If I don’t submit my SAT will it hurt me?

Answered

Private Elite Boarding Schools are in a unique class of their own compared to public and many parochial religious high schools. 1st of all, all of them were originally established to be feeder schools into the Ivy League/Elites. In New England, Andover, Exeter, Deerfield, Choate, and Hotchkiss cohorts typically place 25% of their class into Ivys. If you include schools like Tufts, Georgetown, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore it's more like 50%. You can say that Lawrenceville is a Princeton Feeder and Georgetown Prep is a Georgetown feeder.

What does this mean for you? Well, lucky for you, you are held to a different standard for attending one of these schools. The culling process that Ivys/Elites/Top LACS make during application reading season really doesn't apply to you because you already went through a rigorous admissions process 4 years ago. Top Boarding Schools already eliminate 80-85% of applicants to begin with so they are working with the cream of the crop for the most part. Colleges know that a typical 4-year curriculum is quite different than what one would find at a public high school as well as co-curriculars' (called ECs to everyone else) and travel, internships, and research opportunities during breaks and summer vacation.

If your school uses Naviance, you can verify this for yourself. A typical US high school in a very good zip code with 250-500 students probably only places about 1% of its graduating class in an Ivy or Elite. That's never going to change. It doesn't matter if the average acceptance rate is 5-6% for all 8 Ivys. Public school students, on average just can't compete with Elite Private Boarding Schools. If you look on Naviance at various Ivys like Cornell, or Dartmouth or look at Georgetown, you will see a lot more green checkmarks than you would see at a Public High School. You can cross-reference the green checkmarks and see where you are against other peers who got into these schools over the past 5 years. (If you don't use Naviance, then ask your college advisor at school for a help and print out).

There are 2 key things to keep in mind with Elite Private Boarding Schools on the East Coast. (this doesn't apply to Harvard-Westlake, Cate School, or Stanford Online school).

1.) There is serious grade deflation at boarding schools. At Deerfield for example, less only 1% of students had a 95.00 average or above (like 2 out of 200). Most Deerfield students who get into Ivys have around a 90.00-92.00 GPA which is a low A. If you are a key recruited athlete like you are team captain of the Lacross team or something like that, Cornell or Princeton might take you with an 87.00-88.00 or a B+. Compare this to a Public HS where there might be 50 perfect 4.0 GPAs at a school of 500 and 100 GPAs between 3.7-3.99 to follow. Public schools all have grade inflation. So the guidelines on all the college websites really don't apply to you.

2.) Test Scores matter much much less to Elite Boarding School applicants. While you might think your 1320 doesn't compare well to the other public HS kids that have 1520-1580 before they apply to Ivys, if you look at Naviance, there are plenty of students from elite boarding schools that get into Ivys with a 1320. Most boarding schools have a school profile you can download. Some have GPA distributions and SAT distributions and ACT/APs as well. At your Top 5-10 boarding schools the avg. SAT did suffer a little under COVID-19 however they are all between 1350 and 1400 for the most part. Therefore all you really want to do is up your score to that range. When you take it again shoot for 1400 and you should be golden. Again you are held to a different standard because a.) your curriculum is different and b.) many 500,600 level classes at boarding school are college level to begin with and much harder than AP classes. If you scan Naviance scatter plots, you will also see that many Ivy admits and Elite admits from your school got in with 1300s and low 29/30 ACT scores, not the 1550/35s that many public school applicants require.

Therefore, don't sweat it. You are doing great and good luck on your next SAT test. It will go great and you will be on your way.

The last thing, definitely rely on your college counselors for advice and help. They all fully understand the context of applying to these schools from boarding schools and have relationships with all the admissions officers at the schools. Whether there is a quota or not, many colleges have verbally agreements to take 5 at this school or 10 at that school, etc. So you really want to get tight with them because 1 phone call will make the difference for you.