Debbie Stier asked me a question about score choice the other night (in case anyone wants to read it, she posted my answer on her blog), and it occurred to me that I should probably say something about it as well.
First, I'm just going to start by re-posting my definitions of score choice and superscoring. They are not the same thing!
Score Choice:
This means that *you* can pick which scores to send. Most schools will let you do this, but a handful will not. And no, you can't simply get around that rule by picking the scores you want to send anyway: when you send scores to these schools via the College Board website, you will *not* be given the option of selecting individual scores. You simply have to send all of them. Non-score choice schools include Yale, Cornell, Penn, Georgetown, George Washington, Pomona, and Tufts.
Say you take the SAT three times. Score choice means that you can choose to send one, two, or three of those scores. If you blew the first test completely, did best on Math on test #2, and did best on CR and W on test #3. You would ignore #1 and send two and three because of...
For the complete list of colleges and universities and their score-reporting policies, please see:
http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/sat-score-use-practices-list.pdf
Superscoring:
Superscoring is what *colleges* do to position themselves best in the rankings, regardless of whether they offer the score choice option or not.
So if you submit scores from tests #2 and #3, they'll take the highest M, CR, and W from those two tests and look only at those. They'll see the other scores you got on those tests, but they won't count them. They really do ignore the other scores, unless there's clearly something very weird going on.
A 50 or 70 point variation won't draw much attention, but a 200 point on will. If you got a 500CR/700M on one test, then 700M/500CR the next, they'll know you simply tried to game the superscoring process by taking the test to focus on one section. This practice isn't explicitly, but it makes you look as if you didn't try, and it certainly won't earn you any Brownie points with admissions officers. Don't do it.
A school can offer both score choice and superscoring, or it can just superscore. Almost all schools that do not offer score choice still superscore.
If you have great grades and extracurriculars but don't think that your test scores measure what you're capable of doing in the classroom, you should look at schools that are...
Score Optional
Yet a third category of school does not require you to submit scores at all, although you need to be aware some of them may still require scores for merit-scholarship consideration. Here is the complete list of score-optional schools: http://fairtest.org/university/optional
In general, if your scores fall at or above a school's average, you should probably send them; if they're well below, you probably shouldn't. If some are above and some well below... That's a conversation for you and your guidance counselor.
If you're so anti-standardized testing that you want a school that refuses to even consider scores, I would suggest that you look at Sarah Lawrence College. And if you're looking for a school with a slightly more flexible policy when it comes to standardized testing, you might want to look at Middlebury College, which allows you to submit three SAT II scores in place of the SAT or the ACT.
And a warning...
While it's nice to have lots of options, all these different policies can create the illusion that you have more leeway in the standardized testing process than you actually do. Yes, it is nice to know that you can choose not to send that embarrassing first SAT score -- the one, let's face it, that you got when you really weren't ready to take the test but hoped that you might just be able to ace it anyway -- but don't get too complacent.
From what I've seen, the most successful applicants are the ones who ignore the whole score choice thing, don't take tests unless they're really ready (even if that means waiting until May or even June of junior year for their first SAT), and treat every test like it counts. That goes for SATs, ACTs, and SAT IIs. The"Oh, I can just take it again attitude" can get you in a lot of trouble. You do not want to be taking the SAT for the fourth time in December of your senior year, just hoping that you'll be able to pull that CR above 700.
Try not to take the SAT or the ACT more than two or three times at most. I once tutored a girl who had taken the (real) ACT *seven* times before she started to work with me -- and was stuck at around a 21. Because she knew she didn't have to submit all her scores, she just kept taking it and hoping she'd miraculously improve. That's a recipe for disaster.
