Insights on Test Optional Admissions

Insights on Test Optional Admissions

In an op-ed published in Inside Higher Ed, David Blobaum, the director of outreach for the National Test Prep Association and the co-founder of tutoring company Summit Prep, argues that it is in college hopefuls’ best interests to submit test scores, even if a school does not require them.

When accepting – or rejecting – applicants, admissions departments cite often-clandestine “institutional priorities” having to do with students’ backgrounds or areas of expertise. According to Mr. Blobaum, however, “Rhetoric and reality often diverge.”

He contends, unequivocally, that “test-optional institutions have a preference for students with high test scores” and that students applying to test-optional colleges and universities are less likely to be admitted if they do not submit test scores. “If a college does not value SAT or ACT scores, then the college would not use those scores.”

Citing data from Dartmouth’s watershed report, which led the institution to return to test-mandatory admissions, Mr. Blobaum argues that traditionally marginalized students have the most to gain from submitting test scores: “a disadvantaged student with an SAT score between 1450 and 1490 is 3.7 times more likely to get admitted if they submit their score than if they withhold it.”

To support his argument, Mr. Blobaum explores a few key examples of elite institutions that recently were or currently are test-optional:

  • Yale had a three times higher admit rate (6 percent vs. 2 percent) for students who submitted test scores over the past several years compared to those who didn’t.
  • According to Cornell’s internal research, “submitting test scores significantly increases the likelihood of admission (to its) test-optional colleges.” The institution labeled it “prudent” for students to include test scores with their application package.
  • Even though Duke claims that choosing not to submit SAT or ACT scores “will not impact (a student’s) admissions decision,” 81 percent of newly enrolled students at Duke submitted some combination of SAT and ACT. Furthermore, Duke’s admission website goes as far as advising students to “buy a study guide and begin taking practice SAT or ACT tests.”

These examples are compelling, and make clear that standardized test scores can certainly act as key differentiators between candidates who are otherwise qualified for limited class seats. These differentiators are particularly important for hyper-selective schools where the ratio between applicants and enrollment offers is especially stark.

Mr. Blobaum approached this topic with an eye toward the most elite institutions; his observations, therefore, despite their potential relevance at Ivy Plus schools, may not capture the admissions landscape at less selective—but still excellent—colleges and universities. Furthermore, Mr. Blobaum’s argument sometimes strays from hard data; he, perhaps controversially, claims that admissions departments “often outright lie” and bases some of his reasoning on the fact that “it is just common sense.”

Source: Denied? That Top College Lied (Inside Higher Ed)

*Stay in the know! Subscribe

 

What Makes an Effective Personal Statement or Common App Essay

What Makes an Effective Personal Statement or Common App Essay

Your personal statement should uniquely reflect who you are, what you value, and how you think—while also engaging and even surprising the reader.

You may be thinking, “Nothing much has happened to me! How can I surprise the reader?” Well, one of the biggest myths about the personal statement is that you can’t write a good one unless you have a “big” or tragic story to tell: “I was on my way to becoming a professional skater before I shattered my ankle,” or “I overcame a life-threatening disease then founded my own nonprofit to fund research on that disease.” While an experience like this could make for an excellent (though painful) personal statement, it could also make for…a really boring essay. Though it’s sad to say it, admissions officers have read many of these stories and so aren’t surprised or even moved by them.

Just think about it: admissions officers read thousands of essays every year, year after year. To get through them all, they have to read quickly, stopping once they figure out which “pile” you belong in (yes, no, or maybe). Your goal is to force that reader to slow down, even stop—to make them want to read your essay, to make them think, “I’ve never seen this before!” Admissions officers are more likely to have seen the “big” stories before—every year, they read thousands of essays about sports injuries and divorces, about Eagle Scout projects and difficult classes. Often, the best way to surprise the reader is to think small—to write about an unusual hobby (Sample Essay 6 in The Complete College Essay Handbook) or passion (Sample Essay 5 in The Complete College Essay Handbook)—or to write about a more common experience in an unexpected way, like discussing your parent’s divorce in the context of a violent protest (Sample Essay 4 in The Complete College Essay Handbook). Surprise can also be contextual. A varsity soccer player writing about varsity soccer? Not surprising. A varsity soccer player writing about his passion for cooking? That’s surprising!

A note: not all surprises are not created equal. There is the pleasant, gentle “surprise party” kind of surprise, and then there is shock, which can be invoked through violent images or vulgar confessions, and which produces negative emotions—fear, disgust, anger, and more.

