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A Primer for College Admissions Decisions

Posted on March 2, 2022 by Patrick O'Connor

We’re about three weeks away from the height of the release of college admissions decisions, the time of year when students pull their hair out either waiting to hear or musing over what they’ve heard.  Along with trying to ease student angst, college admissions veterans know they can expect an inbox full of articles featuring the following content:

  • Record High Applications at Highly Selective Schools
  • Highly Selective Schools Report New Lows in Admit Rates (yes, these two are related, but most Americans don’t understand this, thanks to the way we teach math in this country, so…)
  • Calls for Equity in Admissions Follow Record Application Year

We can expect these articles because they are written every year, partly to make an official record of what actually has happened, partly to supply some kind of solace to students who didn’t get the admissions news they had hoped (“See Son?  It was harder than ever to get in”) or to fatten the praise of those who did (“Wow!  I beat the odds in the Most. Competitive. Year. Ever!”)

To balance these “the sky is falling” articles, I write one that tries to keep everyone on an even keel, so they can provide some stability to the students and parents who are new at this, or who are doing it again, and forgot what it felt like the first time.  Hardly anyone notices the piece I write—it’s apparently more fun to be out there on rocky seas than to be safe in the harbor—but in the interest of trying to offer some support, here we go:

  • Not all applications are created equal. A college that reports a 5 percent admission rate doesn’t mean a particular student’s odds of getting in are 5 percent; it means the college admits 5 out of every 100 applications it receives.  Put another way, a student with a C average applying to Swarthmore doesn’t have the same “chance” of being admitted as a student with a 3.9.  Juniors should keep this in mind.
  • Much of the college experience depends far more on what the student puts into the experience than where they experience it. A former student was admitted to a Seven Sisters college, which then proceeded to gap her in financial aid.  She ended up at a public university, where she basically ran the Global Studies program where she earned a degree.  This included fulfilling her desire to do a semester abroad in South Africa, even though her college didn’t offer study abroad there.  She simply registered as a guest student at another college that did.  Tell me she would have had any of those opportunities at the Seven Sisters school.  Go ahead.
  • Notions of the need for change in the college admission process are overblown. It takes about 20 minutes to apply to most colleges, since they require neither essays nor teacher letters.  Since that’s about the same amount of time it takes to get to another level in Mario Brothers 812, it’s pretty safe to say most students can complete this task without life-altering stress.
  • Notions of change in the college admission process are simplistic, Part I. Admissions observers had a field day when COVID drove many competitive colleges to go test optional, a change that was gaining steam even before 2019.  Two years later, we now find a rise in “test optional strategies” from test prep advisors who will advise students on which tests to take, and which scores to send—all for a fee.  Similarly, we see some competitive colleges admitting fewer—far fewer—test optional students than those who submit scores, but deciding not to report that to the major public, since the “test optional” moniker is so highly valued.  The result?  A change that was supposed to make applying to college easier has made it harder in many cases, except at colleges where the admit rates were generous to begin with—and those are the schools where applying takes 20 minutes, and application reform wasn’t necessary.
  • Notions of change in the college admissions process are simplistic, Part II. Undeterred by the lack of real parity brought by many test optional policies, many reform advocates are now turning to essays and teacher letters of recommendation as the next parts to go in the current process.  This leads to two questions:
    • If you take out all parts of the current application process (some are even saying grades shouldn’t have to be reported), what do you replace them with?
    • Do you honestly think whatever you answered in the last question can’t also be gamed to favor the rich? Interviews?  Community Service?  Cake Baking?  Put any life experience or skill in the mix of college applications, and in a year, a horde of tutors will crop up that will give an edge to students who can afford their services.  That will be very hard to beat.
  • My annual plea for more counselor training in college counseling. If it’s safe to conclude that any admissions process will favor students who understand it, it’s reasonable to conclude it will favor any student who works with a counselor who understands it.  So, instead of changing the admissions process, how about leveling the playing field by making sure all counselors receive deep training in college counseling?  Less than 5 percent of all school counselor training programs devote any time to instruction in college counseling, and that sometimes only consists of how to register for the SAT.  Private school college counselors have greater access to professional development that keeps their already keen college counseling skills sharp.  Most public school counselors got their counselor training in a program that gave them no college counseling skills at all.  Which group needs to be better trained in the first place?

