College admissions news: Week of October 26th

All the college admissions news for your family

Middle school math

Red-state kids who struggle with the SAT may have a reprieve. Over the past three years, public universities in Florida, Arkansas, Texas, Georgia, Indiana, and Iowa now allow applicants to submit scores from the Classic Learning Test (CLT) in lieu of the SAT or ACT.

Once the test of choice for a small subset of homeschooled students, the CLT has recently gained support from Republican politicians. While critics argue that the test is too easy, leaning on math problems a middle schooler could solve, the GOP sees it as an alternative to the SAT’s supposed “anti-Western left-wing ideology.”

These objections are surprising given that the usual critique of college testing has come from the left. For years, progressives fought for test-blind admissions, contending that wealthy students benefitted from prep courses unavailable to their disadvantaged peers.

When COVID shuttered test centers in 2020, these left-wing critics got their wish: colleges nationwide made tests optional. The University of California system had already gone a step further, no longer considering the SAT or ACT in admissions.

With many schools returning to mandatory testing, the CLT presents a different kind of challenge. CLT backers don’t object to testing itself, but to its presumed ideological bent. Political preferences notwithstanding, the weakest point is the evidence of CLT’s rigor. The company behind it failed to run the standard-setting process used to define proficiency, and its SAT equivalence study relied on fewer than 5,000 students, about half of whom self-reported their scores.

What families should know

Outside of a handful of public universities in red states, most colleges, and especially the selective ones, won’t consider CLT scores. If you’re applying for scholarships in Florida, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Wyoming, or in-state at the universities listed above, the CLT might be an option.

We still recommend caution. Until we know how admissions committees at the University of Florida or UT Austin read CLT scores against their more common predecessors, we’d advise students to stick with the standard tests.

Holistic review has a calculus problem

Our counselors advise students to take the most rigorous courses available to them. Key word: available. College admissions committees claim that’s how they rate students, and they don't penalize them for courses their high schools don’t offer.

A recent University of Michigan study casts doubt on this claim: in an experiment, 292 admissions officers were less likely to recommend an engineering student for admission if they didn’t have calculus on their transcript, even if their school didn’t offer it.

Students who hadn’t taken calculus because their high school didn’t offer it were 16.4 percentage points less likely to be recommended for admission than their calculus-taking peers. This was true even for students who took the highest math and science classes their schools offered and scored above their high school average on the SAT.

Holistic admissions review, the practice of looking at the totality of a student’s achievements in the context of their high school, should theoretically prevent this. But the study, which asked admissions officers to make real recommendations on fake applications, showed otherwise.

For engineering applicants, at least, a missing calculus course counts against a student, whether or not their school offered it.

What families should know

If your child plans on applying to engineering programs and their high school doesn’t offer calculus, you may have a problem. 

Two ways to close the gap.

First, look for a calculus course elsewhere. Dual enrollment at a local community college or an accredited online course can add the class to your transcript.

Second, make your high school context impossible to miss. The study found that readers who spent more time with the high school profile were more likely to admit students without calculus when it wasn’t available. Ask your school counselor to state in their recommendation letter what math courses your school offers or use the Common App’s Additional Information section to say the same thing.

Ending the AI insanity

University of North Carolina has stopped using AI to scan and rate the grammar and writing quality of student admissions essays.

According to The Daily Tar Heel, UNC Admissions previously used a tool called Slate for Admissions and Enrollment, which generated an AI score for each essay. The tool evaluated essays based on the “quality of word choice, sentence structure, sentence variability, vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, length, and more in an applicant’s essay.” 

However, the program was becoming increasingly useless for evaluating essays because applicants were widely using AI tools. Scores were skewing higher each cycle, which ultimately led to the decision to score essays the old-fashioned way with a human reader.

Use of AI in admissions from both sides of the ledger, students and universities alike, is a controversial topic. A university that pushes essays through an algorithm finds itself in an awkward position when it has to tell a 17-year-old to put theirs away. 

UNC’s experiment suggests where we’re heading: once nearly every applicant’s prose has been machine-polished, that polish stops telling a reader anything, and the essay returns to being judged on what a student could have plausibly written themselves.

Jared Rosenberg, UNC’s admissions director, says his office wants students “considered for the substance of what they share,” which is precisely what a grammar score was never built to measure anyway.

What families should know

With AI, good grammar is the floor, not a difference maker. UNC’s AI scores kept rising because most applicants were already using AI writing tools. In other words, a flawlessly written essay no longer stands out because it’s flawlessly written.

Admissions readers want content that stands apart: a specific story, the oddball detail, or a line of thinking that could only belong to your child.

But don’t let fear push you to the other extreme either. Our counselors have seen students so worried about their essays getting flagged as AI that they won’t use it for anything, even spell-check. Don’t worry: a grammar check won’t sink your admission essays. A chatbot-drafted essay can, simply because it reads like everyone else’s.

Draw a sensible line: your child provides the ideas and sentences, while the software catches typos and tweaks the wording when necessary.