I like to think I wasn't "judging" anyone, but I know what you mean. Because we used both GPA and test scores, yes, you almost certainly would have been a "deny" with a 36 ACT and a 1.97 GPA.
If I had seen your file, it would have been the talk of the day. "Can you believe this file!" I probably would have talked to the Dean, maybe called you and given you some advice. That advice would have been something like:
"Listen. Don't tell anyone I said this, but, this school is more expensive than it needs to be. Heck, who says you need college at all? But if you really want to go here, you've got two options. 1. See if you can get into the local community college for a semester or two and then transfer your credits - we won't care about your HS grades anymore. 2. AND REALLY DON'T TELL YOUR PARENTS/TEACHERS I SAID THIS You could, in theory... just get your GED. That's a loop hole around us caring about your GPA."
But it sounds like you did not graduate high school or apply to college. If that’s correct, I would not have the context to know since the baseline of inclusion into my experience is people who graduate high school in some form - GED included, AND who provide test scores.
I’m really sorry to hear about your stepdad, wincy. I hope things are ok for you now.
I worked in the underrepresented student office, so I was keenly aware/curious about that possibility when I began. However, after reviewing thousands of applications, my experience, to my surprise, was that GPA to SAT/ACT scores remained highly correlated regardless of race. If memory serves (and it’s been awhile) the outliers who were more likely to have higher SAT/ACT than their GPA normally suggested, tended to come from predominantly non-white schools. I’ve seen so many reports to the contrary that this surprised me to no end, but that’s what I observed.
Excellent question. I’m of two minds here. As a high school student, I too struggled to get great test scores. I took the SAT four times, which finally resulted in a score that could get me scholarships.
Did I become smarter? - I sincerely doubt it.
Did I become less likely to fail out of college? …Seems unlikely, but I don’t know.
As an admissions rep, I understood that high scores, whether SAT or GPA, are certainly both proxies for a prediction: If I admit this student, are they going to fail out?
Unknown: It actually might be the case that students who get private tutoring are less likely to fail out because their parents can financially endure them struggling to repeat failed courses. I’d be interested to see a study on that.
From a state school’s Admissions perspective, where the unit test resolves to admit/deny, there is nothing particularly outlying about your scores from what I recall.
I see 31 and think, “admit”. I see 3.18, I think “probably admit”. I check your math scores (which is where a lot of people trip up), and see you got mostly Bs- heck, you’re on Hacker Mews, probably As, and I think, “admit”. Now I do the normalizing math and yeah, Admit. Congratulations!
Great question - the short answer is that our Admissions office did not attempt to normalize non-mathematical factors. At first, this surprised me. How often do we as students somehow get the impression that extracurriculars, magnet, Montessori, AP, IB, student council, <more trophies/achievements of your choice/> are somehow positively associated with college admissions?
From a non-Admissions perspective, accounting for these non-empirical differences seems wise and fair. However, they introduce subjectivity into the equation, which increases the likelihood of a human decision maker being unfair.
So what normalization did we do? What would you do? Knowing that no equation is perfect, you must start with a goal and find the least-bad equation.
The goal: Only admit students with a high likelihood of not failing out.
Why: Failing out has consequences for most US students who take out large loans and must repay immediately if they fail out.
The realization: High schools already provide a proxy for degrees of past failure - letter grades.
Assumption: Assume that high schools use their letter grading system as a method of normalizing and displaying how hard their courses are. A B+ should represent a certain level of achievement regardless of school. The school has the autonomy to use any letter system they choose.
Solution: Assign a point system to letter grades and calculate an average. Use only classes correlated to success at your university. This is the normalized GPA.
Surprise #1 - If your high school thinks a tougher-than-average letter grading system (eg a 93% is a B+) somehow makes students more attractive to the majority of the 7000 US colleges, they are wrong. And probably causing students to lose out on scholarships.
Surprise #2 - If you believe this system is unfair, you can aim the blame at technology. Applications to most universities (until recently I’m told) increase every year as digital applications make it easy to apply to 10 schools instead of 3. To handle the increase, colleges can hire 3x more admissions people, or find ways to speed up the process.
Surprise #3 - Colleges always want more applications than ever before. By dropping SAT/ACT as criteria, it removes a point of friction in the customer experience, and removes a step in the calculation effort. (If they could drop GPA and keep SAT/ACT, this would the ideal situation from a metric and efficiency perspective, but Marketing and the public would throw a fit.)
I worked in Admissions at a large state school from 2005-2007. Our method for determining admissibility reminded me of the heat map chart in this article - ie GPA on one axis, SAT/ACT score on the another axis, trace your finger along both paths to see if the applicant was in or out.
I probably reviewed 20-30 applications a day. If high school transcripts were universally formatted, decisions could have been instantaneous but alas, we live in the real world and some human-in-the-loop normalizing had to be done over-and-over.
With all that reviewing, patterns emerged, namely that SAT and ACT scores strongly correlate to GPA. Now, I’m the kind of person that roots for the genius to overcome his grades and emerge a genius on the SAT/ACT. But in two years, it probably happened only twice. Before calculating a normalized GPA, I could look at the test scores and predict “admit” or “deny”.
While the author is correct to say “the irrelevance of test scores is greatly exaggerated”, in my experience, whether or not something is irrelevant has very little to do with what universities do.
I’d recommend only using test scores. Or, only go with GPAs. Only test scores is more efficient. Only GPAs looks better on press releases.
If I had seen your file, it would have been the talk of the day. "Can you believe this file!" I probably would have talked to the Dean, maybe called you and given you some advice. That advice would have been something like:
"Listen. Don't tell anyone I said this, but, this school is more expensive than it needs to be. Heck, who says you need college at all? But if you really want to go here, you've got two options. 1. See if you can get into the local community college for a semester or two and then transfer your credits - we won't care about your HS grades anymore. 2. AND REALLY DON'T TELL YOUR PARENTS/TEACHERS I SAID THIS You could, in theory... just get your GED. That's a loop hole around us caring about your GPA."