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SAT/ACT scores required for UM undergrad once again

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There is a scale, and every test is adjusted.
The test is slightly easier than say 1990. Scores on average are roughly 100 points higher and collectively are more than that in the test optional era. So your 1400 in 1990 would be 1500 today. This is due to a slightly easier exam, an infinite number of study resources (free and paid), and the fact that kids take the test more times. Every kid is different, but I want our LBs and safetys to get good SAT scores.
 
GeorgiaHurricane said:
UGA and GT saw their enrollment decrease and it had nothing to do with Georgia response to Covid. That’s asinine. University of Florida enrollment has gone down every year since Covid and that has nothing to do with their
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Acceptance rates have gone down across the board (even pre COVID). This stuff has nothing to do with COVID. In fact, many schools are gaming the system to advertise artificially high acceptance rates. Part of the other reason is that there is simply more demand - more kids are applying to colleges than before.
 
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Canesq said:
Lmao if Jeremiah Smith was that recruit, you’d feel much differently.
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If my grandmother had wheels, she would've been a bike.

Edit: I wonder how Jalen Carter, Jordan Davis, Ladd McConkey, Brock Bowers, Kamari Lassiter, Nolan Smith, Broderick Jones, Nakobe Dean and George Pickens felt about having to take a SAT test. Poor Georgia, lost all of these recruits because they require their students to take that test...
 
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3FW said:
There is a scale, and every test is adjusted.
The test is slightly easier than say 1990. Scores on average are roughly 100 points higher and collectively are more than that in the test optional era. So your 1400 in 1990 would be 1500 today. This is due to a slightly easier exam, an infinite number of study resources (free and paid), and the fact that kids take the test more times. Every kid is different, but I want our LBs and safetys to get good SAT scores.
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It's almost as if learning strategies for exams have developed over the past 25 years or so, because we've made tremendous strides in psychology.

Nah, can't be it.
 
AUcane said:
I’ve read different and I will dig up some sources. Do you have any sources for this?
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My friend, I taught for, and was a national trainer for, The Princeton Review for two decades. I taught SAT, LSAT, GMAT, and GRE.

I have precisely explained how a "bell-curve" scaled scoring system works. The SAT and tests like it are designed for predictability and comparability across the year and across multiple years.

Outside of cheating, there is no way to "game the test". There are ways to PREPARE for the test, and what is on the test, otherwise The Princeton Review and companies like it would not exist.

For decades, The Princeton Review spoke of improving one's vocabulary to improve SAT Verbal skills, and even had a separate course (WordSmart). I don't think that improving one's vocabulary is "gaming the test". We also taught the most common archetypes of questions. This is common to other types of review courses I've taken, such as bar review and CPA review. "Hey, there will be X number of questions on Contracts, and Y number of questions on Torts; always expect a question on 'the mailbox rule', etc."

If ETS (the company that authors the SAT) actually had an increasing PERCENTAGE of high scores on the test, they would simply adjust the curve for the scaled score.

Here is a write-up from the website of a test prep company NOT named The Princeton Review:


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Bender said:
If my grandmother had wheels, she would've been a bike.

Edit: I wonder how Jalen Carter, Jordan Davis, Ladd McConkey, Brock Bowers, Kamari Lassiter, Nolan Smith, Broderick Jones, Nakobe Dean and George Pickens felt about having to take a SAT test. Poor Georgia, lost all of these recruits because they require their students to take that test...
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UGA just mandated the ACT/SAT this year for acceptance. They stopped it in 2020.
 
3FW said:
There is a scale, and every test is adjusted.
The test is slightly easier than say 1990. Scores on average are roughly 100 points higher and collectively are more than that in the test optional era. So your 1400 in 1990 would be 1500 today. This is due to a slightly easier exam, an infinite number of study resources (free and paid), and the fact that kids take the test more times. Every kid is different, but I want our LBs and safetys to get good SAT scores.
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What would be define as a good SAT score today? Genuine question
 
MissileCane said:
For admission into the fall 2026 class, prospective students will be required to submit their standardized test scores. This follows a 5 year period where UM suspended the requirement.

Good to see the change -- standardized test scores are important. I wonder if this is an Echeverria mandate.

news.miami.edu

Standardized test score policy reinstated for fall 2026 undergraduate admissions cycle

The University of Miami will require standardized test scores beginning in fall 2026, ending the temporary test optional process put in place during the pandemic.
news.miami.edu news.miami.edu
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Disagree but don’t care
 
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TheOriginalCane said:
My friend, I taught for, and was a national trainer for, The Princeton Review for two decades. I taught SAT, LSAT, GMAT, and GRE.

I have precisely explained how a "bell-curve" scaled scoring system works. The SAT and tests like it are designed for predictability and comparability across the year and across multiple years.

Outside of cheating, there is no way to "game the test". There are ways to PREPARE for the test, and what is on the test, otherwise The Princeton Review and companies like it would not exist.

For decades, The Princeton Review spoke of improving one's vocabulary to improve SAT Verbal skills, and even had a separate course (WordSmart). I don't think that improving one's vocabulary is "gaming the test". We also taught the most common archetypes of questions. This is common to other types of review courses I've taken, such as bar review and CPA review. "Hey, there will be X number of questions on Contracts, and Y number of questions on Torts; always expect a question on 'the mailbox rule', etc."

If ETS (the company that authors the SAT) actually had an increasing PERCENTAGE of high scores on the test, they would simply adjust the curve for the scaled score.

Here is a write-up from the website of a test prep company NOT named The Princeton Review:


View attachment 318258
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Thanks for this - appreciate it. Ok, let's take your pov where on a relative basis, the scaled average is the same as it was 30 years ago. Do you subscribe to the notion that people score better now than they did 30 years ago and that comparing scores now vs 30 years ago is comparing apples and oranges?
 
