What Are Elite Colleges Looking For?

Below is a passage from my NYT Opinion cutting room floor. I was trying to explain why top students stopped submitting SAT scores even though they all took the test, and it seemed to me that the system had morphed into one of those sports where objective achievement was mixed with more subjective factors. I settled on ski jumping …***Holistic Chess: Nordic Ski JumpingIn Nordic ski jumping – the sport where tall, pale people throw themselves off the side of a mountain – officials judge competitors from a high perch above where they are expected to land. When the Winter Olympics remind people living south of Oslo that this sport exists, it is natural to think we are watching a sort of javelin where the spear has been replaced with a blonde person. But this is not true. Distance matters, but the soul of ski jumping is style. Judges award style points, and the longest jump does not always win.Elite college admissions has never been purely about how far the skier can jump, so to speak. There have always been grades and test scores, and there have always been considerations of style. But as grades mean less and tests are mastered - even as they become optional - the skiers have maxed out the hill and considerations of style have taken center stage. It’s as if what started out as ski jumping had unexpectedly mutated into ice dancing, elevating style to the point where something that is clearly still athletic is resolved on an unknowable set of artistic grounds by judges whose reasoning cannot be sifted.Covid-19 interfered with SAT and ACT testing, especially in places like California and Canada, but 1.5 million masked and distanced students took the SAT and 1.3 million took the ACT anyway. This was a 30% drop from 2020, but there were plenty of scores to be submitted by the 2.7 million students applying for Fall of 2021. Scores didn’t change - the average SAT went up a little and the average ACT went down a little. But colleges went test-optional in 2021, and the number of students who submitted scores collapsed - particularly at mainstream American schools. To take one example, in 2021 just 15 percent of Washington State University’s entering class had submitted a test score, even though most had surely taken either the ACT or SAT.The skiers were still jumping, but the judges had no idea how far they had gone.Students who didn’t get a near-perfect score on the SAT or ACT figure they are better off not submitting the score at all. At Cornell, about 70% of students submitted test scores before the pandemic. In 2021, just 41% did, and the scores were much higher. In 2023, the scores rose again - not because the average student who got into Cornell had a higher score, but because only those with perfect or near-perfect scores even submitted them. This is the idea of a “submittable” score: take the test, but only submit the score if it clears a rising bar. Standardized tests have begun to morph from a system of gradients to a singular accomplishment: did you get a perfect score? If not, move on.MIT is an interesting and important case. In 2021, the percentage of students admitted without submitting an SAT score dropped only slightly, and the 25th percentile score didn’t rise because there was almost nowhere for it to go. For years, MIT’s 25th percentile SAT Math score was 780 out of 800. Yet in early 2022, MIT became the first elite school to reinstate the standardized testing requirement, stating that the SAT is the most accessible way for students with “less access to educational capital” to show their abilities. MIT’s suspicion was that low-income students from weak school districts who scored, say, a 760 on the SAT Math would decline to submit the imperfect score. But this would leave MIT’s admissions department with nothing but high school grades to go on - usually not enough to confirm that the student could succeed. With an SAT or ACT score, the student might have been admitted. This thinking is hotly contested, but in 2024, Yale, Dartmouth and Brown followed MIT’s lead.Elite schools’ reported test scores make at least one thing clear: the tests aren’t hard enough. There are meaningful differences in ability among the thousands of students with a perfect SAT score. It’s not like they have probed the outer limits of human knowledge; they are, after all, applying to go to college. And it’s not like we lack the ability to write better tests. 99.91% of those who take the Law School Admissions Test don’t get a perfect score. Those who do each year would fill just half of Yale Law School’s entering class; the other half of the class, and every other law student in the country, would have lower scores. But colleges are deluged with perfect SAT and ACT scores, suggesting a false equivalence between candidates who are, of course, not the same. We may not have lowered the hoop, but if we are going to keep on with standardized testing, we might need to raise it.The upshot of all this is that it is now impossible to be clearly qualified for admission to an elite school – but it’s also impossible to be clearly unqualified. This makes things awfully confusing for applicants, but gives colleges unassailable discretion over whom to admit. In practice, it works something like this: a perfect student gets one raffle ticket, and with as much sense as a raffle, she will be disappointed nine times out of ten. If her extracurriculars are just so, maybe she gets two or three raffle tickets. But the perfect applicant will get four if she’s a legacy, six if she’s an athlete, and nine if her parents are wealthy or famous. It’s rarely a guarantee; there’s still a raffle. But the chances that the child of a billionaire, ambassador or movie star will win the raffle are, by all appearances, very high.***Coming tomorrow … What if we just didn’t do this?Previous posts in Ten Things We Get Wrong About College* #10 - College is harder to get into than ever! (It’s never been easier.)* #9 - College is more expensive than ever! (Tuition has been flat for 15 years.)* #8 - Ugh. We have to fill out the FAFSA. (Maybe. Here’s what to know.)* #7 - Colleges are closing! (Yes, but none you’ve heard of.)* #6 - There’s a college debt crisis! (No. But there are problems.)* #5 - Ugh! [Perfect Daughter] has to take the SAT. (What for? Let’s get into it.)To come …* #4 - Well, I guess a sports scholarship is the ticket. (They’re mostly fake.)* #3 - I bet expensive schools spend a lot on the student experience. (Sometimes, if they feel like it. Here’s how to find out.)* #2 - Ivy League graduates make the big bucks. (Not usually - for pretty obvious reasons.)* #1 - [Handsome Prince] should go to college in [country], where it’s free! (It’s not, which is one of the reasons nobody does this.)Other recent posts …* Sunday Charticle: What Do Students Major In?* How colleges discovered the virtue of geographical diversity – and other shenanigans* Launching The College Question This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecollegequestion.substack.com/subscribe