Reply to SAT 8/26/23 -- What did your kid think?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]He said “great” after working with a tutor all summer.  And this is a brag, not a humble brag.  Well, hopefully it will be a brag when he gets he results.  His last score was 1000, and now it feels like 1200 might be within reach.[/quote]

Is your DS inclined to submit a 1200 score if that ends up being his highest score?

If not, what's the cutoff?[/quote]

NP. I believe the general rule is: if a applicant’s score is at the 50th percentile or higher for that specific college (which can be found on the college’s most recent Common Data Set), submit. If lower than 50th percentile, don’t.

Standardized tests once existed largely to show colleges that a student, if enrolled, was capable of doing the work at that school. Now the scores serve dual purposes. One of those, unfortunately, is to boost/maintain schools’ rankings (USNWR uses test scores in their rankings formula). So these days applicants have to ask, “might my score bring down this school’s average and thereby hurt their ranking?”

Personally, I think it’s absurd. Now, at plenty of schools only a fraction of students submit scores, which renders them fairly meaningless. But here we are.

(I hope I’m answering the Q you asked!)[/quote]

This is driving me crazy. I have a 1200/1250 kid who I think should be proud of her scores. But she's afraid to submit them anywhere. Some of the colleges she's looking at claim 50th percentiles close to 1300 and I'm just not sure that's true when you factor in all the kids who don't submit. [/quote]

This is correct. A college’s average test score range is merely the average for the (often small) percentage of students who submitted. It is *not* the average for their students.

The Common Data set will also tell you the percentage of students who submit and don’t. So where your daughter is below the 50th percentile, she can also see that she could be part of a large majority in not submitting. Maybe seeing that 72% of applicants also didn’t submit (which might well be the case) will help.

Please encourage her to separate the decision whether to submit from whether she should be proud of her scores. These two things should have nothing to do with one another.

Your daughter is great. She *should* be proud of her scores. There’s nothing she can’t do in this world. Unfortunately, the rankings have gamified admission for the colleges. They get “points” for specific things, and higher scores = more points. The more points, the stronger their business model. This has nothing to do with your daughter as a student or a human being. Truly.

(And for what it’s worth, even the AOs know this! Nearly all are good people who are genuinely rooting for their applicants and are trapped in the rankings game against better judgment). [/quote]

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