Finally, a word on style and structure. The personal statement has two central elements: scene and reflection. Scene shows the reader what happened in an exciting way, and reflection explains its relevance. At the same time, your personal statement shouldn’t be all scene, but a balanced mix of scene and reflection. Reflection enables you to place the scene into its larger context and to show you thinking through the story.

Grad a copy of The Complete College Essay Handbook to keep learning more!

*Stay in the know! Subscribe*

What is a Personal Statement (Example: The Common App Essay)

What is a Personal Statement (Example: The Common App Essay)

It’s June, which means it’s time to start working on college admissions essays. This month, we’ll share some excerpts from our book, The Complete College Essay Handbook, starting with some personal statement tips!

First, what exactly is a personal statement like the Common Application essay?

A personal statement is a creative essay of 650 words or less that reads like a short story, memoir, or novel—not like an academic essay, textbook, or newspaper article. The best personal statements tell a story that culminates in a meaningful realization and offers the reader a glimpse of a mind in the process of thinking.

The personal statement is not the place to brag about accomplishments (student body president, team captain, founder of a schoolwide service project), or about how amazing you are (“I’m a world-changing revolutionary!”).

Although people you don’t know are going to read it, the personal statement is not a public form, like a school-wide speech. The personal statement is an intimate form, like a secret. It is the place to be honest, vulnerable, and raw, to reveal mistakes and weaknesses, to open up about an experience you’d only tell someone you were really close with, to explore what you struggle with and what scares you.

The personal statement is not “about” an event or achievement. It is about the psychological and emotional processes that occurred “behind the scenes.”

The same story, told from one angle, can be impersonal whereas, from another—told with a focus on the process rather than the outcome—can become deeply personal. Here are a few examples to help explain what I mean.

  • NO (Impersonal): The story about how you got elected student body president and a detailed account of everything you plan work on once in office
  • YES (Personal): The story about your internal struggle to overcome a crippling fear of public      speaking in order to run for student body president
  • NO (Impersonal): The story about how you changed lives by raising money for an orphanage in Africa
  • YES (Personal): The story about how you decided to start raising money for an orphanage because you yourself had been adopted and always struggled with the fact that your birth parents had abandoned you
  • NO (Impersonal): The story about how tearing your ACL was hard because you couldn’t play football or see your friends for a few months
  • YES (Personal): The story about how tearing your ACL gave you the time to reflect on who you are and you realized you didn’t want to just be an athlete so you started writing poetry and made new friends at school

Notice how all of these negative examples focus on the superficial event: I was elected; I raised money; I tore my ACL. By contrast, the positive examples explore the story behind the event—what was going inside of the writer that either led to this event (the student body president and orphanage examples) or the internal change that resulted from it (the ACL example). They also explore intimate, potentially difficult topics.

Since the personal statement is a creative essay at its heart, there is no set formula for success—however, our process and essay samples will give you the tools and examples you need to write your own singular personal statement.

*Stay in the know! Subscribe*

10 Do’s and Don’ts for Writing The Common Application Essay

10 Do’s and Don’ts for Writing The Common Application Essay

Our essay experts know best. Check out these 10 tips from Emma that will help you write the most effective personal statement.

Interested in completing your college essays this summer?  Summer is the best time to tackle this important essay, so start coming up with a plan now! 