That should be all you need to make it through the media madness of the next month.  Release the hounds.

 

AP Exams Aren’t Worth the Hype and Hysteria

Posted on July 5, 2021 by Craig

Taking and doing well on Advanced Placement Exams could earn you some college credits, but they shouldn’t influence the grade you earn in your AP Classes and they rarely are factored into college admissions decisions.

Sadly, many high schools pressure students to freak out about these exams; yet, the exams themselves have limited utility to the vast majority of high school students. These exams do make the College Board and schools a lot of money.

What Needs to Change in College Admissions

Posted on June 3, 2021 by Patrick O'Connor

The ups and downs of the quarantine gave college admissions officers and school counselors a taste of application life to come, as the birth rate for high school graduates continues to slide, and the need to develop new approaches to recruit students increases.  As the profession continues to try and improve college access, and knowing that small differences can make a big difference, here are some considerations for both sides of the desk to ponder this summer over a well-deserved glass of lemonade:

Colleges—move your deadline dates.  November 1 (early applications), January 1 (regular applications), and May 1 (many deposits) are all big dates in the college application world—and they all fell on a Sunday or a holiday this year.  I don’t understand this, since the admissions offices weren’t open, and the vast majority of high school seniors had no access to counselors or other application helpers the day of and before the deadlines.

This needs to change.  Yes, students need to be responsible, and should learn to plan ahead—but perhaps that lesson is better applied to deadlines for things they’ve done before (like papers), not with things they are doing for the first time (like applying to college).  The first Tuesday in November, the second Tuesday in January, and the first Tuesday in May would solve this problem nicely, increasing the quality and quantity of applications to boot. Georgia Tech made the move, and they get kaboodles of applications.  It’s an easy, but important, change.

High Schools—stop working holidays.  Moving the January 1 deadline to a date when high schools are in session is also overdue for school counselors, who have taken a serious shellacking this year with all the student mental health issues arising from COVID.  School counselors have always been overworked, but never able to use the December holidays to recover, since they were expected to help their students make January 1 college deadlines.

It’s time to take a stand.  Assuming the colleges move their deadlines, counselors need to learn to let go.  Send a note to all senior families early in November, letting them know your vacation is—well, a vacation.  If you really can’t let go of your students for that long—or if the colleges unwisely cling to January 1– set two days of vacation for online office hours, and take a breath all the other days.  You have mastered online office hours this year.  Let them be your friend.

Colleges—keep innovating.  One (and perhaps the only) upside of the quarantine was the ability of college admissions offices to adapt major chunks of their traditional approach to recruitment. Test optional, drive-thru tours, and online high school visits suggested it might be OK for everyone to get their hopes up, that some real college admissions reform was in the air.

Yes.  Well.

In a post-vaccine world, we see more signs of returning to “normal” than creating new normal.  Reinventing the entire admissions process is no easy feat, to be sure, but how hard might it be for admissions offices to spend half a day this summer doing “What ifs” to one part of the application process?  Do that for five years, and you have a new admissions paradigm, and a more accessible one—the thing you say you keep wanting.

High schools— mental health and college access aren’t either/or.  I will legitimately blow my top if I read one more post from a high school counselor insisting that the increase in COVID-related mental health needs makes it impossible to do any effective college counseling.

School counseling as a profession has long been showing a mental health bias at the expense of quality college counseling, and this year just seems to have widened the gap.   Counselor training programs plant the seeds of this bias— training programs devote about 7 classes to mental health training, and none to college counseling—and all of this must stop, if only because the dichotomy is a false one.

Discouraged, depressed high school students light up like a hilltop church on Christmas Eve when I tell them college gives them a fresh start to life and learning, proof enough that college counseling affects mental health.  That, plus the American School Counselor Association says college counseling is part of the job.  Counselors truly are overworked, so they can’t do everything they want in any part of counseling.  That said, college can still be part of a key to a better self.  More counselors need to see that, and act on it.

Everyone—stop beating up on the Ivies.  The Ivies and their equally tough-to-get-into institutions largely decided to go test optional this year.  For some reason, this gave a lot of students with B averages the hope that they too could pahk the cah in the yahd, now that they didn’t have to reveal their test scores.

So—more students applied to the Ivies this year than last year.  The Ivies didn’t admit more students this year than last year.  That means their admit rate had to go down, and more students were denied.

That isn’t news—it’s math.  And if you want to blame the Ivies for encouraging students to apply who didn’t really stand a chance of getting in, you’re going to need to make a thousand more jackets for that club.  If you think the Ivies take too few Pell-eligible students, say that.  If you think they admit too many legacies, stay that.  But don’t beat them up for proving the laws of basic ratios.  Any other college in their shoes would have to do the same thing. (Besides, it’s the national media who has left our society with the impression that there are only 25 colleges in America.)

Everyone—about Kiddos.  It’s no secret that college is largely a time of youth, especially with the expansion of adolescence into the early twenties and beyond. But college is also a time to help young people embrace the opportunities of adulthood, skills and attitudes that sometimes require setting the desires of self to one side.

This goal would be more easily achieved if we saw students—and if they saw themselves– as capable of embracing a larger sense of self by referring to them as students, not Kiddos.  They don’t need to grow up in a hurry or, with the right kind of help, succumb to the media images of college choice as a high stakes pressure cooker.  But they also need something more than just a pat on the head and a verbal affirmation that’s the equivalent of a lollipop. Let’s try calling them students.

College Admissions and the Eyes of a Child

Posted on April 14, 2021 by Patrick O'Connor

There were only eight in the box, but Billy didn’t see it that way.  To him there wasn’t anything he couldn’t draw.  Especially anything red.  Shoes.  Birds.  Strawberries.  Even dogs.  Look at it the right way, and anything could be red.

Mrs. Struthers understood that, and loved to see Billy in class every day. Together, they discovered all kinds of things that turned out to be red.  As the year went on, Mrs. Struthers showed Billy how many other things were a mix of red and one of the other colors in his box of crayons.  By May, Billy was working with just green, and just yellow, and just about every other color.  But once kindergarten was over, it was the red crayon that had been worn down to a stub.

Coloring somehow became both less important and more important as school went on.  By second grade, the box had grown from eight to twenty-four, but there was less time to color in school.  Billy had rearranged the box to keep his favorite eight colors together, in the front row.

During one of those rare times drawing was allowed, Billy was relishing the chance to draw another cardinal, when Mr. Tyler walked by his desk.

“Cardinals aren’t really red, you know” he said.

Billy kept drawing, and looked up.  “What do you mean?”

“They’re actually their own color.  Cardinal red.  You have that in your box.  It’s in the top row of colors.”

Mr. Tyler walked away.  Billy kept drawing with red.

The last time Billy saw a box of crayons in school was fourth grade, when the box had grown to 64.  Billy had no idea what to do with a crayon named Salmon—wasn’t that a fish?—and the two named Yellow Orange and Orange Yellow looked exactly the same.  Why take up space with two crayons of the same color?  Billy brought his box of eight crayons from home.  The red was getting very small.

There wasn’t time for coloring again until eighth grade, when Billy took an art class in middle school.  The crayons had been replaced with pastels that were thicker, and moved across the paper differently than crayons.  Suddenly, Billy’s crisply drawn cardinals were fuzzy, and smeared, and looked a little more like smushed raspberries.  Billy waited until the end of class to ask his teacher about this, and how could he draw crisp cardinals with pastels.

The teacher frowned.  “We didn’t draw cardinals today” she said, “we were drawing mosaics.  Did you draw mosaics?”

Billy put his head down.  After school, he took his crayons home, and put them in the back of a desk drawer.

The counselor opened up the file on his lap and smiled.  “The career tests suggest you have an exceptional talent for art.  Have you considered a career in graphic arts?”

The student across from him stared at his blank phone screen.

“Billy, did you hear me?”

“Yeah” Billy said, not looking up.

“Your records say you haven’t taken an art course since eighth grade.  There’s room for one in your schedule next year as a senior.  What do you say?”

Billy’s eyes were frozen on the ground.

“Mrs. Jefferson is a great art teacher.  She taught me how to cross hatch.  Have you ever tried that?”

The counselor pulled out a blank piece of paper, and opened the top drawer of his desk.  It was filled with crayons.

The squeak of the drawer made Billy look up.  “They’re all green” he said.

“Yeah” the counselor chuckled, “I had this thing for green crayons when I was a kid, and it’s stuck with me all these years.  I had a couple of teachers try and talk me out of it, but when you love something, you just stick with it, you know?”

