Reply to Where are your UNDER 1400 SAT kids going?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Above 1300 is still a really high SAT score! [/quote]

Yes...people on DCUM act like it's not but it is a very good score (1350= 94th/90th national/test taker percentile, respectively; 1390 gets you to 97th/92nd).  Now, I assume those numbers are for a single sitting and superscoring and multiple test taking skews things but people here act like a 1350 is subpar.  It's absurd.[/quote]

The issue is that it’s a good NATIONAL score, but not particularly competitive for DMV area.
For example, even if you scored in the high 1400s, which is GREAT—you have to consider that Stanford isn’t going to admit an entire entering class (or even more than 30 or so) from one geographic area. So your 1480 might get you a good look if you’re that one kid who lives on a farm in Montana, but not from DMV where 600 other 4.0 applicants (with major ECs) scored 1550+ than you.[/quote]

I wonder about this.  Is "DMV" treated like a monolith?  Is the "DMV kid" with a 1400 from an underresourced DCPS school that has an average score of 950 treated the same as the "DMV kid" with a 1400 from one of the top privates where that score may very well be the average?  I honestly don't know the answer to that question...but assuming that neither kid is first generation and that the colleges can't consider race, do they look at the school resources to contextualize the school?   [/quote]

The majority of selective colleges consider the resources available at the high school level. A kid at Dunbar who scores 1400 will not be compared to a Sidwell kid who scores 1400. This board assumes that every kid is from a well-resourced public or private high school. Plenty of AOs have gone on the record explaining this, e.g., Yale, UVA, Dartmouth, Brown, etc. [/quote]

Let's split the difference: what about a kid with 1400 at Walls or J-R?  Definitely underresourced schools compared to Sidwell...but presumbably those kids are not going to get the same kind of "contextual" advantage, except they may only have a handful of kids applying from their school versus 30 from Sidwell.[/quote]

It depends on the average SAT score for Walls or J-R and also the socioeconomic status of the individual student. If a kid is low-income at Walls scores 1400, and the average score is 1100, that kid will get a contextual advantage compared to a student at Sidwell. For example, a Yale AO explained this in their admissions podcast. [/quote]

That makes sense...what if the average score at Walls is 110 but the 1400 kid there is upper income?  I'm guessing that is actually a realistic scenario. [/quote]

According to the YCBK, Yale, and Dartmouth podcasts, the UMC kid wouldn't have an advantage in that context because colleges also consider parent education, job titles, zip code, etc. Schools are looking for low-income/first-generation outliers. [/quote]

I don’t think that’s quite right because they are still considering the school context, among factors. [/quote]

The topic was brought up on all three podcasts, and they all said the same thing. I assume that students have access to advanced classes at J-R and Walls, but the student body is economically diverse. That is the scenario that was discussed on the podcasts. The exception would be a high school that doesn't have APs/IB or advanced curriculum (e.g., magnet)-- a low-resource school. I'm sure it is rare that a UMC kid would attend a school that didn't offer a good number of APs/IBs or had a magnet program, so most AOs wouldn't encounter that scenario. [/quote]

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