Admissions Beat

Data Dive into the Transcript and Testing

Episode Summary

A college application generates a lot of data. "The transcript is the heart of the application," Emily Roper-Doten of Brandeis notes, "and there's a story in that transcript." And while that story seems straightforward, admissions data is easily misunderstood, as a grade point average, SAT score, and class rank (when available) dance with the rigor of a student's curriculum, the teacher recommendations, and the achievement norms shared on a high school profile. In an updated encore episode from Season Four, the new Brandeis dean joins AB host Lee Coffin from Dartmouth and Jeremiah Quinlan from Yale for a dive into the high school transcript and the role of standardized testing, optional or required. The trio of deans offers a primer on what the numbers mean, which stats matter and why, and how digits or percentages or letters inform an admissions evaluation.

Episode Notes

A college application generates a lot of data. "The transcript is the heart of the application," Emily Roper-Doten of Brandeis notes, "and there's a story in that transcript." And while that story seems straightforward, admissions data is easily misunderstood, as a grade point average, SAT score, and class rank (when available) dance with the rigor of a student's curriculum, the teacher recommendations, and the achievement norms shared on a high school profile. In an updated encore episode from Season Four, the new Brandeis dean joins AB host Lee Coffin from Dartmouth and Jeremiah Quinlan from Yale for a dive into the high school transcript and the role of standardized testing, optional or required. The trio of deans offers a primer on what the numbers mean, which stats matter and why, and how digits or percentages or letters inform an admissions evaluation. 

Episode Transcription

Lee Coffin:

From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's vice president and dean of admission and financial aid, and this is Admissions Beat.

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Data and voice. For most of my career, I have pointed to those two words as organizing principles around a college application. Those are the two big building blocks of information every applicant shares to every college. There's the data that often dominates conversations about college admissions when people organically start talking about grade point averages and testing as the singular definition of merit. Those are foundational definitions of merit, but they don't always predict the result as much as people think they do. Last week we talked about the importance of storytelling in an application. Storytelling is your voice, it's your narrative. It's often discovered in essays, short and long, and those elements bring personality into a file.

This week we'll focus on the data that is showcased in an application and we'll give high school seniors, parents, and counselors a way of understanding the numbers and the letters that dance around college admissions and what they mean and how an admission officer uses them. So when we come back, we will welcome two longtime admission leaders who join me for a data-themed conversation that aired in two episodes back in October 2023. Since that conversation is evergreen, we've merged “Data Dive” parts one and two from season four into an encore performance in this fall's Admissions Beat lineup. When we come back, we'll say hi to Jeremiah Quinlan from Yale and Emily Roper-Doten from Brandeis, as we revisit the conversation we had two Falls ago. We'll be right back.

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So we welcome returning friend of the pod, Emily Roper-Doten. When we last met Emily, she was the dean of admission and financial aid at Clark University in Worcester, and she previously joined us when she was the dean of admissions and financial aid at Olin College of Engineering. But since then, Emily has relocated and is now the brand new dean of admissions at Brandeis University. Hi, Emily, it's always great to have you on the pod.

Emily Roper-Doten:

Hi, Lee, I'm thrilled to be here. This should be a fun conversation.

Lee Coffin:

Yeah, thanks for coming back. And making his debut on Admissions Beat is my friend and colleague, Jeremiah Quinlan, the dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid at Yale. Hi, Jeremiah.

Jeremiah Quinlan:

Hi, Lee. Thanks for having me. Very excited to be part of this conversation and to talk next to you and Emily about these important issues.

Lee Coffin:

Yeah, you're going to talk with me and Emily-

Jeremiah Quinlan:

Talk with you, yeah.

Lee Coffin:

So this topic is sort of the naughty one that I think so many parents and kids overemphasize. They get stuck on things like their grades and their class rank. So I want to have a conversation with the two of you about the numbers and the letters that dominate college admission or at least dominate it in the minds of kids in high school. And I think by the end of this podcast, I think people are going to say, "Oh, those are important, but they're not singular in terms of their focus." And Jeremiah, you just nodded as I said that. Why did that ring true to you?

Jeremiah Quinlan:

As you said at the start of the podcast, it's only part of the picture. And at Yale we use data to essentially answer the preliminary question,  “Is a student prepared to do the academic work at our institution?” And we look at the grades and we look at the courses that the students have taken and if it's available in the file, we look at the testing. And we start with those elements because we're looking, again, to answer a singular question for most students in our applicant pool. The answer to that question is yes, the student does have the preparation academically to do well at Yale. And then we turn to the rest of the application file— the essays, the letters of recommendation, the extracurricular activities—to answer some of those voice pieces that you talked about earlier. And that really is what separates out a student. The data is important. It's the preliminary question, it's the first step to being a competitive applicant to Yale, but it's only part of the journey to getting in front of the admissions committee.

