Shades of Test Optional

There was a great talk given by Jed Applerouth at the recent IECA conference for private college counselors. Mr. Applerouth runs a test prep company, and his talk was entitled “Test Optional Doesn’t Equal Test Ignorant.” If you’ve been following my page for a while, you know that I’ve written quite a few posts about what test optional means and what makes it so nebulous. A few weeks ago, I discussed the fact that students need to look at the midrange scores for each school when deciding to submit scores or not as well as what percentage of students submit scores to each school.

I thought quite a few of you would find Jed Applerouth’s graphic interesting. You can see that there can sometimes be a huge admissions advantage to submitting scores to a test optional school. Obviously, the scores that a student submits need to be within the midrange for the school, which can easily be found on the Common Data Set, item C9. For those of you who look at these numbers for various schools, keep in mind that if your daughter or son is planning to major in a STEM field, some schools look at the math score more than the verbal score. (And when you look at the percent submitting scores - which is right above the 25th and 75th percentile numbers - keep in mind that some

students submit both an SAT and ACT score, so you can’t just add the two percentages, but it gives you an idea.)

As someone who strongly prefers things to be black and white, I appreciate all the nuance of the numbers that help make a gray area just a bit less so.