3FW said:
There is a scale, and every test is adjusted.
The test is slightly easier than say 1990. Scores on average are roughly 100 points higher and collectively are more than that in the test optional era. So your 1400 in 1990 would be 1500 today. This is due to a slightly easier exam, an infinite number of study resources (free and paid), and the fact that kids take the test more times. Every kid is different, but I want our LBs and safetys to get good SAT scores.
Click to expand...


This is actually a commonly misstated cause-effect summary of what actually happened.

First, the SAT or some variation thereof has been administered for decades. In the early days, it was predominantly taken by people with serious plans to enter college.

Accelerating from the 1980s onward, the SAT began to be used for a variety of purposes and was taken by an increasingly large percentage of the student body, and across a wider base of years.

For instance, the Duke Talent Identification Program routinely had SEVENTH GRADERS take the SAT. I myself took the SAT for the first time in seventh grade, and was selected for T.I.P. Now, I'll be the first person to tell you that my 11th/12th grade SAT scores were significantly higher than my 7th grade SAT scores. But as a 7th grader, my "lower" scores were a part of the statistical bell curve.

From the 1980s onward, almost every high school student was pressured to take the SAT. Including athletes. Including students who were likely to go to 2-year community colleges.

As a result, by the early 1990s, the MEAN score of the SAT had declined a bit. So the scaled score was RE-curved. Which resulted in an uptick in the "fat" part of the bell curve where most of the scaled scores reside. It was absolutely NOT some sort of "add 100 points to your score no matter what your score was" situation.

And this has nothing to do with the test being "slightly easier". In fact, the argument can be made that the format of the test is more difficult today. For instance, in the 1980s, you had exactly two kinds of Math questions. There was the traditional "5 answer multiple choice" question, and the the old 4 answer "comparison" questions (they gave you two columns of math information, you answered A if column A was always larger, B if column B was always larger, C if the two columns were equal, and D if it "could not be determined"). Since the 1980s, the test has added a mix of other formats, and you currently have a batch of questions that are based on interpreting charts or tables.

Similarly, the SAT Verbal was made up of Reading Comprehension, Analogies, Sentence Completion, and Analogies. The "Test of Standard Written English" was where you had your Grammar questions, but this section "(scored from a 0 to 60+) did not "count" as a part of your scaled score. Now, things like Analogies and Antonyms have been removed and the grammar components have been moved to the "regular" Verbal section.

I'm not sure that either math or verbal are "easier" than they used to be. And I think my nephews and nieces and family friends whom I have prepped for the SAT for the last 20 years would agree.

Can you prep? Sure. I've never seen any other test where people try to convince you "oh, you can't prepare, you should just go in there and do your best, nobody cares if your score is low". But that's what HS teachers and advisors try to tell HS students today.

Is it easier to afford prep courses and/or materials if you have more money? Sure, but that fact has never changed.
 
GeorgiaHurricane said:
What would be define as a good SAT score today? Genuine question
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While the population of the US is much larger, most of the best colleges and universities admit roughly the same student body size that they did decades ago. Certainly, universities are NOT increasing their class sizes, year over year over year, to match population growth.

Thus, for the number of "available" spots at, say, an Ivy League school, there are larger NUMBERS of applicants with good scores, although the PERCENTAGE of people scoring high scores is about the same.

It's supply-demand. The schools are "demanding" about the same number of incoming students every year. However, the SUPPLY of potential college students is increasing every year, as the population grows.

A 1500-1600 score is still the gold standard. But based on population growth, schools are able to fill higher and higher percentages of their incoming classes with kids who attain this score.
 
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GeorgiaHurricane said:
UGA just mandated the ACT/SAT this year for acceptance. They stopped it in 2020.
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Oh no, those poor THREE ******* FIVE STARS AND OVERALL EIGHT PLAYERS THAT ARE RANKED TEN WITHIN THEIR POSITION GROUP SURELY WON'T TAKE ONE, IT'S SO UNNECESSARY AND IT'LL COST PLAYERS
 
AUcane said:
Thanks for this - appreciate it. Ok, let's take your pov where on a relative basis, the scaled average is the same as it was 30 years ago. Do you subscribe to the notion that people score better now than they did 30 years ago and that comparing scores now vs 30 years ago is comparing apples and oranges?
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Roughly, yes.

But if there were 20 million test takers per year 40 years ago, and the top 5% (1 million) scored 1400 and above...

And TODAY there are 40 million test takers, and the top 5% (2 million) scored 1400 and above...

Well, then you can see how the ILLUSION of "rising test scores" is created. Particularly when TOP colleges/universities have not doubled their campus sizes and started to admit DOUBLE-SIZE incoming classes.

So, flip from the "scaled score" itself to percentiles. A student in the 99th percentile in 2025 is comparable to a student in the 99th percentile in 1985. There are just, maybe, twice as many of the "99th percentile" kids today as there were 40 years ago.
 
TheOriginalCane said:
While the population of the US is much larger, most of the best colleges and universities admit roughly the same student body size that they did decades ago. Certainly, universities are NOT increasing their class sizes, year over year over year, to match population growth.

Thus, for the number of "available" spots at, say, an Ivy League school, there are larger NUMBERS of applicants with good scores, although the PERCENTAGE of people scoring high scores is about the same.

It's supply-demand. The schools are "demanding" about the same number of incoming students every year. However, the SUPPLY of potential college students is increasing every year, as the population grows.

A 1500-1600 score is still the gold standard. But based on population growth, schools are able to fill higher and higher percentages of their incoming classes with kids who attain this score.
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Thank you
 
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