Lee Coffin:

Yeah, that is beautifully said. I was nodding and smiling all the way through that answer because it is foundational. It is the preliminary step for every college. And Emily, what would you add to Jeremiah's description of why we start with the data?

Emily Roper-Doten:

I actually think it doesn't really matter if you admit 4% or 40%, you're still answering a question for your faculty of “Are the students you're inviting into your community going to be capable of succeeding in your classrooms?” And so we do similarly look for what is the picture of the student who's going to walk onto our campus, sit in our classrooms, work in our workshops, be a part of whether it's game design or studio art or psychology, making sure that we're thinking about students who are bringing the academic skills to be successful. So the primary story of that for us is the transcript. What did you do in the classroom? What courses did you take? Yes, how did you perform in those classes? But what's the story? We always talk about story a lot in the world of admission. There's a story in the transcript.

That story could be “What classes did you choose to take?” Whether it's because you wanted to challenge yourself because that subject was interesting to you, or maybe that story is one of a student who's on the rise, right? Are we going to catch you when you're peaking academically? Maybe that first year, that ninth grade; it's an adjustment just like the first year of college. There's a transitional moment there. So what's the story that the transcript tells us so that we can turn around and say to our faculty, "This group of students is ready to jump in with us?"

Jeremiah Quinlan:

I would just add something to what Emily just said which really resonated with me: the idea that the transcript does tell a story and we're not looking at a singular GPA number to help us answer the questions that we have about a student's academic preparation and academic journey. At Yale, we don't really even pay too much of attention to the actual 4.0 number or 4.5 number or whatever weighting GPA scale you have at your high school. We look at the entire transcript in its entirety on the screen to understand the classes that a student has taken, to understand the academic journey that a student has gone on, to understand the choices that they may have made. And that is incredibly valuable information for us that is not boiled down to a singular number at all.

Lee Coffin:

So we're all saying the same thing about the transcript as the heart of an application. If someone does not have the academic preparation to be successful on the campus, we each represent, end of story. But as Jeremiah pointed out, the majority of people who apply everywhere I've worked are qualified— broadly qualified. Doesn't mean they're all going to graduate Phi Beta Kappa with honors, but they can successfully sit in a classroom and not have the faculty knock on my door and say, "Who the hell did you admit? These people can't do the work as I'm presenting it.” And so that foundational question starts every admission process, but if I'm a parent listening to that, it feels kind of abstract. Like how do we know that from the transcript that somebody can do the work? I mean, Emily, what's that evidence there that gives us that proof point?

Emily Roper-Doten:

Part of the evidence I think is seeing that a student has at least dabbled, if not more than dabbled, in some rigorous work that might be a proxy for college level work. So maybe that's an honors level, maybe that's a dual-enrollment course. Maybe that's taking a course at a community college over the summer, maybe it's AP or IB, giving us a chance to see someone who's had a set of academic expectations in a course that allows us to think they're going to be able to kind of hold their own in our classrooms. There is a piece of saying, "What was available to the student in their high school in terms of challenging coursework and what did they take?" So we're not going to sit there and say, "Ah, your high school had 28 AP classes. You should have taken 28 AP classes."

That's bananas, and it would make you a not interesting person. We keep coming back to the person who's going to come onto campus, but maybe the student chose the four classes that really pull their interest if they're interested in the STEM career. Later on, we're seeing them dabble in math. Maybe it's AP calculus or maybe it's AP physics or chemistry, those sorts of things. So seeing how do their choices in terms of the curriculum help us also see what they're thinking about? Not that everyone has to be declared when they come in, but what they're thinking about in terms of academics.

Lee Coffin:

So Jeremiah, let's get really tactical. So you're sitting, meeting an application. How do you read and document a transcript? Emily has applied and you open her transcript and you need to assess it. What do you do?

Jeremiah Quinlan:

Obviously transcripts are organized differently depending on what type of high school you go to, but we're trying to get an understanding of how well a student is prepared, what classes they've taken and how well they've done in those courses. We're looking for students who have challenged themselves in high school through rigorous courses, whether that's International Baccalaureate, advanced placement, whatever kind of rigor is available to students in their particular school or community context. And we are looking closely at those grades. We are looking more closely at the grades in the junior and senior year. We're not looking for perfection. We don't have a rubric.

We're not sitting there counting the number of foreign language courses a student has taken, the number of science courses a student has taken. We obviously want to see a breadth of course completion and courses that students have taken. But again, as Emily was just saying so well, if you are interested in foreign language and you want to take introductory French for your senior year rather than an AP science, that's a really interesting choice that might tell us something about what your interests are. If you want to take AP statistics and AP calculus your senior year and not take AP government or econ also another interesting choice that helps us sort of understand what your academic interests are. And again, we are not calculating numbers, we're not crunching them as we review. We're just looking sort of holistically at the challenges that a student has sort of given themselves in high school and how they've met those challenges.

