Dartmouth, Yale, Brown Brought Back ACT/SAT Requirement, Why!? 🎓 

Thank you for watching and giving your feedback. Glad to hear the section about grit and hard work resonated. I completely agree that student motivation is the key to raising scores. And yeah, Harvard has other problems they're dealing with :) As for Princeton, Cornell, Columbia and Penn, this article from a Princeton student is great! www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2024/03/princeton-opinion-column-sat-standardized-testing-test-optional

⭐Thank you for the feedback, we're so pleased to hear it was helpful. Your plan sounds like a good one! If you need any help reaching that 33+, we work with students all over the world, so hit us up at www.PrepGurus.com 🌟

Great question! There is a connection between income and all forms of testing, but it is often misunderstood, so this will be a long answer! 1) Students from "advantaged schools" generally are from families with higher incomes. Students from "disadvantaged schools" generally are from lower-resourced families. 2) Students from advantaged schools generally score higher than students from disadvantaged schools across a variety of testing metrics: state high school exit exams, AP exams, as well as the ACT & SAT. This is a reflection of the cumulative educational experiences and environments a student has been exposed to up until the time they take these exams. It does not indicate biases in these exams toward certain groups of students over others (based on income or otherwise). 3) However, the key point is that the ACT & SAT retain their predictive power of college performance for students from both advantaged and disadvantaged high schools. 4) So while students from disadvantaged schools might generally see slightly lower scores on the ACT & SAT on average, as their standardized test scores rise, so does their performance in college. 5) This is why colleges allow some "leeway" in scores from students from disadvantaged high schools. You can see evidence of this in the slightly higher admission rates for students from disadvantaged schools over students from advantaged high schools with the same scores (6:53 in the video). Or put another way, the colleges in this study are adjusting for environmental differences between advantaged and disadvantaged high schools to make the admissions process more fair to all students. 6) Something that is not in the video is that when standardized testing is removed from the college admissions equation a perverse incentive is created for some elite high schools to inflate their students' grades to create an unfair advantage. There are numerous studies (Gershenson, an education economist at American University being one) that show grade inflation is disproportionately increasing in advantaged schools. This is clearly not in the broader interest of society and makes college admissions less fair. 7) Also not in the video, but relevant to this discussion: many test-optional colleges are likely to leave their policies unchanged in the near term because test-optional leads to more applications, and colleges benefit financially from every application they receive -- however, in light of all of this new data, selective colleges also likely to admit far fewer students who apply without scores. Conclusions: 1) The ACT & SAT are not perfect tools for predicting college performance, but statistically, they are far better tools than high school GPA for predicting college performance -- and this holds true across the income spectrum. 2) Grade inflation has made high school GPA a weak predictor of college performance and is likely to create a seismic shift in how colleges interpret high school GPA and standardized test scores in the years ahead. 3) If you're applying to selective colleges in the next few years, including a strong standardized test score in your application is your best tool to win scholarships and gain admission to top-tier universities.