 on math.

It's entirely possible with sufficient grade inflation, especially from a poorly performing school (FCPS high schools are not poorly performing).

I'm not sure how going test optional opened doors for some of the top kids at Ivy schools - can you expand on that?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The letter says "He also administers a midterm and final exam. This fall, he reused the 2020 final exam to create a control comparison". That doesn't make any sense. Which 2020 exam did he reuse? Was it spring 2020? Fall 2020? That was the height of COVID. Was that exam taken in person or it was taken online? You can't then compare the results of a 2020 exam to 2024. A better comparison would be the 2019 exam to 2024.

No, because a 2019-2024 comparison wouldn't control for COVID. Their 2021-2024 comparison did.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m on the fence about reinstating SAT. I’m all for moving toward tests as GPA’s can vary widely based on school policies/retakes/ grade inflation and vary even among teachers within schools. However, college board is a racket. It’s a poorly constructed test and frankly any test that signing up for an expensive prep course can raise your score 200 is not an effective test. I wish the US had something similar to the British school model with A levels.

The faculty are missing the mark. Correlation does not mean causation. Test blind or optional occurred at the same time during the pandemic. The sophomores that are so deficient missed foundational upper level math skills spending half their freshman and sophomore years in virtual. They jumped into junior year after 2 years of basically self learning and then crammed to get good scores on their tests and AP exams.

To get into Cal Tech, kids need AP Calc BC, Physics etc. Don’t tell me that a kid who can get an A in those classes and a 4 or 5 on the AP wouldn’t have been able to prep for the SAT.

No, the faculty petition addresses that. They say the top students are still well prepared despite the pandemic; the increasing number of failing students is due to lack of skill as indicated by SAT Math score.

No, you don’t understand. Cal Tech is still very competitive. You aren’t getting in without As in AP Physics,, CALC BC, high AP scores, math and science competition winners. This is the floor not the ceiling! You can have all those things and still not get in. There is no way that any of those students wouldn’t score 700 on the SAT math section. Heck my humanities kid, has a 700 on math.

It's entirely possible with sufficient grade inflation, especially from a poorly performing school (FCPS high schools are not poorly performing).

I'm not sure how going test optional opened doors for some of the top kids at Ivy schools - can you expand on that?

How many Caltech students do you think go to poorly performing high schools? And what poorly performing high school offers all the AP sciences and Calculus BC?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This will be controversial. I think it is because, Caltech type institutions usually rely on math olympiad/AIME type tests to identify MALES who are ready for their schools. However, if you have ever seen the results of these tests, winners/ high scorers are predominantly male. Like, heavily skewed male. Someone should have the numbers-- I was more familiar when DC was doing these tests. I think if you make it to the USJMO or similar as a female, you are automatically considered for the Caltech, MIT, etc.

If you are not a high scoring female in those Olympiads, I think they need to see other indicators that you can handle the coursework. They have probably decided SAT/ACT scores would do this (I am guessing, a female Math score will have to be perfect or otherwise high considering socioeconomic factors).

It does not mean that someone with an 800 Math SAT score can handle higher level math. It just means, they are pretty good at math and combined with high level courses, can probably handle the work at a Caltech (in lieu of consideration of scores from higher level competitions).

I think this is how females and URM may be considered only because they don't seem to have the same level of training/interest in studying for USJMO level math. That does not mean that they cannot handle higher level math. So, schools are just looking for other indicators.

Caltech used to have abysmal graduation rates when they required SAT back in the day. I’m sure they’ve improved it, because us news and all, but a lot of these colleges (looking at uchicago) are just plain miserable and difficult places filled with research egos who act as “teachers.”
I say this as an alum who really found my time there disdainful, and the red flag triggered for me when the professor states essentially that the students need to be cream of the crop and that they don’t create scientists-sure Caltech, tell that to literally every other college in the country omg.

In which field did you find UChicago teachers to be miserable egos? And don't you think it would be more egotistical for Caltech to claim they "create" scientists, as if they get all the credit for their students' accomplishments? I think recognizing the selection effect is far more humble.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think it’s hilarious how a professors rant on 14 students warrant any of this conversation

That's because their brief analysis matched the much larger and more robust institutional data, as evidenced by Caltech's decision to require test scores for future classes.