Reply to is there a nationally known US university that just admits on test scores?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Carnegie Mellon especially their CD or engineering programs.  If the student doesn’t have the chops, he or she won’t make it through the curricular.  CMU tends to admit based on high school performance, gpa and test scores.

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This isn’t what OP means.  CMU doesn’t just take their applicants and then sort by test scores and grades and merely accept the kids on that basis.

If they did, they wouldn’t make you write an essay beyond the common statement and would only have 1 AO for engineering because it would be a simple process.[/quote]

The issue with CMU, as with most "nationally known" schools, is that they get too many qualified applicants (applicants with test scores and GPA above a certain high threshold). That's why schools turn to qualitative measures. It's not that they think qualitative measures are inherently better, it's that they become the only way to distinguish between applicants.

Schools in other countries that admit based purely on test scores can do so because they do not have such a huge pool of UMC, well-educated, high scoring applicants as in the US. India can have schools that award spots based purely on one exam because the exam results will not be bunched up at the top with too many people scoring in the top to guarantee admission to all of them. In the US, with test prep and UMC and wealthy parents willing to spend money on tutors and other advantages, these schools with just a few hundred seats available will always have way more qualified applicants than spots.

This is also why state flagships are better able to admit based purely on scores -- they have more spots available and often have fewer applicants because they are largely drawing from their state or region with few applicants outside that circle. Thus -- not really nationally known.

The handful of state flagships that have truly national reputations (Michigan, some of the Cal schools, maybe UVA) also get more qualified applicants than they have spots even with their size. So they separate in-state and out of state applicants and do two processes. Both involve some qualitative elements, though there will be more qualitative elements for out of state. They will generally reserve a certain number of spots for in-state students.

Schools that truly admit just on test scores in the US are generally not that selective. They can also change the cut off for test scores every year depending on the number of applicants and the average scores.[/quote]

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