Reply to Texas tonight--proof that the college system is broken

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Texas tonight--proof that the college system is broken"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I wouldn't put this just on Texas - the common app has broken the system so that kids apply to routinely 15-20 schools.  If they had a limit of 10 which is completely reasonable, then kids would only apply to the ones they wanted to.  At my kids high school, the number of kids applying to Wisconsin, Boulder, Michigan, Washington is over 50 kids - sometimes as high as 80.  Most of those numbers have doubled in the past few years. [/quote]

It’s not just the common app. It’s also test optional.

It seems like before 2020, students were sorting themselves by the SAT/ACT scores given in school profiles. In other words maybe schools didn’t weigh the SAT very heavily, but students did, and they self-selected out of the applicant pool. When all the schools went test optional at once, admissions became less predictable, which caused students to apply to more schools as a kind of insurance, which caused admissions to become even less predictable, which caused students to apply to even more schools …

Students hate it and schools hate it but I’m not sure there’s any way to put the genie back in the bottle.[/quote]
UT is test required.[/quote]

It’s not enough for UT to be test required. The market was stable when nearly all schools were test required. But now that most schools are test-optional, applications are increasing everywhere. [b]The increase in applications is driven by high-scoring students. Returning to test-mandatory will not deter high-scoring students. [/b]To the contrary, high-scoring students have every reason to increase their applications to test-mandatory schools, where they expect their test scores will help them more. That is probably what happened to UT this cycle.

The only thing that will deter high-scoring students from applying to 20 schools is a perception that they can count on admission to certain schools. But because test scores remain only a small part of the equation even at test-mandatory schools, and the AOs at the test-mandatory schools are overwhelmed by the increase in applications, uncertainty continues to escalate. More applications will be filed at more schools because of this mess at UT.

The sudden turn to test optional kicked off this instability, but a return by some schools to test mandatory seems insufficient to end it. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics