Do some SAT Subject Tests look better for college admissions than others?
I was asked to answer the question above on the website quora.com. What I wrote was short and succinct. Rather than post it here I am posting instead the words of Lawrence Chiou. His answer to this question is among the best I have ever read. He has taken the time to give a detailed answer that far surpasses my reply. He provides great data to back up his assertions and also gives great advice to those students who hope to attend highly selective colleges and universities. Lawrence knows whereof he speaks. He attended Harvard as an undergrad and then went West to Stanford for his PhD.
*********************************************************************************
I'll preface my answer with the following disclaimer: I agree with Parke Muth's answer in that your first priority (by far) should be to earn the highest scores you can, in whatever subjects you can. To state the obvious, high scores look better for college admissions than low scores. (If you've gotten a 5 on a particular AP subject or did very well in a particular class, for example, then that subject's a good candidate for an SAT Subject Test.) The question of whether one subject looks better than another given that you can comfortably get an 800 on both tests is a question that not many students realistically get to (but ask all the time anyway)—they'd be happy simply to get three 800s!
Now, if you believe you can get high scores in several different subjects (as in very close to 800) and want to choose a few to focus on for practice, I would suggest that you consider the kind of "profile" you want to establish. If you want to bolster your humanities credentials, then perhaps you might want to take the two history exams. If you want to focus on math and science (especially for applications to dedicated undergraduate engineering programs, for which Math Level 2, Physics, and Chemistry may be required), then the Math Level 2 Subject Test plus two of the science exams are a good choice. If you want to look more "well rounded," than Math Level 2 in addition to one science and one humanities exam might be optimal. Note that the tests you choose can be complementary to the rest of your academic profile; if you didn't take as many math or science APs, for instance, you may want to show that are are still strong in science. More often than not, however, students just take the subjects in which they're already have an established track record, as getting good scores in less familiar subjects isn't all that easy.
As far as specific exams go, it's somewhat of a complicated and speculative question. I'll note that different tests have different relative "difficulties," as evidenced by the differing correspondence between scaled score and percentile ranks for each test (if you're on a lower-resolution display, you may want to click to enlarge the image).
As you can see, unlike the SAT Reasoning Test, on which section scores of 780 or above correspond to 99th percentile scores, on some SAT Subject Tests even a perfect scaled scores are well under the 90th percentile (in some cases into the 60th percentile!).
It's not just a simple matter of percentile, though, since the students who take each exam are self-selecting. Even though the Math Level II Subject Test is by far the more rigorous of the two Math Subject Tests, an 800 on the Math Level 2 Subject Test corresponds only to an 83rd-percentile score, whereas the a full scaled score on the Math Level 1 Subject Test lands you in the 99th percentile. Likewise, students never end up taking physics in high school, which means that the pool of students who took the Physics Subject Test are, in some sense, a bit stronger in physics than the students who took one of the two the Biology Subject Tests are strong in biology (most students are required to take biology, which is generally a freshman- or sophomore-year class). This is suggested by the fact that the Physics Subject Test has a third fewer takers compared to both Biology Subject Tests (or the Chemistry Subject Test) combined.*
Over time, the relative meaning of the scaled score for each exam has become "inflated" or "deflated" for a variety of reasons (changes in the difficulty of the exam or the strength of the pool of test takers), and thus the same scaled score on different exams definitely means something different.
But do colleges actually read that much into it—not only looking at the percentile ranking but also inferring the perceived difficulty of the same scaled score on different Subject Tests? Maybe.
In the whole scheme of things, the nitty-gritty of your SAT Subject Test scores isn't all that important if you already have an established academic track record (such as lots of good AP scores) and if you do reasonably well on the the Subject Tests (I'm assuming the latter; otherwise, this question is irrelevant). Thus, some admissions officers, especially at less selective colleges, may not have invested as much time into understanding the ins and outs of each exam. For sure, the scaled score is still the big fish when it comes to the perception of your score and, secondarily, your percentile rank. (The percentile rank is important not only in and of itself but also because there's a greater likelihood that admissions officers will see lower scores from other applicants on the same Subject Tests if you obtained a high percentile rank.)
One exception, for sure, is the Math Subject Tests. Admissions officers know that the Math Level 1 Subject Test covers only two years of high school math, and it may actually look bad to take the exam (which indicates that you know you're less than well prepared mathematically), even if you get an 800, if you're applying to a highly selective college or university.
As to whether any of the other subjects stick out particularly much, I would say that of the four science exams, either of the two biology exams looks pretty good simply due to the higher percentile. Even with the ostensibly "weaker" test-taking pool for the Biology Subject Test, the exam has seemed a bit more difficult to get an 800 on compared to the physics or chemistry tests (from my perspective, if you already have a reasonably strong grounding in the fundamentals of high school biology, physics, and chemistry) just because so few mistakes are allowed for an 800 compared to physics.
World history (with the fewest test takers of all the Subject Tests but still requiring a 95th percentile score) looks relatively good, as does literature, which is very similar in format to all of the other ETS-written reading comprehension exams (such as the AP English exams or even SAT Critical Reading) but is relatively difficult to get an 800 on.
The language exams are kind of a hit or miss, but certain language exams can look particularly good if you never took a language AP. In general, the listening tests are preferred to the reading-only tests (if you have an option). (The entire controversy over the low percentile ranks for the Chinese and Korean Subject Tests is complicated, and I won't get into it.)
*The size of the test-taking cohort for a given Subject Test is one very rough metric for the the self-selectivity of the test. That said, we do have to first account for the relative number of students who take the subject in school and the relative strengths of the students who take those subjects.
******************************************************************************************
I hope that after reading Lawrence's words some will take the time to read some of his other great responses to questions that have been posted on Quora. I would like to thank Lawrence for giving me permission to post this response here. He and I have shared interests in education and i have learned many things from him. He has a very bright future ahead of him in whatever endeavor he decides to pursue.
No comments:
Post a Comment