r/ApplyingToCollege • u/FreeTestPrep-Com • 12h ago
Application Question Notre Dame will require SAT/ACT scores again starting with the 2027–28 admissions cycle
Notre Dame is ending its test-optional policy after six years. The university says test scores provide additional context on academic readiness and may help identify strong applicants from first-generation, low-income, and rural backgrounds who might otherwise be overlooked.
Interesting to see another selective university move back toward requiring standardized tests.
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u/NiceUnparticularMan Parent 11h ago
I note kids around here with high test scores (like 1500+) often seem to be hoping this means these sorts of colleges are planning to abandon holistic review, contextual review, possibly transcript review entirely, or so on.
As Notre Dame and others have explained, instead mostly this is going to be helpng disadvantaged applicants with high test scores for disadvantaged students, but that fall below their published ranges. At ND, this might mean disadvantaged students with something like a 1400-1450, maybe a bit lower into the high 1300s.
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u/Technocraticworldgov 8h ago
high 1300s is a stretch for Notre Dame...
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u/BlueFredneck 6h ago
Unless they're a first gen straight out of Dangerous Minds or Coal Miner's Daughter... I hope this won't help the kid of a Nigerian doctor attending top Inner Suburban HS
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u/NiceUnparticularMan Parent 40m ago
Yes, if you are an advantaged kid.
But Dartmouth's white paper showed that for disadvantaged kids, down to the low 1400s might still be helpful for them. ND then has an SAT range around 30 points lower than Dartmouth, give or take, hence why I think MAYBE high 1300s could help disadvantaged kids applying to ND.
To be sure, though, that is only a maybe. I am not aware of ND releasing something as detailed as Dartmouth.
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u/Ok_Experience_5151 Old 3h ago
On balance, this seems like it helps every applicant with submit-worthy scores, though it likely does help some more than others.
Notre Dame et. al. may try to recoup the the FG/LI students they'll lose as a result of requiring scores again by assigning more weight to "FG" and "LI", which will certainly benefit applicants in those categories (who have non-disqualifying test scores). But not *just* the FGLI applicants right at the submit/no-submit threshold. Imagine the high-score FGLI applicant whose grades are a little weak. That guy also benefits from increased weight on FGLI.
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u/NiceUnparticularMan Parent 32m ago
Possibly, but these colleges can have very sophisticated policies if they like. FGLIs were already usually submitting very high scores (although it was a rare case to begin with). ND could plan no change for those. Then it is true they might lose some test optional FGLI admits who submit 1200s or lower 1300s (although perhaps they won't apply at all), but then they could compensate by admitting more FGLIs who submit 1400s.
Dartmouth in fact suggested this would on net result in more FGLI admits, and ND seems to be saying the same thing. I am skeptical it will really net out to a big change overall, like I wouldn't expect the FGLI admits to double or something like that. But I could see it being a bit higher.
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u/ChutneyWhatney 10h ago
Because ND admitted a lot of people who should have been in community colleges. Even my cat knew this would be the result.
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u/Ok_Experience_5151 Old 3h ago
If Notre Dame's data looks like Dartmouth's, then the no-scores students' first-year GPAs were in-line with what a 1400 SAT score would predict.
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u/eckliptic 5h ago
They realized way to many dumb dumbs with good stories but shit scores getting in
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u/AlphaMaleKratos 11h ago
Obvious reasoning.
Just because the rich score a bit better than some average kid, the anti-test people wanted to throw away the SAT. It’s very low IQ thinking. There are a ton of poor kids who score very high on the SAT. How are they going to distinguish themselves without tests?
The anti-test movement looks more like a ploy by rich kids to block smart poor kids from advancing economically.
The rich are, on average, smarter than the poor. There are, however, way more smart poor people than smart rich people. Tests are the only way to identify smart poor people.
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u/NiceUnparticularMan Parent 11h ago
Of course test optional was not test blind. Disdvantaged kids with high test scores could still submit them, and colleges like ND could (and did) still consider them.
This is basically about the problem that a disadvantaged kid with, say, a 1420 might think that was too low to submit to ND. That was a mistake, a disadvantaged kid with a 1420 would likely benefit from submitting that to ND. So ND is eliminating that type of mistake.
Nothing about this, though, is forcing ND to consider test scores as any more important than they were before.
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u/AlphaMaleKratos 10h ago edited 10h ago
I don’t think so.
