Her Counselor Said Submit the Scores. I Said Don't.

Applying test optional and getting in test optional are two very different things.

That distinction has cost families more money than almost anything else I see, so let me give you the rule of thumb first and the story second.

Start here: admissions officers would rather see scores than not. The scores are useful to them. Test optional was sold as a way to level the field and widen access, and the honest read is that it did not really do that. Which is a big part of why these policies are less fashionable than they were a couple of years ago.

So my rule of thumb, based on where your kid falls in a given college's reported range.

Upper end of the range: submit. Easy call.

Middle of the range: I'd submit.

Between roughly the 25th and 50th percentile: be very, very careful. This is where I'd usually hold them back.

That last one is where I've had more polite disagreements with guidance counselors than anywhere else in this process.

Here's one of them.

A family came to me. Their daughter attended one of the strong public high schools out here on Long Island, the kind with a serious academic reputation. Her counselor had looked at her ACT, seen that it fell inside the college's published range, and told her to submit.

Mom asked me what I thought.

I said I wasn't so sure.

So we went through the whole application the way an admissions officer actually reads one, across the twenty to twenty five factors they weigh depending on the student. And what I saw was a genuinely strong candidate. The grades were there. The rigor was there. The extracurriculars had real impact behind them.

The scores were the weak spot. Technically in range, yes. But below the 50th percentile.

Here's the thing about a weak spot on an otherwise strong application. It doesn't average in. It gives an admissions officer a reason to say no.

When everything else is that good, you don't hand them one.

So I said let's play defense. Don't submit. The school is test optional. Take them at their word.

She got in.

She also got a scholarship worth about $30,000 a year.

Now, I'm not telling you her counselor was foolish. The counselor looked at a number, saw it inside a published range, and gave reasonable advice based on that number. The counselor was not looking at the other twenty-odd factors, or at what happens when one soft element sits next to a stack of strong ones.

That's the actual lesson, and it isn't about test scores at all.

A single data point in isolation will mislead you almost every time. The question is never "is this number acceptable." The question is "what does this number do to the rest of the file."

Sometimes the smartest thing you can submit is less.

Onward.

-Andy "Play Defense" Lockwood

P.S. The submit-or-not call is one of maybe a dozen decisions in this process where the obvious answer and the right answer part ways. We work through them inside the Lockwood Inner Circle with the same approach we use for private 1:1 college advisory clients. A dollar gets you in: lockwoodinnercircle.com