There may be some child somewhere for whom higher SAT scores will be important in the college admissions process. For your child, the chances are that higher SAT scores won’t matter at all in determining where she is admitted.
Bold statements, I know. But after 30-something years of counseling students and their families about choosing and applying to college, I think I have the standing to make a few observations.
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There are some children for whom higher scores willmake a difference. An athlete with a 3.0 g.p.a. needs a 620 (math plus “reading”) to play college ball. The National Collegiate Athletic Association has no sense of humor when it comes to the inverse relationship between grades and scores leading to eligibility. Some scholarship programs use SAT scores as a cut off as well.
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But for most kids, higher SAT scores are of modest utility, maybe meaningless. Consider the following common scenario: Percival will graduate in the top five percent from his competitive suburban high school having excelled in his sophisticated academic curriculum. He will score 4s on many of his AP exams, 5s on the rest. His extracurriculars are stellar–long range, consistent, and meaningful–his essays personable and charming. His calculus teacher, who knows him well, writes an eloquent recommendation about his ability, his motivation, and his thoughtfulness. “One of the brightest and nicest kids I have had the pleasure to teach in my career” she writes. His SAT scores? 700 on the new “evidence-based reading and writing” (do you mind if we just call it “reading”?) and 760 on math. In short, Percy’s scores are well into the 90th percentile.
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Let’s say Percy’s parents hire a tutor or a series of tutors or a roomful of SAT experts or a phalanx of test prep connoisseurs. Let’s say that Percy gives up reading for pleasure, camping with his family, helping out around the house, tossing a ball with his mom, dating, sleeping, and enjoying his junior year in every particular. Let’s say he studies assiduously and subsequently feels closer to the 1, √3, 2 triangle than he does to his own siblings. Let’s say his scores improve from his respectable 1440 to a perfect “dialing direct” 1600. (“800” is a toll free number. Get it?)
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With his 1440, Percy’s chances at uber-competitive schools are something worse than one in ten.
With his new and improved 800 reading and 800 math, his chances are upgraded to around one in eight.
That’s right. Colleges that admit fewer than 10 % of their applicants routinely reject kiddos with 1600 on their SAT. Why? For the same reason that university professors date their graduate students. Because they can. The tour guide at a college in the Northeast last year bragged about how her school rejected two out of three valedictorians. And applicants with 1600 SATs? “We could fill our entire first year class with them if we wanted to.”
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What to do? Given that 1600 is the top of the scale, going back to the plethora of SAT wizards and shooting for a1700 is off the table. Given that one is the smallest natural number, graduating “better” than first in the class in not an option either. So here is some directed advice for all loving parents and their high achieving high school junior offspring: get up early on a Saturday morning; make some PBJs and fill up the canteens with lemonade. Drive to the nearest National Park and hike somewhere beautiful with your beloved child. Enjoy the panorama. Do not talk about admission to competitive colleges. Do not talk about how higher SAT scores improve your child’s chances of admission to a psycho-competitive college from 10% to 12.5%.
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Subsequently, if your child is admitted to Stanford, she may consider matriculating there. I hear Palo Alto is lovely this time of year. However, if your child is not destined to be a cardinal (the “color” not the bird is the Stanford mascot) then graciously accept the offer of one of the two thousand colleges in this country who would be thrilled to have a great kid like yours. (Such lovely credentials, and did you see that glowing recommendation from the calculus teacher?) And wouldn’t you want your kid to go to a college with other kids who go hiking with their parents rather than a bunch of stressed out dweeb-weenies? (I’m not saying that Stanford undergrads ARE a bunch of stressed out dweeb-weenies but given the 4.79 % admit ratio, there is the potential that they COULD be.)
Take it to the bank: good kids–academically motivated, intellectually curious, pleasant students–do well WHERE EVER they go. Don’t believe me? Check out the Yale Law School website listing where their first year students went undergrad. There are schools represented you have never even heard of. So there.
Time to stop reading this blog post and go plan the next day of hiking with your beloved high school student. Because whatever she gets on her SAT and wherever she goes to college, these glorious days are not going to come again.
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2 thoughts on “Score!”
Important point made here. In a former incarnation I was an admission officer at one of the Ivies. Which one is not important to our purposes here. We could have filled the class with people with 800s on SATs. But actually there were times that higher SATs would work AGAINST admission. For example we had access to actual RESEARCH that demonstrated that underachievers were the worst academic risks. (Disclosure: the prejudices of Ivy admission officers that determine who gets admitted are rarely based on actual research) It was easier to admit a person with a huge talent in one area (say hockey, for example) who had straight B average, and individual SATs in high 500s or low 600s than if the same student had 800s.
When we believed a student was sufficiently talented academically to get through our academic program, then our preferences after that were largely based on what we thought having that student on campus would do for us. Sure, some students were admitted for academic talent alone, but they were the ones who had published papers in academic journals or had invented and patented a device to determine the chemical composition of the atmosphere of the planet Jupiter. They did not necessarily have 800 SATs.
Sometimes reading application and credential folders we don’t learn about everything that is relevant but as an admission prospect the guy who went hiking with his parents in a nearby National Park sounds like a better admission prospect than the one who spent his high school years doing SAT prep and mega-tutoring.
thank you thank you thank you!!! having just finished this whole college process with child #1 and about to start with #2, this is so right on the mark!! my kid didn’t have 1600 on her SATs or a 4.0 GPA (or even 4 and 5s on her AP exams) — and she still got into a perfectly fine school that she is excited about attending!