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Yeah, to expand on what I meant, Population growth -> Naturally leads to more people willing to criticize the SAT because percentages. Especially if there rema

Yeah, to expand on what I meant, Population growth -> Naturally leads to more people willing to criticize the SAT because percentages. Especially if there remains a similar or greater level of exposure to it, which there has. Population growth -> Larger applicant pool, and assuming Yale or whoever is unwilling to drop the SAT as a filtering mechanism, naturally means they'll raise their various bars, including the SAT score cutoff.

rayiner 13y ago
Obviously you would expect Yale to raise SAT medians in addition to other criteria as the number of applicants goes up, in order to maintain the class size (which it has done for the relevant time). What's interesting is how much the bars are raised relative to each other. Remember, the criteria aren't perfectly correlated. If you go from top 4% SAT to top 2%, and top 10% GPA to top 5%, you should expect the number of people passing the filter to shrink by much more than 50%. It could be as much as a 75% reduction if SAT and GPA aren't correlated at all. Apparently, the number of applications at Yale have gone up by 2.6x since 1976, and the admissions rate has gone down by 3.5x. So Yale needs to raise its various bars to let through 1/3 or 1/4 as much of the applicant pool, in totol. The fact that it has raised its SAT bar from top 4℅ to top 1% suggests that all the increased stringency in the admission standard comes from the SAT criterion. Indeed, to achieve that increase in SAT median with only a 2.6x increase in apps, Yale probably had to make some criteria less stringent. That's the crazy part. Not that SAT went up, but that it seems to have been the primary tool to filter the additional applicants, to the exclusion of other criteria.
- saraid216 13y ago
  Hrm. Couple things that come to mind, if you want to keep poking: * how did the distribution of SAT scores among applicants change during that period? * how did tuitions change over that period? * what's the GPA distribution versus the SAT distribution? At some point we went from a 0-4 GPA scale to a 0-5 GPA scale, and IIRC, the SAT's numbers have moved around as well. Can the preference for modifying the SAT bar be related to finer granularity being available? You sort of allude to this in your original comment. GPA may not have gone up simply because it's a worse metric than even the SAT. * did the rise coincide with all standardized tests, or just the SAT I? SAT II? AP exams? IB? * was the applicant pool affected by accepting transfer students or affirmative action type of deals? * what does "top X%" actually mean in this case? Is it a stated admissions policy? Or is it it just that students below a certain SAT score virtually never qualify on some other criteria? Sorry if some of these would be answered by your links. I'm less interested finding the answer and more just giving you a sounding board.

rayiner 13y ago

Obviously you would expect Yale to raise SAT medians in addition to other criteria as the number of applicants goes up, in order to maintain the class size (which it has done for the relevant time). What's interesting is how much the bars are raised relative to each other. Remember, the criteria aren't perfectly correlated. If you go from top 4% SAT to top 2%, and top 10% GPA to top 5%, you should expect the number of people passing the filter to shrink by much more than 50%. It could be as much as a 75% reduction if SAT and GPA aren't correlated at all. Apparently, the number of applications at Yale have gone up by 2.6x since 1976, and the admissions rate has gone down by 3.5x. So Yale needs to raise its various bars to let through 1/3 or 1/4 as much of the applicant pool, in totol. The fact that it has raised its SAT bar from top 4℅ to top 1% suggests that all the increased stringency in the admission standard comes from the SAT criterion. Indeed, to achieve that increase in SAT median with only a 2.6x increase in apps, Yale probably had to make some criteria less stringent. That's the crazy part. Not that SAT went up, but that it seems to have been the primary tool to filter the additional applicants, to the exclusion of other criteria.

saraid216 13y ago
Hrm. Couple things that come to mind, if you want to keep poking: * how did the distribution of SAT scores among applicants change during that period? * how did tuitions change over that period? * what's the GPA distribution versus the SAT distribution? At some point we went from a 0-4 GPA scale to a 0-5 GPA scale, and IIRC, the SAT's numbers have moved around as well. Can the preference for modifying the SAT bar be related to finer granularity being available? You sort of allude to this in your original comment. GPA may not have gone up simply because it's a worse metric than even the SAT. * did the rise coincide with all standardized tests, or just the SAT I? SAT II? AP exams? IB? * was the applicant pool affected by accepting transfer students or affirmative action type of deals? * what does "top X%" actually mean in this case? Is it a stated admissions policy? Or is it it just that students below a certain SAT score virtually never qualify on some other criteria? Sorry if some of these would be answered by your links. I'm less interested finding the answer and more just giving you a sounding board.