thinqueprep

DEEP involvement in one or two causes. Not just meeting with club members a couple times a week, but devoting hundreds of hours to something they are passionate about.

Absolutely. This is the conundrum that will have enrollment managers scratching their heads.

There will be a clear dip in enrollment due to the sheer number of students taking a gap year for this fall. As a result of that, for the class of 2024, many colleges accepted much deeper into the WL than they were used to. This will compensate for part of the number of students who decided to defer admission until next fall.

For the coming cycle, enrollment managers will have to be very clear as to how they will deal with a potential influx of students. In my talks with my colleagues on the college side, this will likely result in extra emphasis on the WL for the class of 2025 just to make sure they are extra intentional with making sure they do not over-enroll.

The above is a discussion for the 100 or so highly selective schools, which will continue to have high demand.

On the other end of the spectrum, many less competitive schools will struggle to fill seats. As such, their acceptance rates will likely increase.

THIS.

This is DEEP involvement.

That depends on the school. You can read on a school website if they are test optional at all.

Some schools are very specific with their policy -- they make sure to state that they will not penalize students in any way if they are physically unable to take the test.

If this is you, you will have the chance to explain on your application that you were unable to take the ACT even though you tried.

Other schools will still recommend that you take the ACT/SAT if at all possible. They will use the scores for class placements, merit scholarships, or other considerations.

Other schools would still like to see a high test score if at all possible, especially at a slightly more selective school because they may be inundated with inflated GPAs this year.

So it depends on the types of schools you're looking at. If you have aspirations of more competitive colleges, then I would recommend you keep trying to take the ACT if it is safe to do so.

What kind of schools are you looking at?

This is a contentious discussion that many of my colleagues are having right now.

I personally do believe that standardized tests do serve some validity. However, the way these tests are designed do benefit those from higher income brackets. As such, they do inform, but shouldn't be seen as an objective standard of measure.

In my experience, we did use low scores to weed out students if there was no indication of why they received a low score. There was an unspoken expectation that we wanted high scores, but we never would nitpick over a difference of 10 or 20 points.

In fact we would often reject perfect score students because it was clear from their applications that they didn't do much besides study for the exam.