Think higher SAT/ACT scores can’t greatly impact your or your your kid’s college list and final admissions decisions in today’s misrepresented and misunderstood “test optional” era?
Oops.
For various windy and partisan reasons, many educators, politicians, and business people denigrate standardized college entrance exams and minimize their actual impact on admissions decisions, but they’re wrong to do so: It’s simply not factually true for a huge range of students applying to selective and highly selective colleges.
Just this fall, many CPE students, currently seniors, including a young woman from Texas and two young men from NJ and CT, now have a much more comfortable chance of getting into a bunch of schools they had almost indefinitely relegated to their long-shot pile. Even when applying to test-optional schools that make explicit proclamations and sign official-sounding documents stating that opting out of including scores won’t actively hurt any candidate’s chances, students who achieve scoring gains on SATs and ACTs that push them to the 25th or higher percentile for incoming freshmen are able to swim in admissions pools with far less predation, as clearly born out by acceptance rate data, (Fun fact: predation is an “SAT” word I discovered on an SAT passage about a scientific study of fish and their predators:-)). Mathematically and statistically put, acceptance rates for students at the 25th or higher percentile for incoming classes are much, and at some schools jaw-droppingly, higher.
Which pool do you want to swim in? Your only real limiting factor is the time and effort you’re willing to commit. We’re here to help you get in shape.
See also: The Test Optional Trap: how-covid-19-kills-in-college-admissions/