Lawrence
Today magazine, Spring 2007
Lawrence welcomed 374 incoming freshmen and 25 transfer students in September.
They are distinctive in a number of ways, including the fact that they are
Lawrence’s first class of first-year students who had the option of
not submitting their ACT or SAT scores as part of their application for admission.
In February 2005, Lawrence announced it would become test-optional beginning
with students matriculating in the fall of 2006. At the time, Lawrence was
one of fewer than 20 liberal arts colleges nationally to forgo standardized
test scores as a requirement. It remains the only liberal arts college in Wisconsin
to do so.
In the months since Lawrence elected to become test-optional, at least ten
other institutions have followed suit. Of the 215 colleges that U.S. News & World
Report regards as “national liberal arts colleges” in its
annual rankings, Lawrence and 12 others of the top quarter of those institutions — among
them, Bates, Bowdoin, and Hamilton — have made the SAT and ACT optional.
“We
felt the system had gotten out of whack,” Steve Syverson, dean
of admissions and financial aid (right), said in a recent New York Times article. “Back
when kids just got a good night’s sleep and took the SAT, it was a leveler
that helped you find the diamond in the rough. Now that most of the great scores
are affluent kids with lots of preparation, it just increases the gap between
the haves and the have-nots.”
While students still have the option of submitting SAT or ACT scores, Syverson
says Lawrence prefers to rely on its time-tested standard of “multiple
intelligences” when reviewing a student’s application for admission.
According to Director of Admissions Kenneth Anselment, about one-quarter of
this year’s record number of freshman applicants chose
not to submit test scores, a figure that he says was very close to what college
officials had expected to see.
Anselment
(left) credits the decision to go test-optional as one of several reasons Lawrence
enjoyed a 12 percent surge in freshman applications this year en route
to a school record 2,315, shattering the previous all-time high of 2,060 applications
established last year.
“Our applicant pool has been steadily rising over the past few years,” Anselment
says. “More importantly, our rate of growth of applicants has been pretty
remarkable. In addition to outpacing most of our direct peer institutions such
as Grinnell, Beloit, and Knox, we’ve been outpacing the national rate
of growth as well.
“Certainly going test-optional had something to do with the big bump
this year,” Anselment
says, “but so, too, did some other factors, such as our inclusion in
the book Colleges That Change Lives and the success of our athletic teams.”
“We’re discovering that students are genuinely elated by the fact
that Lawrence recognizes there is more to them than just a standardized test
score,” he
adds. “When we talk to students these days and explain that option, they
light up.”
As a result of the uptick in applications, Lawrence’s admit rate dipped
to 56 percent of the students who applied this year, a 12-point improvement
in selectivity from 2005.
“We were shooting for a freshman class of between 370 and 375 and wound
up with 374, so we’re pretty happy,” Anselment says. “We’re
right on target in terms of holding overall enrollment at 1,400.”
This year’s 399 new students hail from 33 states and 17 countries, representing
294 different high schools. Wisconsin accounted for 37 percent (140) of the
new students, with Illinois
and Minnesota responsible for 14 percent and nine percent, respectively. Among
international students, South Korea has the most with five, followed by China
(four), Canada and Japan (three each), and Vietnam and Jamaica with two apiece.
Among those students who did include test results with their application, the
average ACT score was just over 28, a slight increase from last year. Composite
grade points averaged
3.45 unweighted on a 4.0 scale and 66 percent of the incoming freshmen ranked
in the top quarter of their graduating classes. Ninety-three percent of the
first-year students were awarded need-based or merit-based financial assistance,
with aid awards averaging $23,300.
“Students are excited about our decision to go test-optional, particularly
those with really strong grades whose test scores are not good indicators of
their academic performance,” Anselment
says. “We continue to attract the best and the brightest students by
any measure — test scores, grade-point averages, leadership skills, artistic
talents, community engagement. We’re excited that more of them than ever
are interested in attending Lawrence.”