Billy looked away for a minute, then pulled out what looked like a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

“Uh, Billy—” the counselor said.

Billy flipped open the top of the box, revealing a dozen crayons of different heights.  All red.

“Do they teach art in college?”

What the death of SAT Subject Tests means for strong high school students

Posted on January 30, 2021 by Craig

What are high achieving members of the high school Class of 2022 and younger to do now that SAT Subject Tests are no more?

That’s the question many of my students have been asking me since the CollegeBoard pulled the plug on the rigorous one-hour content-based tests that at one time covered everything from Biology to Writing. In more recent years, the Writing Subject Test was subsumed into an optional section of the main SAT, but with the news that all SAT Subject Tests were being cancelled also came word from CollegeBoard that the optional Writing section of the SAT would also be canned. So much for the importance of writing, at least from the perspective of the powers that be at both the CollegeBoard and most American colleges, none of which made so much as a peep opposing the CollegeBoard’s decision to no longer attempt to assess students’ writing.

Oh well, I don’t make the rules; I simply help students play the game, and what a perverse game the American college admissions process has become.

Below are my first thoughts about what students can and should do to pump up their chances of college admission now that a very important objective measure of knowledge mastery has fallen by the wayside.

Amherst Shares Latest Admissions Stats

Posted on January 19, 2021 by Admissions.Blog

Amherst College received 857 Early Decision (ED) applicants this admissions cycle, which represents a forty-three percent increase over last year. This led to a twenty-five percent ED admit rate, which is down from a thirty-two percent ED admit rate last year.

This news came from Cate Granger Zolkos, Amherst’s Dean of Admission. As a result of the application increase, Amherst expects forty-five percent of its Class of 2025 will be drawn from its ED admits (up from thirty-nine percent last year). Meanwhile, 13,930 students applied to Amherst Regular Decision (a thirty-one percent increase over last year).

In other news, Amherst has announced that for domestic Early Decision applicants this fall, a whopping forty-five percent applied without testing (test-optional) and a full thirty-nine percent of Amherst’s ED admits were test-optional. Among all Regular Decision applicants, forty-nine percent have applied test-optional. With the applications flooding in, Amherst will continue to be test-optional for high school seniors applying during the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 admissions cycles.

At some point before the 2023-2024 admissions cycle Amherst will evaluate whether the test-optional policy will remain in place permanently.

“Your anguish is justified.” The ACT apology for canceling your registration.

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Craig

Many colleges have gone test-optional for the 2020-2021 admissions cycle, and so far, ACT, Inc., the publisher of the ACT, has done all it can make colleges appear prescient by doing so.  When you can make the individuals running Mizzou (went test optional this week) appear forward-thinking you know you are really scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to organizational effectiveness.

Throughout the spring and early summer ACT administrations were cancelled with little to no notice. Students often registered for testing sites miles away from home in the hopes that they had found a rural school willing to allow them into the building to take the ACT only to find that they were student #251 out of 500 students in line, and the school, because of social distancing, was only accepting the first 250 students to show up.

All this happened with no warning or guidance from ACT, Inc.

In other cases, students showed up to a school on a Saturday morning only to find the whole place locked up and the ACT unable or unwilling to give any pre-test or post-test guidance as to why the test was never administered. Was it the ACT’s fault or was it that proctors just didn’t show up or was it because the school was closed by some higher power? Does it matter?

Obviously, the plague spreading around the Earth came at a time when many long-standing institutions were least capable of dealing with it. Most venerable institutions in the U.S. are notable for their lethargy, inflexibility, listlessness, and lack of leadership, and their reaction to doing business through a plague is to remain in denial as long as possible.

Yet, now that summer is waning, the hits keep on coming for the ACT.

The latest ACT snafu comes in the form of a random email some students who thought they successfully registered for the September ACT received this week that read as follows:

Hi [Student Name],

We’re sorry. We know on Monday you visited MyACT to register for the ACT test and did not have the experience you were hoping for or the one we wanted to provide you. Your anguish is justified.

We are refunding your full transaction amount that occurred on July 27 through MyACT.

Your order did not complete as expected and you do not currently have an ACT test registration.

MyACT will be up and running on Monday, August 3 at 10:00am CT, and you will be able to register successfully. Customer Support teams are not able to complete or change registrations until our system is back up on Monday.