Take lots of practice tests and know where you stand before you take it for real. If you're not comfortable with how you're scoring already, you need to wait. Your score probably won't just zoom up 100 points during the real thing, and you'll be stuck with a score you don't like and may still have to submit to some schools.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Friday, February 3, 2012
Why new errors are unlikely to appear in the SAT Writing section in the near future
Every so often, after I've doled out official my list of errors covered on the multiple-choice portion of the SAT Writing section, I'll get asked what would seem to be a very logical question: how do I know that the list you've given me is really comprehensive? Who's to say that other errors won't suddenly show up? Shouldn't I learn the rule for "who vs. whom" just in case, even though it's never actually shown up on a test?
Well, my response would be yes, you should learn the rule for "who vs. whom" because you should know when to use "who" and when to use "whom" correctly, but the chances of it appearing on the SAT any time soon are pretty slight.
One of the things that people tend not to take into account when speculating about what could theoretically appear on the SAT is how rigidly standardized the creation of the test actually is -- how rigorously questions are vetted and tested (and re-tested) before they even show up on an *experimental* section. It's a hugely politicized process, and it moves very slowly. It isn't as if someone suddenly says, "Hey, let's test "who vs. whom this time," and presto, a question testing it appears the next month. Every precaution is taken to ensure that a given score has the same significance from test to test. That's why the questions get recycled, in some cases almost word for word, from test to test.
Any new element, anything that would have the potential to throw that balance out of whack, would have to be calibrated and re-calibrated in committee meetings and focus groups and experimental sections for a very, very long time until it was established that it met all the pages and pages of criteria for inclusion on the test. There's a reason that the SAT only changes every few decades. (Side note: I was recently doing some reading about the history of the SAT and encountered a vocabulary question from one of the earliest versions of the test. Guess what word was on there? Didactic. The SAT's favorite words have been its favorite words for well over 50 years.)
I'd never dissuade someone from learning grammar for the sake of learning grammar, but if you're a high school junior with a full load of AP classes and extracurriculars and consider five hours of sleep to be an exceptional night's rest, it's strongly in your interest to just focus on mastering the concepts that are known to have appeared on past SAT Writing sections. It's not worth it to speculate about what new errors could show up because they almost certainly won't. What you do need to worry about is having common errors (like subject-verb agreement and word pairs) combined or reconfigured in unfamiliar ways, and the best way to prepare for that situation is to know individual concepts so well that you can attack a confusing question from multiple angles and reduce it down to something more manageable.
Well, my response would be yes, you should learn the rule for "who vs. whom" because you should know when to use "who" and when to use "whom" correctly, but the chances of it appearing on the SAT any time soon are pretty slight.
One of the things that people tend not to take into account when speculating about what could theoretically appear on the SAT is how rigidly standardized the creation of the test actually is -- how rigorously questions are vetted and tested (and re-tested) before they even show up on an *experimental* section. It's a hugely politicized process, and it moves very slowly. It isn't as if someone suddenly says, "Hey, let's test "who vs. whom this time," and presto, a question testing it appears the next month. Every precaution is taken to ensure that a given score has the same significance from test to test. That's why the questions get recycled, in some cases almost word for word, from test to test.
Any new element, anything that would have the potential to throw that balance out of whack, would have to be calibrated and re-calibrated in committee meetings and focus groups and experimental sections for a very, very long time until it was established that it met all the pages and pages of criteria for inclusion on the test. There's a reason that the SAT only changes every few decades. (Side note: I was recently doing some reading about the history of the SAT and encountered a vocabulary question from one of the earliest versions of the test. Guess what word was on there? Didactic. The SAT's favorite words have been its favorite words for well over 50 years.)
I'd never dissuade someone from learning grammar for the sake of learning grammar, but if you're a high school junior with a full load of AP classes and extracurriculars and consider five hours of sleep to be an exceptional night's rest, it's strongly in your interest to just focus on mastering the concepts that are known to have appeared on past SAT Writing sections. It's not worth it to speculate about what new errors could show up because they almost certainly won't. What you do need to worry about is having common errors (like subject-verb agreement and word pairs) combined or reconfigured in unfamiliar ways, and the best way to prepare for that situation is to know individual concepts so well that you can attack a confusing question from multiple angles and reduce it down to something more manageable.
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