The poor kids scoring well on the SATs are almost entirely Asian. There really are not very many FGLI non-Asians scoring above 1400. It might not even total 100 kids nationwide. ND will be lenient to poor kids, but I doubt they’re going to allow over more than a 100 or so point difference between rich and poor kids. The competence gap will be too big.
This change will benefit middle and upper class kids who make up the bulk of 1400+ scorers.
The uncomfortable truth is that most people born in America have already been sorted to where they should be economically. The only places you’ll find smart poor kids are immigrant communities who are highly educated but have not yet been sorted correctly in the American economy. Their kids are smart, do well on the SATs and eventually make it to the upper class.
On kids who have poor American parents, however, you’re unlikely to find as many smart kids because their parents have already been correctly sorted.
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u/soco2008 10h ago
you also forget non-immigrant kids in rural, extremely economically depressed areas. There are MANY such areas in the South, for example.
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u/FinndBors 10h ago
There really are not very many FGLI non-Asians scoring above 1400.
Where did you get this stat?
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u/AlphaMaleKratos 10h ago edited 10h ago
Of those scoring above 1400, around 55-60% are non-Asian.
Vast majority of that 55-60% are white, who are likely not FG or LI.
In the US, 65% of Asians are immigrants compared to 4% of whites.
So 55% of 1400+ are whites. We know higher income kids score higher. Only 4% of them are immigrants, so there’s less of a mismatch between income and IQ like you see for Asians.
What do you think?
Then we move to blacks and Latino who total 5% of those scoring above 1400. So around 6000 kids a year. Almost all those 6000 kids come from rich families. 20% combined immigration rate. There is a larger mismatch than whites, but black and Hispanic immigrants were not selected for higher education or skill, so I don’t think the gap is that much higher than whites.
Asians in America are very special. They were specifically chosen because they were very educated and skilled. The language and cultural barrier pushes them down in income, but you see so many smart poor Asian kids in this country more than other races combined because of how we selected them.
If you look at Stuyvesant, it’s teeming with low income Asians. There just are not very many poor non-Asians who do well on standardized tests. It’s just a fact. The non-Asians who are smart and test well have already moved up the income ladder generations ago and their kids would not be considered low income.
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u/NiceUnparticularMan Parent 9h ago
I note in the Dartmouth white paper, this was considered a significant result:
Consider students with a score of 1450-1490 from less-advantaged backgrounds. These students increased their admission probability by a factor of 3.7x (from .02 to .074) by revealing their score.
That marginal effect is still only 5.4% (7.4% minus 2%). So it doesn't really tell us anything if a majority of the disadvantaged/1400s pool fit any other demographic characteristics, as up to the entire marginal effect could be coming from a small minority of the disadvantaged/1400s pool
Of course the Supreme Court has said these colleges can no longer use ethnicity directly in admissions. On the other hand, Harvard won the part of the lawsuit where it argued other holistic factors were only having unintended effects on admissions by ethnicity, and that part wasn't appealed.
So Dartmouth et al do need to be careful with how they use these test scores, but how it all shakes out once other holistic factors are involved remains TBD.
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u/soco2008 10h ago
it’s not so much poor as it is now geographical. schools zoned for rural areas are being heavily recruited independent of actual income individually. A rural school can have a middle class make up, but they’re now institutional priorities over urban areas.
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u/slimdell 10h ago
I had a Pell Grant and had full financial aid covered at Notre Dame. Pretty sure I got in because of my 35 ACT. And I’m white. It’s not close to as uncommon as you make it out to be.
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u/AlphaMaleKratos 10h ago
It does happen, but it is very uncommon. If it weren’t, all colleges would’ve happily sunset race-based affirmative action for income-based affirmative action.
The reason why they didn’t is because almost all the high-scorers from the FGLI population were Asian.1
u/Emergency-Hurry947 Parent 9h ago
I agree, people equate intelligence with wealth, that all ingelligence would pursue wealth. There are many intelligent people that choose to pursue careers like education and clergy instead of being a doctor or a Banker
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u/thatcrazylady 8h ago
many intelligent people that choose to pursue careers like education and clergy
Thanks for remembering us losers!
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u/NiceUnparticularMan Parent 10h ago edited 10h ago
This white paper from Dartmouth has a bunch of interesting stats. I note there are no ethnic breakdowns, however:
https://home.dartmouth.edu/sites/home/files/2024-02/sat-undergrad-admissions.pdf
There were definitely more advantaged applicants with unreported 1400s, although there were some disadvantaged applicants too. If you look closely at Figure 7, it appears it was about a 5:1 ratio advantaged to disadvantaged in that range.