  • Don’t worry about the prompts. It’s helpful to read through the prompts to see if doing so sparks any ideas; however, there is no need to stress about writing an essay that exactly “answers” a prompt. Your goal is to write the best essay you can about whatever you decide is best to write about. Working with students 1:1, we totally disregard the prompts and usually find that their essay still easily fits under one of the questions. And, if not, there is often an open-ended prompt such as: “Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.”
  • Do open with a scene. A strong opening scene draws the reader into your essay. Admissions officers and their first-round readers have hundreds of applications to get through—make yours stand out from the first sentence. Intrigue them or scare them or make them laugh. Make them want to keep reading.
  • Do focus on a single story. You only have 650 words. Perhaps that sounds like a lot to you: it’s not. There is no reason you should worry about filling it up. Through our process, you will find out how to generate enough detail to write an essay about any story. Nor should you worry about cramming as much as possible into the personal statement. Remember that colleges have all of your application data and that trying to do too much in the essay will only end up making your essay feel rushed and scattered.
  • Do make sure that your story has a clear beginning, middle, and end. You can tell your story out of order—for instance, opening with a scene from a stressful moment in order to build suspense before jumping back into chronology—but you always want to make sure your story has each of these elements. Skipping any single one will confuse your reader and make your story feel incomplete (because it is!).
  • And yet don’t get bogged down in detail. We usually find students have trouble generating enough detail. But sometimes we get a student who is unable to summarize effectively, too. Having too much detail can make your story confusing and also mean that your reader will have trouble understanding what the most significant elements are. It usually also means you don’t have room for reflection—the most important element in the essay!
  • Do present yourself in a positive light. We actively encourage you to tell a story that showcases your vulnerabilities, failures, weaknesses, and mistakes. However, either your narrative or your reflection (or some combination of the two), needs to ultimately redeem you so that your essay, in the end, shows you to be someone who is actively working to improve—to rectify mistakes, move past failures, or strengthen weakness. Your essay should be honest, but its main purpose is to make you seem like someone admissions officers want to see at their colleges! Make sure you come off well.
  • Don’t use huge thesaurus words. Again: you aren’t trying to impress the admissions officers! You are trying to show them who you are—and you are trying to make them like you. Using big words can mean using words you don’t quite know how to use, and that will show. Even if you do know how to use them, unless your essay is about how much you love long words or languages, using the big, 25-cent words can make you sound pretentious and overly formal. The language should sound like you and be relatively casual—not curse-word, talking-with-friends casual, but maybe talking-with-your-grandmother casual.
  • Do use vivid, interesting words and varied sentence structure. Being casual doesn’t mean the writing shouldn’t be good or interesting! Do push yourself to use words you might not use in your everyday speech, and do mix up the sentence structure to keep the writing varied and exciting. Do feel free to include words from your personal vocabulary—words from the language you speak at home or from a regional dialect or words you’ve made up. That can add a lot of texture and personality to an essay. Just make sure you define the words for your reader if the meaning isn’t clear from context.
  • But don’t use emotional language: I was happy; I was sad. Instead, let an action depict the emotional state. That is, instead of saying “I was happy,” you might write, “I couldn’t help skipping a few steps down the street after hearing the news.” And, instead of saying “She was sad,” you might write, “Her shoulders slumped, and she cradled her head in her hands.” You can’t see an emotion, and you always want to give the reader something to see.
  • And don’t use cliche—i.e. common, predictable, overused—language. Cliche language includes (but is definitely not limited to!) phrases like:
    • I need to be true to myself.
    • Time heals all wounds.
    • Every cloud has a silver lining.
    • Good things come to those who wait.
    • I learned more from them than they did from me.
    • Every rose has its thorn.
    • You win some, you lose some.
    • Little did I know.

Of course, your essay might have one of these messages at its heart. Maybe you did learn more from the kid you tutored than they learned from you. Maybe you did find the “silver lining” in a terrible situation. Both of these could make for great essays. But you want to verbalize that realization in your own unique and surprising way.

Contact us if you’d like help completing the CA essay (or other essays!) this summer so you can apply ASAP after August 1.  

*Stay in the know! Subscribe*

Colleges That Are No Longer Test Optional – Updated 4/23

Colleges That Are No Longer Test Optional – Updated 4/23

Colleges have continued to roll back test-optional policies. We will update this post as more updates are made.

You’ll need competitive test scores to apply to the following schools:

Auburn (testing STRONGLY preferred; required with certain GPA)
Brown
Cal Tech
Cornell (2026, require, 2025 recommended for certain colleges)
Dartmouth
Georgetown
Georgia Tech
Harvard
MIT
Purdue
University of Georgia
University of Florida (state-wide)
University of Tennessee (state-wide)
UT Austin
Yale

We have also found it beneficial to send high scores to most other test-optional schools in the top tier, especially if you are applying to a selective major (engineering, comp sci, data science, business, hard sciences) or attend a high school where the majority of students test and test well:

Ivies
Stanford
Vanderbilt
Northwestern
JHU
Duke
Rice
WashU
Notre Dame
Carnegie Mellon
Tufts
Emory
USC
Boston College
Boston University (exception: General Studies)
NYU
Clemson
Case Western
Villanova
University of Chicago
University of Michigan
University of Wisconsin
University of Virginia
University of North Carolina
University of Illinois
University of Maryland

Reach out to us if you’d like help with your application strategy and deciding whether you are a good candidate to apply test-optional or not.