Lee Coffin:

How do we know that?

Jeremiah Quinlan:

Through the coursework, I mean through what type of advanced coursework that they're taking.

Lee Coffin:

How do we know? At Dartmouth we had over 7,000 high schools in last year's applicant pool. How does an admission officer as a reader know how to assess what's on the transcript versus what's offered?

Jeremiah Quinlan:

Great. Yeah. Thank you for clarifying. Yeah, so we actually organize the world into different geographic portfolios. So I have 25 full-time admissions officers and then 40 total admissions readers. So 15 folks who work for us part of the year. And these all are people with deep levels of admissions experience or they've just been through sort of our reader training. And it's their job to understand the high schools in their admissions territory and in their context. So there is someone responsible for reviewing the applications from the state of Michigan, and that individual understands the different context of a student's applying from the Upper Peninsula or the suburbs of Detroit or East Lansing, and they're trying to understand what offerings there are available at a school, what the typical coursework looks like at a school.

And then even if they have questions because their expertise is not all-encompassing, the school provides us a pretty good amount of detail in the school profile for what courses are offered, what the average GPA is at the school, the average number of APs is at the school. Sometimes school will offer us the average standardized test score for the school so that we can put that in context. And in the committee room itself, if we have questions about the coursework that a student has taken, we can pull up this document and as a group of individuals try to understand what the offerings the school has and whether or not a student is taking advantage of it.

Lee Coffin:

That profile for listeners is a hidden resource, hidden because it's not usually something that you have, but the school shares it with us as a companion to a transcript. And-

Jeremiah Quinlan:

In some cases it's a tremendous resource. It can be incredibly helpful.

Lee Coffin:

So Emily and Jeremiah, you're both kind of pointing towards curriculum first. I mean, you've both kind of described a student's path from ninth grade to 12 and looking at what's available, what did you take? We'll get to how did you do, but I had an anonymous letter last week from a parent who was not responding to the podcast specifically, but was observing something. I don't even know if it's a mom or dad, but parent observed this: "I want to express my concerns over your admission department's overemphasis on high school AP courses. In all the information sessions my family has attended in the past several months, admission directors have made a point of explaining how closely their college looks at what AP courses are offered at the applicant's high school and how many of these courses the applicant has taken all in order to judge how serious the applicant is about learning. This I believe is a mistake."

What do you say to this parent? If we're talking about rigor, why are we looking at things like advanced coursework and honors or advanced college prep or whatever a school might call? What's the value in the admission review of rigor?

Emily Roper-Doten:

I think one of the things that they're touching on is that there are lots of different students in the world and we want to remind them that there are lots of different colleges as well. And so not every college is necessarily going to be counting APs in the same way. Certainly I just mentioned that in our read of an application, we are looking for students to take those courses, and part of that is because we are looking for evidence that the student has had exposure to some deep learning and thinking and writing and skill building that they'll utilize. We are not ever actually trying to admit masterpieces, people who are done. We are not trying to admit students who have done everything already. We're looking for growth, we're looking for evidence of growth and those kinds of things. And so being able to think about what a student has had exposure to in terms of courses allows us to potentially draw conclusions around what skills they're gaining.

Things like the AP curriculum or the IB curriculum give us an opportunity. Folks in our world know what those curricula offer. We know what those different courses are teaching students, the skills that they're built around. And so we can think of how they translate to what we do. Many of us are also incredibly close partners with organizations of institutional research on our campuses. So we may also be taking the data from our admission process and mapping it to how students do on our particular campus to be able to say, "Oh, students with this type of background are the students who are most successful in our classrooms." And so it's not totally random, it's not totally just based on feel, “this transcript feels good,” but really, how does the information that we gather in the admission process help us say that the likelihood of this student being successful, growing, contributing, and all those things, is high, based on these things that we're learning?

Lee Coffin:

And Jeremiah, you're in a place which you described as having the majority of applicants are qualified and your acceptance rate is low. How does rigor inform assessment and then decision-making in that very competitive landscape? So think a lot of our listeners have aspirations of an admission outcome in what I would call the toughest band of selectivity. Where does rigor sync up with that?

Jeremiah Quinlan:

I don't want people to get too hyper-focused on rigor. Again, we're not counting things up when we're reviewing. We are just kind of looking at what the sort of junior year and senior year program tells us about a student's academic preparation. It's a base question: if a student's academically prepared and if there's a compelling candidate in a similar high school with fewer APs, we're not going to be comparing students across that particular dimension and making decisions that hinge on these very fine differences between AP courses or rigor. I will add to go back to your original question and to add onto what Emily said. I will say that we hear very loudly and clearly from our faculty that the performance in some of these AP and IB classes is incredibly predictive of how students do at Yale, particularly an introductory math courses. We've heard from faculty around how well students are doing if they've done some of the IB extended essay work and they have really good independent research skills or writing ability to put together long papers, things that they're going to have to do in college.

