u/TimeCubeIsBack

My goal is to hit at least a 1500+ to make my profile competitive, especially now that most Ivies like Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, and UPenn have brought back their standardized testing mandates. I am feeling incredibly anxious right now and have a few questions:
Do Ivy League admissions offices care about or penalize the number of SAT attempts? If I push myself to take it a 4th (or even 5th) time to get that 1500+, will admissions officers look down on it, thinking I'm just "test-obsessed" or trying to brute-force a score?
What are the current score reporting policies? I know most schools allow Score Choice or Superscore, but are there any Ivy League schools that strictly require you to submit your entire testing history (All Scores)? Will they see how many times I've retaken it?
If I end up staying at 1450 and can't seem to push it higher, should I pivot entirely to optimizing my essays and extracurriculars to compensate, or should I keep fighting for a higher SAT score at all costs?
Thank you so much!

Duke has already been using conventional license plate readers around campus for a long time, but they are becoming interested in specifically "AI powered" license plate readers.

Flock Safety, already contracted by Durham PD, is used by federal agencies such as ICE. They will tell you the cameras only record back to the police department, but all over the country we are finding out that feds are accessing these all over.

These cameras don't only track license plates. They are also capable of facial recognition and more. Not sure what we can do about this just yet, but I felt like people should be made aware.

Hey, so I've heard that Yale is seriously considering changing the way it grades undergraduates because grade inflation has gotten pretty extreme (or so they say). Right now, nearly 80 percent of all grades are either an A or an A minus, which means getting an A no longer distinguishes exceptional work the way it once did. Do you guys share that opinion? If you answer, you can specify major or humanities vs. stem since that might influence your experience at Yale.

We all know about UChicago, but at what colleges does applying ED actually improve your odds? From what I'm seeing, the high numbers mostly come from large pools of legacies and recruited athletes.

First of all, the ranking is not stats-based. A large portion (45%) of the ranking is based purely on surveys they email to “employers and institutions.” These surveys allow the respondents to choose the 10 best domestic universities for employment and 30 universities abroad. The United States has an immense number of excellent universities. The widely recognized Top 30 (T30) U.S. universities are all among the best in terms of research, student outcomes, and brand recognition, both domestically and internationally. These universities have immense revenues and R&D expenditures that almost no other universities can even imagine. So, what makes up the Top 10 in the U.S.? We all know them from U.S. News & World Report. All the other excellent universities in the United States are disadvantaged compared to those in other countries, which might have a maximum of only 5 to 10 decent universities nationwide that get selected in these surveys every time simply because their universities and employers have no other choices.

Furthermore, asking respondents to name 30 universities abroad is a joke - nobody really knows 30 universities outside of their respective countries well. Because of this, these surveys, which weigh 30% of the ranking as “academic reputation,” transform into an echo chamber where respondents simply look at international rankings and select the T30 abroad. Ultimately, this 45% survey weighting largely benefits countries lacking an abundance of decent universities and harms objectivity by relying on the global awareness of faculty members.

Second, it is a big myth that this ranking is research-based. Only 20% of the ranking goes to “Citations per faculty,” which is the only metric where objective citations actually play a role. Moreover, the quality of their data for this metric is likely poorly obtained. If you compare it to genuine research rankings, such as ARWU, Nature, and Leiden, you will see a lot of flaws and ridiculous inconsistencies.

Third, another 15% of the ranking goes to “Global Engagement,” using metrics such as “International Faculty Ratio,” “International Research Network,” and “International Student Ratio.” One has to wonder how this can be considered even slightly important for evaluating a university's quality, even if the ranking pretends to be “global.”

The faculty-to-student ratio and employment outcomes can be somewhat justified, but again, the sources for this data are highly unreliable. They use “their own database of impactful alumni” and a third-party survey with at least a 20% response rate. By the way, these two metrics have only a 15% impact on the overall ranking.

At the end of the day, if you want to choose a university based on its ranking, I suggest using national rankings such as U.S. News & World Report Undergrad, Forbes, WSJ, LinkedIn, Times, or general layman prestige. These metrics are more diverse and relevant to your specific region. If you do not care about employment outcomes and want a purely research-focused metric, use ARWU, Nature, and Leiden, which are much better for grad school than for undergrad. If you want to gauge the general perception in other countries, more stats-based rankings like THE or CWUR, and even specific government policies like the High Potential Individual visa in the UK, can give you a much better understanding. You can even try using Google Trends to measure the national and international awareness of specific universities.

QS tries to do everything but fails to do anything.