Does Being SAT/ACT-Optional Make it Harder to Get Into College?
Today, I want to talk about the test-optional movement in colleges, how it's making it harder for colleges to be able to decide whether or not students are a good fit, and how that rests on the nation's recent report card. The news is concerning: the fourth and eighth grade math and reading data shows that we're pretty significantly behind where we should be.
I’m also going to talk about the pandemic and the tremendous toll it’s taken on our students, as well as the article that Michael Bloomberg wrote about bringing back the SATs and ACTs.
The Findings of the Hechinger Report
Let’s unpack the Hechinger Report article that came out a little while ago: in brief, they talk about how colleges now are having a lot of trouble without SAT and ACT scores to act upon in deciding who is a good fit for their college or not.
The article includes a story that I found pretty alarming: during the process of deciding on whether to admit a student, a third reader would often be called in to break a tie when one staffer said yes and another said no. Without SAT and ACT scores, the job of admitting students had become more subjective and time consuming.
A lot of people have been saying that we should do away with using standardized test scores in the admissions process, because GPA is allegedly a better predictor of how students will do in college. What that fails to take into account is that GPAs from different schools are different.
Let’s say you're going to a high-SES, well-funded school, and you have a 4.0. The colleges will know what that means. Same goes if you go to a well-funded school and have a 3.0: the colleges will know what that means. But let’s say you’re going to an extremely poorly-funded school, and you have a 4.0: colleges have absolutely no idea what that means.
So when they're saying that GPA is a better predictor, that is only true insofar as we understand the high school from which students are coming from. I think it's a fallacious suggestion that eliminating SATs and ACTs is a good idea, because what’ll happen is they will start replacing standardized tests with other metrics that are even more biased towards wealthy and white prospective college students: things like letters of recommendation and expensive extracurricular activities.
Aware of this, one college actually purchased a data service that ranked high schools and factored those high school rankings into each application. Obviously, an underserved high school's ranking is not going to be great. None of this is at all surprising.
The report goes on to say that many admissions officers also are struggling with what to do if a student did submit test scores versus if they didn't. How do we weigh that fairly? It paints a picture of a process that has become increasingly chaotic.
Our source for all this, by the way, is a woman who observed 22 admissions officers from 16 colleges and universities and released these preliminary findings at the Association for Education Finance and Policy. And it paints a picture of colleges having no idea how to evaluate applicants.
Now, there are colleges who have been test-optional for longer. But the issue is that they now have no idea how to evaluate applicants because of how many more they’re getting now versus times past. This makes sense when you think about it: now that you don't have to submit tests, everybody and their mother is applying to every single college.
If you've been watching my videos, you remember that Harvard had a 48% uptick in the number of applications they got in 2021. For reference, let’s say - for the sake of argument - they get 200 applications. It would mean they got almost 300 that year. Colgate saw a 102% increase in its applications: an increase from 100 sample applicants to now north of 200.
It is not as though the admissions staff at these schools doubled to handle this increased workload, either. In fact, consider the events of the last few years: because of the pandemic, they’ve all likely lost staff and are working with skeleton crews.
The upshot of all this is that you have fewer people available to sort through applications, an order of magnitude more applications to sort through, and no solid rubric by which to evaluate them. This is not good. Especially considering that the go-to solution is to use other rubrics that further disadvantage low-SES students of color.
The Limitations of “Test-Optional”
Another piece of information that I thought was extremely interesting: schools that went test-optional between 2005-2006 and 2015-2016 - long before the pandemic - found that there was no significant change to diversity on campus as a result of implementing test optional policies. Let that sink in: no significant change.
One of the big arguments you hear in favor of test-optional admissions is that students of color will have more of a fair shot. But if you're bringing in metrics that are even further prejudiced towards white and wealthy students, that’s not necessarily true. Again, if you can't evaluate the strength of the candidates, people aren't going to be willing to take a chance on a student who comes from a high school that they don't know anything about. They'd rather take a chance on somebody who they absolutely know everything about.
One study published in 2021 found that the share of Black, Latino and Native American students increased by only one percentage point at about 100 colleges and universities that adopted the policy between 2005-2006 and 2015-2016, which is way before the pandemic.
What this all says to me is that the test optional movement is no panacea, and it was never a solution. And I don't know why everybody has been talking about it if the data does not show that it actually has positive effects.
College Persistence and the Pandemic
One other thing that I've been hearing a lot is that post-pandemic college persistence is way down, and grades in classes are way down as well. I'm sure you heard about the professor at NYU who was let go because of his poor course evaluations by students.
I've read several articles in the past couple of months, as well, where professors talked about how students aren't willing to do the work. That they're a lot more fragile, the work that they're doing isn't good, how they're not able to get it in on time. People are dropping out. People aren't getting the grades that they used to. The class average has changed, and the professors are using the same tests. Persistence is a problem: getting into college is a different animal from graduating from it.
One of the things that colleges are trying to do is predict persistence - they want to predict who's going to be able to make it through. Critical thinking skills, higher order thinking skills - the SAT measures both of these. Higher order thinking skills are positive predictors of college graduation, salary after graduation, and success in life.
It stands to reason that if you give the kids a test of critical thinking skills before they get to college and they do well on it, they will probably have a better shot at graduating. Look: we’ve come to this point with the best of all intentions: we want to make everything fairer. We want to give everybody a chance. But what we are not recognizing - and I hope that this is the beginning of that recognition - is that the solution we've chosen is not having the effect on the problem that we wish it did.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress and Standardized Tests
So this takes me to Michael Bloomberg's article: Colleges Should Bring Back Testing Requirements. MIT brought back testing requirements pretty loudly: they sent out a big press release, a bunch of articles about it, and explained that they do not have the ability to evaluate whether or not a student will be able to succeed at MIT's extremely rigorous curriculum without SAT scores. Without those scores, as well, they were able to admit and evaluate fewer students of color.