Now, again, if students haven't had these opportunities because these choices are not available to them at their high school, we're not going to be asking for that. But the reason we are looking for this type of academic preparation is because A, we hear from our faculty that it is predictive of how well students do in the classroom. And B, because when you come to Yale, you're actually going to be asked to take a wide range of courses. We do have a foreign language requirement. We do ask students to either take three courses in an introductory foreign language when they start at Yale or two courses in a continuing language at minimum. And so we want to be looking at the transcript to see if students have had the opportunity to continue that work so we know they're going to be able to come here and meet the requirements that we have for our liberal arts education.

Lee Coffin:

That's really helpful. So as we're looking at transcripts, how do we look at the transition from middle school to high school—there's some adjustment whether you're going straight through your public school system or you're shifting to an independent school or maybe you're now in a boarding school. Is that relevant? Is that a factor in the way we're thinking about transcripts?

Jeremiah Quinlan:

And I wouldn't be completely worried about a very difficult ninth grade year. We understand that students sometimes have a tough transition to high school and we are looking more closely at more recent grades, and there's definitely an opportunity for students to have an upward academic trajectory that will significantly tell the admissions committee a compelling story. Again, we're not looking for perfection. So the counter is if you're taking AP calculus or AP physics for the first time in your junior or senior year and you start getting a B, that's also not going to disqualify a student for being admitted to Yale. We like the students that are challenging themselves and taking these courses and there might be an opportunity for you to take a B and turn it into a B plus second semester and A minus second semester. And again, that kind of profile is very relevant when you're not boiling things down to a single number, but looking at the whole transcript.

Lee Coffin:

I had a question on my sheet to ask you. It says, when is a B, okay? So I'm glad you just went to the Bs to broach this topic.

Jeremiah Quinlan:

I want to assure everyone that we admit plenty of students with Bs on their transcripts.

Lee Coffin:

Yeah, B doesn't mean bad.

Emily Roper-Doten:

I just want to circle back to the fact that everything that a student is doing happens in context in some way. And so part of the additional information we have to understand whether it's that tough start to high school or whether it's something was happening in the family in the junior fall, but we have additional pieces of information that come from the counselor letter or a teacher letter that helps us see not just the production of their educational experience, but what was happening in their world, what type of student they were. And so being able to look at a counselor letter and realize and learn from that counselor letter, that there was something happening in the student's family and parent was sick, there was a home transition, something that maybe shook that junior fall, that we see that student kind of come back in junior spring.

That's helpful information. So being able for us to be able to do the sort of research around that blip. If we see something that looks uncharacteristic of a student, we have opportunities to see what else was going on and we want to know what else was going on, we're not just going to say, "Ooh, that B or worse, that's going to be the end of the road for that particular application." We're going to look at these additional pieces of information to say, "Oh, something was happening and this is how that student bounced back." The resilience of bouncing back actually tells a bigger story than what that individual grade did.

Lee Coffin:

Or maybe that teacher in AP European history or in calc was a tough grader. I mean, some teachers give these B’s as high achieving. So it prompts a question around teacher recs. I mean, you'd mentioned recommendations, but how does the teacher recommendation build off of connect to the transcripts or does it?

Emily Roper-Doten:

I think it allows us to see who the student actually is in the classroom. Is this the student whose hand is always up? Is this the student who stays after class to ask follow up questions? Is this the student who sits back and is quiet but they're synthesizing the whole time and they pop up with an incredible aha moment that takes the entire class to a new place? They're able to actually give us the story around how did we get to that transcript? It's a recommendation. It's a narrative. It's more story for us to be able to see and imagine how this individual student is going to show up in the lab, is going to show up in class. And so it allows us to assess the more fuzzy kind of love of learning and engagement in learning that maybe a transcript can't tell us the whole story.

Lee Coffin:

Yeah. It's like teacher recs amplify data, amplify the grades, or even like an AP score, sometimes there's a B that turns into a five or a C that turns into a five and an AP and the teacher's like, "Here's the proof. This student really, really tore through my curriculum." I want to go back a bit to preparation in two different ways. And for Emily, you spent many years as dean in an engineering context. How for our listeners who are pondering a more quantitative college curriculum, does our assessment of a transcript differ in the way we assess preparation for maybe an engineering school or maybe a business program that's got more of a quantitative focus, but we'll stick with engineering because that's where you were?

Emily Roper-Doten:

It does in that we are looking for the building blocks that engineering sits on. That's math and that's science. And so for my time at Olin, we were really looking for evidence of calculus. We wanted to see calculus in the high school experience because our curriculum sort of made an assumption that there was calculus there. And so again, to this idea that you want students to be successful once they get on campus, being able to work with your faculty as an admission person to say, "Where is the tipping point for us in terms of where that student success could be?"