Thanks for your patience.

What’s going on in Iowa? ACT, Inc. claims a new registration system is in the offing in 48 hours. Maybe come August 3 the powers that be at the ACT will wake up fully aware that their entire business model is hanging on by a thread and they will chart a positive course for the standardized test. But, would you be money on that? Chances are ACT, Inc. will keep stumbling from embarrassment to embarrassment into the fall and winter until someone who is actually a leader takes charge and proactively guides the organization forward in a world unlikely to return to fetid “normal” any time soon.

In the meantime, if you can earn a strong ACT or SAT score and the college(s) you are applying to is test optional, it’s still my recommendation to grin and bear this shady process. Test optional is not test blind; therefore, the clamor to take the SAT and ACT will remain no matter how bad both of these test makers behave.

The (former) SAT word for all of this: debacle. The (current) SAT words for all of this: hot mess.

Our Next Quarantine Lesson: We’re Blowing it for This Fall

Posted on June 24, 2020 by Patrick O'Connor

It isn’t just the seniors who missed this year’s scholastic rites of passage.  Students may be the stars of this show, but there’s something about weak lemonade, folding chairs, and speeches about pursuing your passion faculty and administrators find just as assuring as the honored students.  It’s the closest we get to winding down a year and taking a breath before taking up the task of deciding how the coming year could be smoother, better, or more effective. And if ever there was a year when that breath was needed, it was this year.

We didn’t get it.  Instead, pundits and parents, who had spent the spring seeing first-hand what educators really do, were banging on academia’s gates, asking about the resumption of “school as usual” in the fall with a keen level of expectation.  They may have been saying “Will schools reopen?”, but they meant “Schools had better reopen.” Unaccustomed to making such deep decisions on the fly—and, frankly, a little exhausted from having made two months’ of such decisions on the fly—K-12s and higher ed begged off.  Let’s see what the numbers look like, they said, and we’ll have an answer soon.

Wow, did we blow it. One of the best ways to convey confidence in leadership is for leaders to make decisions with some sense of anticipation and planning.  Given all the seemingly spontaneous decisions this spring required, how much better off would we be in the eyes of the public if we had used April and May to say what really needed to be said in three key areas:

“We’re going to review our entire application process.”  School counselors are exhausted by June, but word that hundreds—that’s right, hundreds—of colleges were not requiring SAT or ACT scores for this year’s juniors created a groundswell of euphoria unknown to the summer months.  The arguments for ridding college admissions of these tests are better articulated elsewhere (like here).  Now that quarantine had added one more point to the argument—that the students just can’t take them—colleges succumbed to the reality in hordes, leaving counselors hopeful that, as long as they were checking under the hood of their admissions policies, admissions folks would toss out some other policies that deny college access to many students who need it most.

That bigger review doesn’t seem to be appearing.  In his typical fashion, Lawrence U dean Ken Anselment was the first to suggest in a Tweet that colleges should use this opportunity to clean up the entire admissions process, instead of taking an approach centered on the question, “So, how do we make admissions decisions without test scores?” If anyone can make major revisions to their application in two months, it’s Ken and the Lawrence crew.  It would have been better if, as a profession, all colleges had committed to this in April, creating more time and space to ask the bigger, better questions.

“We’re going online, and it’s going to be great.”  Colleges also tried to buy some time this spring when they were asked how instruction was going to occur.  As a group, they intuitively demurred, sure that any answer involving pure online courses would turn off students looking for a “full college experience,” sending them into the arms of community colleges, and leading many small private liberal arts four-years with weak decades-long financial struggles to close.

These same considerations are evident in the early announcements some colleges have made about Fall classes.  Hoping that reduced sizes of in-person classes and cancelled Fall breaks will contain the health risks, these colleges are ignoring the realities of some of their own football teams, where summer scrimmages are leaving up to twenty-five percent of the team COVID active, and at least one re-opened bar in a college town, where a quarter of all patrons are now on self-quarantine (and this is before students show up). It’s clear the best health option for all is to stay completely online—but how do you sell that to a student who just had a slew of online classes at either college or high school that, by and large, were less than they could have been?

