How “SAT Optional” Schools Evaluate SATs

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Ussist - Blog

5 min readOct 19, 2021

Understanding the Data — What is a Freshmen Admission Profile?

Freshmen Admissions Profile is the aggregated data on the admitted students’ demographic information and academic performance, including GPA and average exam scores.

Understanding freshmen profile helps you figure out which school to apply to based on your strength, and assist you in creating a more data-based school list of reach-target-safety schools.

“While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.”

Understanding Common Data Set

Common Data Set (CDS) is an initiative where schools report data based on the form created by College Board, US News, and Peterson’s. Its goal is to “improve the quality and accuracy of information provided to all involved in a student’s transition into higher education.”

Furthermore, you should not see these data as qualifications of applicants as most universities conduct what is known as the holistic admission, where they evaluate the entirety of students’ profile. However, for the sake of understanding what goes inside the evaluation of “academic performance,” let us look at the example of Stanford’s Freshmen Profile.

Let’s take a look at Stanford’s Freshmen Profile (2020–2021)

Average GPA

Let’s see section C 10 to 12 to see GPA score of admitted students. In Stanford’s case, 89.7% of students submitted their GPA and average of those students is 3.96 (unweighted).

68.7% of students who submitted their GPA had perfect GPA of 4.0. 30.6%, almost one third of the students had unweighted GPA between 3.5 to 3.99.

Out of the application pool, 24.8% of the students submitted their high school rank, and 96% of them were in the top 10% of school’s graduating class.

SAT Percentile

Stanford opted for Test-optional policy due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, that did not stop more than 70% of the admitted students submitted their SAT score.

Out of those 71.9%, the middle 50% of the students (excluding the top and bottom 25%, had SAT composite score between 1420 and 1550. For ACT, the middle 50% had the composite score between 31 to 35.

Conclusion

If you have SAT composite score between 1420 and 1550, then you have the median SAT profile of Stanford’s admitted students. If you have GPA score above 3.7, then you have the GPA profile of one third of Stanford’s freshmen.

However, having these scores does not guarantee your admission, as much as not having these score means you are not a Stanford material. Over 70% of admitted students did not submit their high school ranking, and more than 10 % of students did not submit their GPA at all.

Stanford practices holistic admission, where “each piece of application is part of an integrated and comprehensive whole.” That means no single part of the application plays a decisive role in the admission process.

Nonetheless, these data can be a guideline for you to have realistic expectation about your admissions process. For fall 2021 admission, 25227 students applied, and total 2349 students were accepted. That means aggregate 9% acceptance rate. There is no doubt that many, many talented students applied to Stanford.

This is why it is important for you to build a balanced school list based on the data of each school. You cannot rely your admissions hope on the chance that is less than 10%.

It is difficult to google and skim through the common data set of more than dozens of colleges that you might want to look into. That is why we have done the work for you.