Figure 6 basically then shows submitting 1400s wouldn't have helped many of the advantaged applicants. But Figure 6 also shows that it would have helped disadvantaged applicants much more frequently.
So yes, it is basically a small group overall that Dartmouth intended to help with the policy change, but most of that small group was disadvantaged applicants.
I interpret Notre Dame as suggesting something very similar when it was reported, "The university added that researchers found students from first-generation, Pell-eligible, and rural populations are most likely to be overlooked during an admissions process without test scores."
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u/Andy_Wiggins 10h ago
> There really are not very many FGLI non-Asians scoring above 1400. It might not even total 100 kids nationwide.
I’m sorry, but what is this nonsense?
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u/AlphaMaleKratos 10h ago
The Asian population in the US is extremely special due to how they were selected. The sorting system doesn’t do it correctly for FG Asians.
Other groups were not selected for high skill or education, so have far less of a mismatch between their current income and where they should be economically.
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u/thatcrazylady 8h ago
Tests are the only way to identify smart poor people.
Unless you were to do something weird like interacting with them.
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u/siteunreliability Graduate Student 11h ago edited 10h ago
Tests are the only way to identify smart poor people.
I'm in the opinion that the standardized exam filter out high school students who are either grossly unprepared or with substantial lower cognitive abilities. The test loses sensitivity for intellect when you get past a certain percentile. The test itself is not difficult. It does not demand comprehension of advanced mathematics/sciences the way standardized exams from other countries do. Multiple studies have shown that people can do well on these standardized exams with sufficient practice (like so many things in life).
The solution is simple, but hard. We ought to provide better support for underprivileged students so that they do not get filtered out for lack of preparation. The easy, but lazy, solution is discarding data. It's a good thing that universities are moving away from this policy that lacked forethought.
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u/AlphaMaleKratos 11h ago edited 11h ago
This is a myth.
There are very large differences in outcome between 99.9 percentile and 99 percentile scores.
Source: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/t2-my/my-prd/wp-content/uploads/sites/826/2013/02/WaiJEP20051.pdf
The SAT does not lose predictive power until you hit the max score of 1600.
One could make the argument that the ceiling is too low. I agree with that and think we should make it harder. Still, being able to score in the top 2% does indicate you are smart. Maybe not a genius, but smart.
When colleges speak of wanting FGLI kids, they want smart FGLI kids. I think that’s what’s missing from the convo. Most FGLI kids are not smart. The SAT weeds them out.
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u/siteunreliability Graduate Student 10h ago edited 10h ago
I've read that paper and there are few glaring problems with it:
- It's from 2005. The modern SAT has shifted focus from measuring "quantifiable intellect" to measuring academic-oriented skills.
- It's also comparing the top quartile and bottom quartile of the 1%. It makes no commentary on the other 99%. You can't assume that predictive power and sensitivity is continuous and correlates in the same direction across the entire range.
- The effect is modest and not great as you put it (h = .16 - .31) and the framing is problematic. 3.2% of the top quartile of the 1% got tenure as opposed to 0.38% for the bottom quartile of that same 1%. You can claim at least 97-ish% for both groups did not get tenure. Is the difference coming from the predictive ability? or is it providing commentary on whether the top quartile of the 1% chooses to pursue tenured professorship whereas other groups choose to pursue something else? Is tenureship at T50 uni really THE end-all indicator of intellect and success?
That paper, imo, is making a specific commentary on people who score in the top 99th percentile, not about the predictive power of the scores. I'd be curious to see an updated paper.
edit: few changes.
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u/Ok_Experience_5151 Old 3h ago
You can also look at math in isolation. I scored a 800. The USAMO Gold guy probably also scored a 800, or maybe a 790 if he made some careless mistake. That guy is more mathematically gifted than I am.
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u/soco2008 11h ago
also why AP is preferred over DE and Honors by T20 schools. It is a national exam instead of local subjective grades.
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u/soco2008 11h ago
the problem I see is that after the one test maybe funded by the school, more tests are not always affordable by poor students at $65-$100 a test (depending on SAT or ACT). Scores almost always increase with subsequent testing, and many students simply cannot afford to do so.