Enter the professors.  It’s easy to see how parents and students don’t want to pay for weak online learning.  On the other hand, professors and high school teachers had about a week this spring to turn their classes into an online version of its face-to-face self, a task most colleges give professors an entire semester (and time off) to do.  Now that the summer is here, college instructors can give their courses the firepower they need to be more vital, more individualized, and more like the face-to-face thing.

If colleges connected the professors to families who rightfully see online learning as dubious, the profs could bring their websites along and show how these courses are more robust than their springtime counterparts.  Smaller colleges have long tried to get faculty involved in discussions with students, because good profs create an excitement about learning that closes the enrollment deal.  The same could have applied to online learning, if we had started sooner.  Now, we’re forced to play catch up again.

“We want your kids to be healthy.” The teachers at a local kindergarten decided they wanted to run a quarantine version of kindergarten graduation.  They made a giant rainbow arch, a few lawn signs, and went from house to house of every one of their students.  They’d set up the display, have their student walk through the arch, and created a composite video of the whole event.

A success?  Not really.  The edited video didn’t show what really happened: that the excited students broke every safe-distancing rule in the book when their teacher showed up.  Kindergartners love their teachers (thank goodness), and two months apart led to a euphoria that was shown by hugging everything in sight, a scene that’s reassuring to everyone but the Health Department.

In a nutshell, that’s why reopening K-12 schools to any kind of face-to-face learning is a bad idea.  Wal Mart can’t even get “adult” customers to wear a mask; what chance does a teacher have making a dozen five year-olds practice safe distancing?

A joint effort by state and federal officials in April, devoting dollars and expertise to developing nationwide broadband access and best practices in K-12 online learning, was the best answer to teaching students.  It also would have given time for working parents to develop resources for child care.  Instead, K-12 is left with a continuation of the catch-as-catch-can policies that allowed them to limp to June in one piece, thinking that a couple of days in the classroom each week will placate parents.  It might, until school closes again for quarantine—and if you think of the last birthday party you attended for a seven-year old, you’ll understand why that’s a certainty.

Pandemic Response Puts Many Colleges in Peril

Posted on April 17, 2020 by Admissions.Blog

The Coronavirus Pandemic has dramatically reshaped the college admissions landscape in just a matter of weeks. While many colleges are attempting to present a united front of care and concern for future applicants by going SAT- and ACT-optional for the high school Class of 2021, what’s really happening is this: colleges’ survival instincts are pushing them to do what they feel they must in order to make it through in one piece what is likely to be a 2020-2021 college admissions cycle unlike any other before it.

The pandemic has killed thousands, but the decision by political leaders to shut down economies has led to the loss of nearly twenty-five million U.S. jobs as of this article’s publication, and with them, many a nest egg to pay for college. Whole industries are in ruins, and job cuts and business failures are likely to continue through at least fall.

Colleges are businesses. Most colleges depend on tuition dollars paid by families and subsidized by the federal government to survive. If too few applicants apply and ultimately matriculate, colleges crumble. That’s why many American colleges are so rapidly going test-optional. They fear for their very survival if they don’t. And we’re not just talking about the obscure colleges in rural locales that were late to go-test optional out of habit. We are talking about the biggest names in American liberal arts education. Amherst, Williams, Pomona, Scripps. All are in grave danger in an economy unable to produce jobs or produce the income necessary to support the luxury of liberal arts degrees. The powers that be at Case Western and the UCs wanted to go test-optional before the pandemic and used it as an excuse to do so. Tufts must fear that being so many students’ second choice will not suffice in the choppy waters that will define the dog-eat-dog 2020-2021 admission cycle.

With the situation is so critical you can bet that talk of a bailout for colleges is drawing near. If a bailout is good enough for Boeing and Delta, college presidents will argue it’s an absolute must for them too. Even Harvard – with an endowment larger than the wealth that exists in many countries – is cost cutting savagely. Many colleges will likely shut down in the months ahead if the likes of TUFTS are suddenly test optional and MIT refuses to look at Subject Test Scores even as ACT, Inc. and College Board hurriedly try to produce at-home tests. Buckle up, you’ve never seen what’s coming.