We also were looking for physics. That's one of the core sciences that engineering is built on. So we were looking to see where did the student take courses in calculus and in physics in high school and for Olin, those were required. And so making sure, again, to see is the foundation laid? It doesn't have to be their favorite subject or the top subject in terms of their performance in those sorts of things, but we're looking for foundations on which we can build. And so for engineering in particular, I would have students and parents think about how does their preparation set them up for that foundation. The caveat, of course, is making sure that you're double checking the institutions you're thinking about because just because my experience in a couple of engineering programs had that foundation of calculus in high school. And upper level physics in high school doesn't mean that every single one is going to, but it's really worth looking at what the requirements are based on the schools that you're interested in.

Lee Coffin:

Yeah, that's a really important news you can use point, Emily around the list making. And I think hiding in the name of the school is also what's required and what are the foundational pieces you need to bring from high school into college? Jeremiah, so in the liberal arts context, someone checks off bio, pre-med, environmental science, whatever? Would you read a file in a similar way as Emily's description of engineering or is it a little less specific coming into a program like yours where you're not admitting people into majors?

Jeremiah Quinlan:

Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Lee. It is less specific. We do ask on the Yale specific part of the applications students to list three academic interests. We ask for three because as a liberal arts institution, we want students to be able to choose broadly. Many students who apply and get admitted to Yale choose subjects across disciplines. They'll list music, English and biology. And that gives us a bit of an understanding of what a student might be, want to do in college, aka lots of different things, which is really great. And then we're looking at the broader academic credentials in the ways that I mentioned before. There are some cases where the application file is particularly angular and it's very clear that a student wants to come to Yale and study engineering. They list three of our engineering majors on the academic interest section. And then obviously we're going to look pretty closely at the preparation in math and physics because we do hear from our engineering faculty how important those areas are in preparation. So in some cases, yes, and in most cases it's a bit of a broader review.

Lee Coffin:

I mean, I would add that as I've started to do some reads already for hello-

Jeremiah Quinlan:

Oh man, I can't believe we're there.

Lee Coffin:

I started to practice again and I catch myself reading a transcript and looking for patterns on it. And to say, I see a student who's mostly A's I read one yesterday where it was lots of A's on the transcript, but I noticed some 80s, it was 100 point transcript, and I said, "There are some 80s every year." And I looked and yep, connecting the dots. Every year it was an 80 something in math. And I flipped back to the first page of the file to see what's the academic interest, and it was math. And I thought, "Well, that's interesting." So the student is projecting math as a major. The lowest grades on the transcript are in mathematics. But the testing, which was quite extraordinary on the math side stuff, these grades and the testing are telling very different stories and the teacher rec explained it, but the point I'm trying to make here is patterns as we read from nine to 12, how's the curriculum developing?

How do the grade patterns follow that shifting curriculum? I always describe myself as a word person with the humanities as my major, and if I were diagramming my own high school transcript, I leaned into the English social studies part, foreign languages part of my high school more than science, math. I took those courses, but they weren't my jam. I lived more happily in the humanities, and that was true in college, anyway.

Jeremiah Quinlan:

I think patterns is a really helpful way to think about the transcript. Think about it in patterns. Don't think about it as like what GPA number it boils down to. I like that articulation.

Lee Coffin:

Yeah, patterns. 

Lee Coffin:

So Emily, how important is 11th grade?

Emily Roper-Doten:

So 11th grade sometimes is the first time a student is taking multiple advanced courses or honors courses at the same time. So there's an opportunity for them to showcase where their interests lie. There's an opportunity for them to show us that when it gets tough, they can dig in, they can rise to the challenge. So I think 11th grade does bear some weight for us. As we think about those are when we're starting to see those courses that we can think of as best proxies for our undergraduate curriculum. And building on it, we want to make sure that students are still working hard senior year. Many of us are going to require senior grades, and so 11th grade isn't the end of the story. The unfortunate reality of college admission is that the answer is almost always, it depends. There are certain schools that are only going to look at ninth through 11th grade.

They're not going to actually require that senior year, the grades. Maybe they'll require what you're taking and they want to see what you're doing. And so I think you want to be able to do that research, but 12th grade is your springboard into that undergraduate experience. And so peaking in 11th grade, especially in terms of that rigor, does it give you the right on-ramp to college? By being able to keep that intellectual engagement going, you're actually setting yourself up best for a smooth transition into the college life.

Lee Coffin:

Yeah. Jeremiah, is 11th grade important?

Jeremiah Quinlan:

Yeah, it's important. It's not determinative, but it's important. I thought Emily's answer was great.

Lee Coffin:

So Jeremiah, so many of our listeners live outside the United States and you had some experience before Yale working in Singapore. So you have an international lens on transcripts. So for our friends outside the United States, when we read a transcript from a high school in a non-U.S. context, what's the preparation question there that we need to understand before we can offer someone admission?

