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I'm actually working on the medians..also have a good amount of real work to do but should have the list up by the weekend. Already did "the top 50", some schools have widish disparities between mean and median.
your kids' SAT score certainly will matter depending on what schools they want to go to. but the average score of the school your kid went to will have little impact on your kids' SAT score. It's a standardized test. You can certainly send your kid to a school that may have a solid ability to teach to a standardized test - but most likely, it will be the same as everyone else that scores well on those tests - you will help your children prepare, and they'll get better scores than their peers who didn't have help.
now - will your kid have a higher GPA at Ridgewood or Millburn? Especially his/her junior year? That's a huge factor in many college admissions criteria.
There are many ways to get good SAT scores that have little to do with their 8-2pm in-class instruction. But their GPA scores have everything to do with that time and those teachers, along with what you do in your home.
To pick a school based on average SAT scores and not realize how easily those numbers can be skewed seems very simple minded to me.
Not the case, unfortunately your comments seem extremely short sighted and incredibly naive. Average SAT scores are a very good indicator of how the school system prepares its' students for this important test. That's why the average matters and it does make a big difference. Also, the school that you are getting the 4.0 GPA from matters almost as much as the number. To think otherwise is incredibly ignorant. A 4.0 from Ridgewood will carry more weight than a 4.0 from West Orange. That is a fact.
And by the way, a simple minded statement is saying that what happens in the classroom all day makes no difference on student performance. Sounds like little BradyKP will be a great candidate for home schooling and judging by where West Orange falls on this list he/she will probably be better off(sarcastic).
Last edited by Goldendoodle1969; 12-09-2011 at 08:27 AM..
Not the case, unfortunately your comments seem extremely short sighted and incredibly naive. Average SAT scores are a very good indicator of how the school system prepares its' students for this important test. That's why the average matters and it does make a big difference. Also, the school that you are getting the 4.0 GPA from matters almost as much as the number. To think otherwise is incredibly ignorant. A 4.0 from Ridgewood will carry more weight than a 4.0 from West Orange. That is a fact.
And by the way, a simple minded statement is saying that what happens in the classroom all day makes no difference on a student performance. Sounds like little BradyKP will be a great candidate for home schooling.
i dug up the post i was referring to up thread. do you not agree with this guy?
Not sure why McNair Academy gets included but not the Monmouth County Academies.
High Tech High once again has the highest average SAT score in the state, at 2145 compared to 1875 at Princeton. Even Biotech has 1960 and beat the current #1 on the list in this thread.
If you look at the best science and math schools in the country, High Tech was number one in the country yet gets ignored by every list made in the state.
i've been told on this board a child is better off being an outstanding student in a mediocre district than being an above average student in an outstanding district when it comes to college acceptance. do you think your child(ren) can only get a high SAT score in a highly ranked SAT school?
I work at one of the truly exceptional schools. Our "mediocre" kids go to places like Cornell, Duke, the military academies, etc, year after year.
Meanwhile my daughter goes to a mediocre high school (IMO) and the one girl who broke 2300 last year did not get into the IL.
I don't agree with that quote at all. I have no idea what kind of admission counselor he/she is but that statement is ridiculous. The top high schools in the country(both public and private) maintain relationships with admission boards at top universities, particularly the Ivy league. A wife of a good friend works in the counseling office at a top New England private school. Harvard gets 23,000 applications and accepts less than 10%, do you think its a coincidence that 20% of this private schools graduating class gets accepted there?
Now, if you are comparing a middle class kid and poor kid the poor kid will win out no question, schools do have quotas regardless of what they put on their admission page.
And some of the schools that don't require it happen to be some of the top rated schools in the nation. So - one can draw their own conclusions.
i acknowledge that we need to have a way to compare students on an "even keel", and that's where standardized tests come into play. It's the best tool we have available, which is why a majority of schools use it. It's hardly the only criteria that college admissions offices use though, so why should it be the only criteria we use in rating a high school?
so yes - i think the opinion i expressed is that SAT is not the only criteria..sorry if that wasn't clear. i think virtually every college admissions board looks at more than solely SAT scores.
p.s. - i'm a numbers guy too. I work in IT and Audit. which is the primary reason why i point out the weakness in using solely average SAT scores to rank an isntitution.
These "other" things really only matter when you have applicants who have statistically even SAT or ACT scores. Two of my students who applied to MIT last year had similar sat scores (2350 and 2330), similar ethnic backgrounds, the exact same coursework and gpa, and the only difference, on paper, were the extra curriculars. The one with more leadership positions in extracurriculars got in and the other did not.
So yes, I agree other things matter, but only if you have the scores to be put into consideration. It maybe useful to group schools with similar SAT scores (and obviously similar standard deviations which no one has yet mentioned as the best metric to describe variability) and then apply those other measures you mention to differentiate within the group. But SAT is obviously the primary consideration.
I'm actually working on the medians..also have a good amount of real work to do but should have the list up by the weekend. Already did "the top 50", some schools have widish disparities between mean and median.
If you have the actual raw data just figure out the standard deviation and p-value already and then we will not definitively whether or not they are statistically, significantly different. Medians are as pointless for discussing variability as averages UNLESS you have run some sort of test for significance.
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