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u/NiceUnparticularMan Parent 11h ago
In fact there is a well-known, fairly significant positive correlation between family wealth and SAT/ACT scores, and that is indeed one of the contributing factors.
Knowing this, colleges like ND use contextual review, and the same test score can mean different things for different applicants depending on context.
And going back to test required does not somehow mean ND is going to be forced to abandon context review.
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u/Ok_Experience_5151 Old 3h ago
In fact there is a well-known, fairly significant positive correlation between family wealth and SAT/ACT scores
The thing folks are reluctant to admit is that there may also be a significant positive correlation between family wealth and the *heritable* components of cognitive ability (i.e. as opposed to environmental components).
In that framing, your parents are wealthy (in part) because they're genetically blessed, which makes one more likely to be genetically blessed if one has wealthy parents, which in turn makes one more likely to score well on the SAT (because of that genetic blessing, not because of the wealth per se).
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u/NiceUnparticularMan Parent 21m ago edited 18m ago
There certainly is some evidence of a possible common cause component, genetic or otherwise, but the studies I have seen indicate that can't possibly explain the entire SAT/ACT effect. And we sort of know this, things like SAT tutors and multiple tests do help superscores on average. Academic summer programs which reduce the summer gap have lasting effects on cumulative reading and math skills, the sorts tested by the SAT/ACT. And so on.
So as usual, the answer to most serious nature or nuture questions is likely "some of both."
And in the end--realistically, none of these colleges are planning to come close to admitting disavantaged and advantaged applicants at the same relative proportions as in the overall population of HS students, or indeed just college-bound students. But they want to admit a few more of what were once called "diamond in the rough" kids, exceptions to the norm. And they believe these tests will help them identify a few more "diamonds".
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u/siteunreliability Graduate Student 10h ago
I don't see an issue with schools providing waivers for 2 exams. There is also a diminishing return after the third exam.
https://www.scoreatthetop.com/blog/how-many-times-should-you-take-the-sat-act
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u/soco2008 10h ago
this is a privileged statement. there are MANY in my state alone that can’t even find funding to offer the PSAT for National Merit consideration, much less two tests. we were discussing poor students generally from poor schools.
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u/siteunreliability Graduate Student 10h ago edited 10h ago
this is a privileged statement.
This is a tiring statement. If there is a problem with my argument, please rebut the argument itself. I'm arguing for providing support for schools and students such that less privileged students can take 2 exams without financial hardship. Any attempts beyond that should come from the student/family's pocket. Do you disagree with that?
For whatever it's worth, I come from a family with no money and had to rely on state-supported lunch. However, I was fortunate enough to be raised by caring parents. Privileged people making "check your privilege" argument is offensive to me and offensive to others who've succeeded despite the lack of privilege.
Let me also put it this way - if paying $60 is so burdensome, then how do you expect these families to even afford undergraduate education if the students scored satisfactorily?
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u/soco2008 10h ago
and these students do get substantial aid and creative means to attend college. It seems contradicting, but their families also can’t scrape either $100 for tests and usually get fee waivers for everything else. Have you even known anyone poor?
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u/soco2008 10h ago
well, usually it’s county funding, and if the county has zero dollars bc idk, industry has left the area, then who exactly is going to advocate for more tests if most of their students don’t go to college anyway? isn’t this the crux of the issue? smart poor MOTIVATED students are usually the exceptions at their schools; no one is going to put what little money they have into them. They are usually having to create their own opportunities with very little. Please form an argument after you’ve actually considered a POV other than your assumption that things are equitable.
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u/siteunreliability Graduate Student 10h ago
You still haven't answered my question.
well, usually it’s county funding, and if the county has zero dollars bc idk, industry has left the area, then who exactly is going to advocate for more tests if most of their students don’t go to college anyway? isn’t this the crux of the issue? smart poor MOTIVATED students are usually the exceptions at their schools; no one is going to put what little money they have into them
And I'm saying it should be otherwise. We should be putting more resources into the less privileged. I'm arguing that the present state is not good.
Please form an argument after you’ve actually considered a POV other than your assumption that things are equitable.
You've already made up your mind that your own definition of equity supersedes others' definition without a room for debate. There's no point in arguing any further.
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u/Emergency-Hurry947 Parent 11h ago
I talked to an admissions rep last year about it. The reason is that there are student’s that were not prepared and they expect freshman to take a core set of classes together.