Jeremiah Quinlan:

Obviously that's a complicated answer depending on what country a student is applying for. So I just want to assure everyone who's listening to this podcast that I have a very dedicated and experienced team of international admissions officers who have read files from outside of the United States for decades. And so we are deeply familiar with the context and what the academic preparation and opportunities look like in say, Hungary versus Singapore versus Korea versus Brazil. And we really value the expertise of those individuals. We will obviously look in some context, the transcripts aren't necessarily the same type of temperature check and academic performance as they might be in some U.S. context, they might be about International Baccalaureate or O-level exams if their students are in a British system.

And so we'll look closely at those exam results and the transcripts that schools provide us. But, again, we understand that it might be slightly different metrics and evaluations, but still very valuable. We want to see students who are going to do very well on their IB exams or their A-level exams or their national exams, and we, again, go to great lengths to become experts in what the top national leaving exam marks are so that we can review those reports with an understanding of whose prepared to do well at Yale.

Lee Coffin:

And for students for whom English is not either home language or the language of instruction, many or if not all colleges in the United States will ask a student to do some English proficiency testing for a listener for whom this is going to be the case. English is not their family language or their school language. What guidance do we give around testing as a way of assessing both preparation, but also ability to thrive in an English-speaking classroom?

Jeremiah Quinlan:

It's something we're going to be looking pretty closely at when we're reviewing a file from a candidate where English is not the primary language of instruction. We do require that non-native English speakers who have not taken at least two years of secondary education where English is the language of instruction, submit an English proficiency exam, whether it's the TOEFL, the IELTS, the Duolingo, InitialView, Cambridge English exams. Our website has a broad list of what is acceptable, and obviously we also will look at English proficiency and things like the application and the essays. So there's other opportunities for us. We do still conduct interviews, so there are opportunities for us to test conversational English and written English in other ways, but the English proficiency exam is a pretty key part of that.

Lee Coffin:

Yeah. Emily, does that sound right to you as well?

Emily Roper-Doten:

We would want a student to be able to provide, if it's not their native language or not their language of instruction, we would love to have that testing just as kind of that double check that Jeremiah is talking about to make sure that we have that confidence as someone who can be successful in our classrooms based on their English ability.

Lee Coffin:

So that's a good springboard into this bigger topic of testing, which for most people means standardized testing, the SAT, ACT and maybe beyond that, scores like IB and AP. But really when you say the word testing to a high school student, they think SAT, ACT. So let's roll our sleeves up on that one and think about the role of testing in a holistic undergraduate selection process and that we're still in this admission space where many places are test optional. Some colleges have restored testing as a required element. But for purposes of this conversation, thinking about where does a standardized test, the SAT or the ACT, IB, AP scores perhaps, but let's focus on SAT, ACT. 

 

Emily, you want to take a whack at the boogeyman.

Emily Roper-Doten:

So again, I'm a big fan of people understanding that we all have to do the work to make sure that our admission processes work for our individual institutions. So when we're in an application, we are looking, our base assessment of their academic background really is the transcript, what's the writing ability, what's the level of learning that we're seeing? And then if there's testing, it has the potential for it to reinforce what we're seeing. Maybe it backs up the type of preparation that we're seeing in the classroom. Maybe it helps give context to something, maybe someone we're seeing lower grades in a particular subject. But then we see that that testing counters that we always start with that baseline of the academic preparation is what you did over four years, how you got to where you are from an academic standpoint in your high school and in your high school experience. If the testing is there, it gives us an opportunity to confirm it or gives us a little bit more information, rarely ever in our process is it going to be something that turns us away.

Lee Coffin:

Okay. Jeremiah.

Jeremiah Quinlan:

Turns out actually that the SAT or the ACT is the single best predictor of a student's academic performance at Yale. And particularly the math SAT in persistence and some of our science majors. This is a bit counter to the national research, which suggests that GPA is a bit more predictive than standardized testing. At Yale, we find that the standardized testing is the single biggest predictor, so that means it's an incredibly valuable part of our process. The other thing I just want to say about this is that we ground everything we do in context. Just like we review the transcripts with a contextual lens, we view the standardized testing with a contextual lens, and it's really on us as admissions professionals to understand that context and doesn't necessarily have to be on the students to understand their particular context. There are some...

Lee Coffin:

Jeremiah, when you say context, admission officers throw that word around a lot, myself included, define context?

Jeremiah Quinlan:

The students' background, the neighborhood that they've grown up in the high school that they attend. And in particular here with the standardized testing, it's about how a student's tour maps on to other students at their high school and how well they have done. And students could look at our testing profile and say, "Okay, I've got a 30 ACT that is not above the median score that students at Yale will admit," but actually for the admissions committee or for an admissions' reader that 30 ACT could be 10 points higher than anyone has scored in that high school in years, and that score is actually transcendent, right? And that can be a huge signal to us in the admissions committee that this student's academic preparation is literally jumping out of context. They are doing such incredible work. They are so well-prepared that this is someone we want to respond to.

