Since the mid 1980s, colleges and universities began to rely less and less and less on ACT and SAT scores. At this point it’s really the high schools that are keeping up the tradition more than the colleges, many of whom no longer bother with them.
I went to Hampshire College for 1.5 yrs (ran out of $$) way back around the start of this changing trend. They are a hippie school – no grades, they’ll take your SATs and stuff but they don’t really count for much – and instead focused on essays, in person meetings, interests, more in depth stuff.
They’re a 4 yr but they produce folks who end up as PhDs at nearly but not quite Ivy League levels. The stuff we were doing then, the other schools started adopting more and more. themselves as the universities moved away from the old statistical models and towards more liberal arts education models, which intend to create not only specialists in fields but also rounded citizens capable of rational thinking.
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that kid applying was working from a high school kid mindset. Not his fault because it’s likely his guidance counsellors and parents and everybody around him had a more provincial knowledge of how universities operate.
Universities work differently than high schools.
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