Anonymous wrote:Elit colleges value diversity. Your skin color is the most visible factor so the applicants will be divided by their skin color first. SAT, GPA, EC, SES, and essays come after. Depend on schools, the order of the factors could change.
There are so many colleges in the US so finding a college where your DC could be top 25% is more important than the rank and name.

Exactly how do these schools divide applicants by skin color? My son is half Hispanic but put Hispanic on his college applications. He really doesn't LOOK Hispanic since he is only half. He never interviewed or visited the colleges he was admitted to (except the closest one to us). So if you are thinking that all diverse candidates look black or look Hispanic, you are very wrong.

Elit colleges value diversity. Your skin color is the most visible factor so the applicants will be divided by their skin color first. SAT, GPA, EC, SES, and essays come after. Depend on schools, the order of the factors could change.
There are so many colleges in the US so finding a college where your DC could be top 25% is more important than the rank and name.

GPA - 4.0, wGPAs - 4.7s, APs - minimum of 10 APs with 5s, IBs - 7s, SAT- 1600, ACT - 36

Because of these overachievers we have had to get rid of all of the above. Maybe, we should evaluate based on ...dance moves?

For my Asian-American kid, grades and SAT scores have to be around 100 points higher. Then they have to have killer ECs, a lot of heart and personality, amazing community work.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok, but now that A LOT more kids are earning A's aren't colleges going to have no choice but to give more emphasis to other factors - most likely test scores? I mean in the age of retesting and allowing late work, an A doesn't really say as much about a student as it used to.

It honestly seems like the trend is going in the other direction. A lot of schools are eliminating standardized tests as part of their admissions because minority groups score lower on them, and they claim that they're biased. If you eliminate standardized tests and drastically increase the number of good grades you can "fix" the achievement gap.

Ok, but the schools have to go by something. With schools taking less grades, and allowing numerous reattempts at the few grades given grades overall are obviously going to go up. Then what? What else will the colleges go by?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok, but now that A LOT more kids are earning A's aren't colleges going to have no choice but to give more emphasis to other factors - most likely test scores? I mean in the age of retesting and allowing late work, an A doesn't really say as much about a student as it used to.

It honestly seems like the trend is going in the other direction. A lot of schools are eliminating standardized tests as part of their admissions because minority groups score lower on them, and they claim that they're biased. If you eliminate standardized tests and drastically increase the number of good grades you can "fix" the achievement gap.

Colleges are eliminating standardized tests because they have found they aren’t the best predictor of academic success (grades are). And yes it puts students who don’t score as well in a more even footing. That includes students of all demographic groups and some students with earning disabilities.

According to another thread, not only are SAT scores predictors of academic success, but they are good measures of iq as well.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok, but now that A LOT more kids are earning A's aren't colleges going to have no choice but to give more emphasis to other factors - most likely test scores? I mean in the age of retesting and allowing late work, an A doesn't really say as much about a student as it used to.

It honestly seems like the trend is going in the other direction. A lot of schools are eliminating standardized tests as part of their admissions because minority groups score lower on them, and they claim that they're biased. If you eliminate standardized tests and drastically increase the number of good grades you can "fix" the achievement gap.

Colleges are eliminating standardized tests because they have found they aren’t the best predictor of academic success (grades are). And yes it puts students who don’t score as well in a more even footing. That includes students of all demographic groups and some students with earning disabilities.

Not really; look up the research that Sacket and Kuncel have done on the validity of SAT scores. They're quite useful. If you're actually interested this is them talking about their work using a sample size of three MILLION college students.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IOPsychology/comments/5xdz79/isir_2015_paul_sackett_nathan_kuncel_predictive/

Anonymous wrote:For competitive schools, scores are going to continue to be really important, if not more important given the wide variations in grading. Our college counselor dismissed them in a large meeting but in the one on one meetings, the first thing they look at is SATs. If you look closer at the studies, the grades are predictive, but only because kids were sorted by SAT scores first. In other words, in a MIT math class, nearly all those kids are going to have very high SATs, you don't have kids scoring 800 sitting in the same class with kids scoring 500.

Competitive schools that have gone test optional:

Bates, Bowdoin, University of Chicago, Pitzer (if grades are above a certain threshold), Wake Forest, Wesleyan. A few others are "test flexible" including NYU and Colby. I think these schools can because they are small enough to practice true holistic admissions.

UC Trustees are strongly considering going test optional, which includes Cal Tech. If they do, I expect more to follow.

And yes right now most applicants to these schools do continue to submit standardized test scores but students who don't are getting admitted.

For competitive schools, scores are going to continue to be really important, if not more important given the wide variations in grading. Our college counselor dismissed them in a large meeting but in the one on one meetings, the first thing they look at is SATs. If you look closer at the studies, the grades are predictive, but only because kids were sorted by SAT scores first. In other words, in a MIT math class, nearly all those kids are going to have very high SATs, you don't have kids scoring 800 sitting in the same class with kids scoring 500.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok, but now that A LOT more kids are earning A's aren't colleges going to have no choice but to give more emphasis to other factors - most likely test scores? I mean in the age of retesting and allowing late work, an A doesn't really say as much about a student as it used to.

It honestly seems like the trend is going in the other direction. A lot of schools are eliminating standardized tests as part of their admissions because minority groups score lower on them, and they claim that they're biased. If you eliminate standardized tests and drastically increase the number of good grades you can "fix" the achievement gap.

Colleges are eliminating standardized tests because they have found they aren’t the best predictor of academic success (grades are). And yes it puts students who don’t score as well in a more even footing. That includes students of all demographic groups and some students with earning disabilities.

Agree. Scores are a good predictor of ability to full pay, so schools will be reluctant to drop them altogether, but that’s their real value.