 

Lee Coffin:

Yeah, I pushed you on context because I think it's the piece that most people don't see.

Jeremiah Quinlan:

Right.

Lee Coffin:

We do have a way of understanding a score in the local framework and that that's powerful. I read one where I wrote, "This person's score is 400 points above the 75th percentile at that high school," it was fantastic, but the score that I'm referencing was below our mean. But a really substantial both proof point of the student's academic ability and it synced up with the transcript really well. So is testing when it's there equally important to a transcript or is it a supporting part of a transcript?

Jeremiah Quinlan:

That's a good question. If the testing is there, it is equally important as the transcript. And again, answering that question, is the student academically prepared to do work at Yale? But it does not tell the same story as the transcript can tell us for all the reasons that we've discussed previously on this pod. So it is in many ways be less of a difference maker. Again, it's an opening question that we answer pretty immediately upon the review of a file. And for most of our applicants, the answer is yes, the student has the testing and the grades to do well at Yale. Now we're going to move on and look at other aspects of this file. 

 

I can tell you, Lee, that in our admissions committee, we still have five-person admissions committees that meet every day all winter to vote to admit students to Yale or not. It's why I have not been able to lose weight for decades because I sit in a room weeks at a time looking at applications. It's also my favorite part of the job. I mean, what an honor to be able to read these incredible stories from these talented young people around the country and around the world. But in the admissions committee room, we will often pull up the transcript for the five-person committee to look at and to examine to help us understand the story of a student's journey. We'll never look at the testing beyond just the preliminary glance at the start of the application file. Because I've never been in the committee room where someone said, "Oh my God, that collection of SAT scores is so compelling. I want to vote that to admit this to student." That's just not how it works.

Lee Coffin:

Same. And it's, I think people are surprised by that. Emily, you're starting to laugh.

Emily Roper-Doten:

If I may, I'd love to say something for the non-hyper selective…

Lee Coffin:

Yes, please.

Jeremiah Quinlan:

Please do.

Emily Roper-Doten:

On this point, because I think for a lot of us, the transcript is the part of the profile that is up for the lead actor spot, if I harken back to my theatrical roots. Where that is the most prominent and that the testing if it's there, plays a supporting role to that, that I think really it is there as an opportunity to buoy, but not to sink, at least for many of us. And I love that you brought us back to the idea of context and talking a bit more about what context means for the student. I think it's also important for families to understand that there's institutional context, right? We've talked about at our individual institutions how testing plays a role, how rigor plays a role. And so it is important to understand that there isn't one categorical answer for many of these things, and that it's really our responsibility, and I hope listeners take away from all three of us, that we're all doing the work on our campuses to understand these things so that our policies are aligned with who we are as an institution, how we teach, what we value.

I know we had some conversations when I was at Olin about how while testing was actually really important in our process, Olin was a hands-on project-based learning environment. High-stakes testing wasn't actually a great indicator of what students were doing because it didn't align necessarily in terms of how we were teaching. And so I think while sometimes we all use the same terminology to be as transparent as possible about things like test optional or these types of phrases to try to be able to communicate as clearly as possible with families, there's an institutional context under each of them that is really important and that we are making purposeful choices about how we do what we do as individual institutions as well.

Lee Coffin:

What advice do we have to 11th graders about testing?

Jeremiah Quinlan:

So specifically I would say you should take the tests. So you would be keeping your options open by taking the SAT or the ACT, but also because then you will get a score and you will understand whether or not that's what is reflective of your academic potential and whether or not you want to submit it or not. You won't have the data you need to make decision about submitting testing if you actually don't have the scores. And hopefully the idea that most selective colleges are now test optional will relieve some of the stress and pressure and can help you take that exam in a way that will sort of not take over your very busy life when you're trying to do your homework and work a job or extracurricular activities or take care of family members.

You can just focus on taking test as a metric for you. And then I would also say big picture. I do believe that test optional admissions is here to stay, even if individual institutions are still evaluating their policies and making as Emily so well-articulated the best decisions for their college or university, I do think that test optional is going to be a widespread option for students in the next few years.

Lee Coffin:

And I agree with that, Jeremiah. I thought what you were going to say is test optional is here to stay, but test required is going to reappear, maybe not as universally as we were in 2019, but it feels like there will be colleges that say testing is once again a component of our admission battery, and you do preserve your options as places perhaps make that assessment.

Emily Roper-Doten:

One of the beautiful things about having test optional be as broadly applied as it is, is that you as students and parents have choice. You can choose where to apply, so much if you apply to a test optional school, you can choose whether or not to actually submit your testing. You can also choose to only apply to schools where testing isn't required. And so remember that you are in the driver's seat of this process, and so you have the ability to say, "If testing doesn't work for me and my family, it doesn't work for me as a student," you have the option later on to opt out and you still have thousands of options in terms of colleges.