*Stay in the know! Subscribe

Common App Announces 2024–2025 Essay Prompts

Common App Announces 2024–2025 Essay Prompts

The Common App essay prompts will remain the same for 2024–2025. Get a head start by grabbing a copy of The Complete College Essay Handbook!

  1. Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
  2. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
  3. Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?
  4. Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?
  5. Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.
  6. Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?
  7. Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

They will retain the optional community disruption question within the Writing section, too.

*Stay in the know! Subscribe*

Elevating Your Extracurriculars for Summer 2024

Elevating Your Extracurriculars for Summer 2024

The strength of your curriculum (rigor), the grades you receive in academic courses (core academic GPA), and your extracurricular activities (ECs) are what matter most in the evaluation of a college application. 

College counselors can help students choose the right courses and connect them with the learning support they might need to achieve excellent grades, but advising on the extracurricular activities that will help students stand out is much more complicated!

It’s getting harder and harder to stand out extracurricularly; a lot has been done before, and it can be tough to come up with original ideas when the internet provides conflicting information. It is easy to pay to undertake research or get published; spend time on a college campus taking a course alongside peers; or travel the world serving communities you don’t have an intimate connection to but that are exciting to visit and experience. For some applicants, these ECs do the trick—really! 

However, if you are targeting selective schools, you’ll benefit from not taking the easy path when it comes to ECs. 

Your ECs will need to not only support a clear academic narrative and demonstrate your intellectual curiosity but also highlight what matters most to you and what you care about in your world. You will benefit from getting creative! 

We understand not everyone needs or wants full-blown college counseling, but we also want to make sure students really understand the role of extracurriculars in the college admissions process and spend their time wisely. If you are interested in a standalone extracurricular planning session to maximize the summer of 2024, reach out!

*Stay in the know! Subscribe*

 

 

Common Application Student Advisory Committee Applications

Common Application Student Advisory Committee Applications

Common App is looking for students to participate in the second cohort of their Student Advisory Committee. This committee aims to provide a student perspective on the college admission process. The goal is to gather valuable feedback on the Common App experience and students’ overall college application journey.

The Student Advisory Committee will consist of: 

  • High school juniors or seniors
  • 2-year college students
  • First-year students at 4-year institutions 

All students are welcome, whether or not they are applying to a Common App college or currently using the platform. For questions about the application process or serving on the committee, please visit the CA website or email studentadvisory@commonapp.org.

*Stay in the know! Subscribe*

Business Bound Workshop for High School Students

Business Bound Workshop for High School Students

Business Bound is an on-demand, interactive workshop led by Dr. Brittany Maschal (no boring PowerPoints, promise) to help high school students who are undergrad b-school hopefuls set the foundation for competitive, differentiated applications. This workshop is offered in a small group setting (5 students max) or 1:1, and covers: 

Academic Foundations: Math is your friend! You’ll learn how to choose the appropriate foundation and extension courses both in and out of school and understand the nuances of standardized testing in the undergrad b-school admissions process. 

Why B-School: You’ll benefit from developing a compelling reason to study business in college. After this workshop, your why could change drastically and for the better.  

Extracurriculars: Your activities are the key storytelling elements of your application. They back your why, and they highlight what you’ve got to bring to the table. 

Leadership & Impact: Leadership is everywhere, and everyone can make an impact. We’ll show you how. No title of Captain or President needed.

Email us for more information on pricing, timing, and how to sign up. 

*Stay in the know! Subscribe*

Students Admitted Early Decision as a Percentage of Enrolled Freshmen

Students Admitted Early Decision as a Percentage of Enrolled Freshmen

In 2022, Education Reform Now released the first brief in their Future of Fair Admissions series. The brief contained the most comprehensive research on college admissions early decision plans, which provide an applicant an admissions decision in mid-December in exchange for the student’s commitment to enroll if admitted. 

The chart linked below from ERN shows the 84 IHEs where a third or more of freshmen were enrolled through early decision (ED) programs in 2022 plus 6 more that enrolled more than a third of their freshmen ED in 2020 but did not share data for 2022. The Common Data Set does not publish the number of students who are enrolled through early decision. Since early decision is binding, you would expect a very high share of all students admitted ED to enroll. Blank spaces represent years when data were not available. 0% represents years an IHE did not offer ED.

You can review the chart here
 
*Stay in the know! Subscribe*