 

Here is a list of colleges, as of this article’s publication, that have gone ACT- and SAT-Optional within just the last month:

Amherst College
Anderson University
Babson University
Barry University
Boston University
Butler University
California Lutheran University
Centre College
Chestnut Hill College
Clarkson University
Coastal Carolina University
Colgate University
College of Wooster
Concordia University Texas
Davidson College
Drury University
Gonzaga University
Hamilton College
Haverford College
Loyola Marymount University
Middlebury College
Montana State University
Murray State University (for high school applicants with 3.0 GPAs)
Neumann University (as long as applicants have a 2.5 GPA)
Northeastern University
Pomona College
Portland State University
Purdue University Northwest
Rhodes College
St. Edwards University (TX)
St. Olaf College
Santa Clara University
Scripps College
Seattle University
Shenandoah University
Swarthmore College
Texas Christian University
Trinity University (TX)
Tufts University
Tulane University
University of California Berkeley
University of California Davis
University of California Irvine
University of California Los Angeles
University of California Merced
University of California Riverside
University of California San Diego
University of California Santa Barbara
University of California Santa Cruz
University of Maine System
University of the Cumberlands
University of Montana (for high school students meeting GPA requirements)
University of Oregon
University of Washington
Vassar College
Virginia Tech
Western Michigan University
William Woods University
Williams College

With admissions standards being lowered by the day, remember to keep checking ConvertYourScore.org for the latest information about which colleges require or recommend which tests.

ConvertYourScore.org is the Internet’s most valuable ACT-SAT score conversion and information supersite. The regular updates to ConvertYourScore.org allow students and parents to plan better than ever before when or if to take the ACT, SAT, and SAT Subject Tests.

ConvertYourScore.org not only gives students the opportunity to compare their SAT and ACT scores just like college admissions officers do when evaluating applications; it also gives students the knowledge they need in order to determine which remaining test(s) may be worth taking in order to meet their college admissions potential.

ConvertYourScore.org has always helped:

  • students who have only received SAT scores to convert their SAT scores into comparable ACT scores.
  • students who have only received ACT scores to convert their ACT scores into comparable SAT scores.
  • students who have received scores for both the SAT and ACT to definitively determine which test they did best on – ensuring that students only send to colleges the scores that put them in the best light the eyes of admissions officers.

In addition, ConvertYourScore.org has always provided valuable background information about both the SAT and ACT and discusses the key ways in which the SAT and ACT differ.

Best of all, ConvertYourScore.org has always been completely FREE and requires no sign in process. The one-page site is the Internet’s best one-stop destination for ACT and SAT information and advice.

Yet, the site’s latest updates also allow students and parents to:

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ConvertYourScore.org is better than ever! No student or parent should start down the path of ACT or SAT planning or testing without first visiting and digesting all the information on ConvertYourScore.org.

Caltech cuts SAT Subject Test, alters official ACT/SAT submission requirements

Posted on January 23, 2020 by Admissions.Blog

Caltech’s Undergraduate Admissions office, with the support of the Faculty Committee on Freshman Admissions, has revealed that it’s eliminating the university’s long-standing requirement for submission of SAT Subject Test scores as part of the undergraduate admissions process. This change takes effect for students applying for the Caltech starting in Fall 2020.

Caltech has long required students to take and submit scores from the SAT Subject Test in Mathematics Level 2 along with at one science themed SAT Subject Test (in either ecological biology, molecular biology, chemistry, or physics).

“In reviewing our admissions requirements, we have come to the conclusion that the requirement for submission of SAT subject test scores creates an unnecessary barrier to applying for a Caltech education,” announced Nikki Chun, director of undergraduate admissions, noting that only a small percentage of high school students take the SAT subject tests. “We are guiding our focus back to long-term academic STEM preparedness based on coursework and grade performance.”

Of course, SAT Subject Tests do assess students’ depth of knowledge in advanced high school sciences.

Chun added that the Caltech admissions process has always focused, and will continue to focus, on seeking students who will approach the Institute’s core curriculum with as much enthusiasm and interest as they do classes in their specific major.

“This move will definitely widen the door for talented candidates we may not have been able to reach in the past who deserve our consideration.” said Jarrid Whitney, Caltech’s assistant vice president for student affairs, enrollment and career services.

In related news, Caltech will continue to require submission of SAT or ACT scores for first-year admission; however, applicants will not be asked to pay ACT, Inc. or College Board for the submission of ACT or SAT results “until and unless they are accepted and decide to matriculate at Caltech, Whitney adds.” Thus, Caltech will now accept self-reported scores during the admissions process.

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