Lee Coffin:

Okay, let's do a quick speed round. So questions we get when we do programs in high schools or answer emails. My high school offers an unweighted grade point average, and I'm wondering what the differences between unweighted and weighted and is that significant, Emily?

Emily Roper-Doten:

So an unweighted transcript or an unweighted GPA would just be kind of a rote calculation of all of the grades. A weighted GPA would be one where there's a little bit of a numerical bump given to those courses that are designated as more challenging. Every college or university may look at what's reported by the high school. They may say, "We're going to put everybody on the same scale and recalculate and note how rigor plays in a different way." We might note, this student is taking an exceptionally challenging curriculum. This student is challenging themselves in some areas. So we're able to kind of piece together what those things mean regardless of how a high school individually reports it. There are so many different ways to calculate GPAs across the country that we need to be able to make that legible to our teams as we're reading.

Lee Coffin:

Yeah.

Jeremiah Quinlan:

Yeah. You can only have your GPA produced in the way that your high school produces to the GPA. We understand that we control for those differences. And as I said, we don't really get too hyper focused on the actual number, and it's really about what the patterns and the transcripts. So it's not a big deal and not something I would worry about.

Lee Coffin:

Okay. How about class rank?

Jeremiah Quinlan:

So few schools are providing class rank these days that it isn't particularly helpful to us. It's something that we see, I would say less frequently, and then fewer and fewer applications. I mean, obviously class rank can help tell a bit of the story, and I usually recommend that students should think about applying to Yale if they're in the top 10% of their high school graduating class. But again, these fine-grained differences between a student whose second in their class of 400 versus student who's eighth in their class of 400, those types of distinctions aren't going to make a difference to the admissions readers or the admissions committees at Yale. It's going to be much more about the story that your transcript tells underneath that rank.

Lee Coffin:

What does the percent of four-year college tell us?

Emily Roper-Doten:

It tells us about the college going culture at that particular high school. So it gives us a chance to see what the academic focus might be like, what type of guidance the students may have. It's not something that we're reflecting back on the student's performance necessarily, but it's more about the environmental context. I think about, in my own experience, my high school, 45% went onto four-year colleges. We had a percentage of our students who were in that college going culture and a percentage of our students that weren't. And so we had the ability to be advised by college counselors and have teachers that were offering some upper level courses, but it was certainly a different environment than one where 100% is going on. And so there is an interesting context there around maybe some of those strivers in a community where the college going isn't the assumption for every single student. So again, it's really about how we're understanding where a student's coming from.

Lee Coffin:

So we've been talking about grades and numbers. Some high schools use words as their form of assessment. So a mastery transcript, as their known, will have a more qualitative way of giving a student feedback on academic performance. So if you're a student in a high school where the transcript or the report card is more narrative, then letter, number-based, what do we do with that, Jeremiah?

Jeremiah Quinlan:

We rely on the expertise of our admissions officers to sort of read these files as a group. To read them over the course of several years so that they can understand if there are no grades available, how the faculty at those schools are differentiating their students in their letters of recommendation, or if it's a school that's using a mastery transcript, what the differences are in the mastery transcript. And if that person's job then to also explain that to the admissions committee when review those applications.

Lee Coffin:

Yeah, and I think that the broad takeaway as we're having this conversation is we go one-by-one, school-by-school, region-by-region. And the reassurance, I hope you hear in that, is the selective universe is still individualized. So there are lots of different varieties of transcripts that we see even sometimes within the same region. And as admission officers, that's our job to figure out, where are we? This is why we visit schools in the fall too, because as you go in and out, you learn things about the academic environment, the expectations, the college-going culture, et cetera. And you build that into the way we read in context.

So that was a lot of data. So we swam through a bunch of numbers and stats and trends and ways of reading a transcript and thinking about testing. And I hope it empowers anyone to look at your own report card and start to see how a college admission officer makes sense of what you studied, where you studied it, and that's really important. 

Lee Coffin:

Emily, Jeremiah, we've covered a lot of ground over two episodes. I thank you for bringing such wisdom and clarity and humor to a discussion of the data that swims around a college application. So, thanks so much for joining the conversation with me on this topic.

Emily Roper-Doten:

Thank you.

Jeremiah Quinlan:

Thank you for having me. It's really important. And I always, Emily and Lee, you're two of my favorite people in this work, so it's great to be able to have this conversation with you.

Lee Coffin:

Well, you're going to come back after giving me that nice compliment. 

Next week we will have a new episode. We've invited two parents who navigated their way through a college search last year and just dropped their children off at college with a happy conclusion to the college search. So lessons from the search, “Parent POV” is next up in our queue. We'll see you then. For now, I'm Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. Thanks for listening.