I think what’s been either misunderstood or ignored up to this point is that the SAT provides a better metric for admissions offices. Should we come up with another metric? Sure. But what would that look like? How long would it take to implement? And what are we going to do over the next five years when kids are applying to schools?
In Bloomberg’s article, he references the National Assessment of Educational Progress: this is the nation's report card, and it came out a couple of days ago. On this report card, fourth and eighth grade math and ELA scores are low - the lowest they’ve ever been. He stresses the urgency of an intervention, and the necessity of reinstating testing requirements - partially to make sure that we know what our kids are learning.
On the other hand, we have a teacher on our staff who was talking to me about how standardized tests are counterproductive: we spend all this time fatiguing students for a test that doesn't necessarily measure anything. Here’s my hypothesis: we are incorrectly lumping all standardized tests in together.
I did a deep dive on a Maryland state test recently for a school we’re working with, and I found the test questions hard to answer and hard to understand. And these were test questions intended for tenth graders. Now, granted, I haven't taken a science class in 20 years, but if I’m able to get a perfect score on the SAT, I should be able to at least deconvolute the question that's being asked, right?
I wonder if we are painting all the standardized tests with the same brush - and I’m wondering if that perhaps is not appropriate. If we look at the state test, and other standardized tests that students take in schools, and recognize that this is different from looking at the tests that they take to get into college - the SAT and ACT - it does mean something that we're giving them the same tests, and the scores are going down.
Bloomberg mentions that our average ACT scores have declined every year since 2018 - this was news to me. With the exception of Asian students, teens of every ethnicity perform worse now than they did five years ago. Definitely not ideal.
How we Even the Playing Field
When you read the comments on this article, they talk about how we are competing with other countries who are making education a priority. We are competing in a global marketplace, and if we are an information-centered economy, then we need a lot of people who are able to think critically, come up with dynamic solutions, do math, and think scientifically as well. So it doesn’t bode well that our kids can't do those things.
If anything, removing objective benchmarks risks tilting the process even more towards students from wealthy families by elevating the importance of holistic credentials like extracurricular activities, volunteering, letters of recommendation, and so on. My kids don't have time to do things for free: they have to work. They're often helping to support their families, or minding younger brothers and sisters. They have a lot of responsibilities besides the free things that wealthy white students have access to.
Let’s talk about letters of recommendation for a bit. Say you're a student in a school that has one guidance counselor for every 500 students, and you're one of maybe 40 students asking your English teacher for a recommendation letter. You're probably going to get a pretty standard template recommendation letter. Is that your fault? Definitely not.
There is no way that the student in this scenario can prove they have the critical thinking skills to be successful in college without the SAT or ACT. Bloomberg says - and I agree - that reinstating ACT or SAT test requirements would make the admissions process fairer, promote high school accountability, and help ensure that students are prepared for college once they get there.
I should also mention college persistence: the ability to stay in college and make it all the way through. Remediation is one of the biggest problems that we have. If a student attending a two-year college has to take remedial classes, they only have a 10% shot of making it through the remedial class and graduating. Those are sobering numbers.
Yes, remediation is only obliquely connected to SAT and ACT performance. But the SAT is a test of critical thinking skills and knowledge gaps. So if I, a teacher, can fill in your content holes for the test, those are many of the things that you will need to be successful in college. This is because the SAT is a demonstrably sound predictor of the things that you'll need to know and need to be able to do.
This brings me back around to the question that I always ask: If SAT prep means preparing kids to think critically, to know things that they otherwise wouldn't have known and will definitely need for college, then is SAT prep bad? I don't think so.
The Failings of Our Education System
The last thing I’d like to talk about is what Bloomberg mentions in his penultimate paragraph: that the failings of America's education system threaten our country's future as a global leader in an economy that's more competitive and skills-based than ever.
To walk away from standards is to limit their career opportunities, and leave far too many of them dependent on social services to make ends meet. So really, this is a question of how we are choosing to prepare or not prepare.
Here’s something you may not know: students in urban schools often don't have homework. There’s a whole host of reasons for this. Most of the time, it's because schools and teachers don't think that the homework will get done. Depending on which source you read, there are a variety of statistics you can take away from this. For instance, there is definitely a correlation between exploring in school and concertizing at home.
Let’s say you’re in a math class - just for the sake of argument. Your teacher explains the process and shows you a problem on the board. It’s hard, and you don't really get it at first. And after you do a couple more, you figure that you might get it. Once you go home and do 40 problems, I promise you that you're going to know whether you get it or not. Suppose you don’t get it: after you've done 40 of them, you definitely know what part you don't get, so you can come back to class and figure out what needs to be worked on. When schools don't give homework, they are denying the opportunity to concretize information in that way.
Sometimes when you talk to teachers, they'll tell you that, on average, they teach about seven problems in a 90-minute block. Contrast this with students in high-SES schools who are doing 47 problems before going home and doing another 40. The numbers speak for themselves; the problem becomes exponential very quickly.
In this case, one of the things that worries me most is that we are cutting off our students’ ability to excel - we’re sealing them, and saying they're not going to be able to do more than xyz. And so we do not challenge them, and they do not learn.
I think that this gets to the heart of what Bloomberg wrote: we can't put a ceiling on our students. We need to continue demanding more, asking more, and keeping the bar high. The more we're able to measure that, the better.
Bloomberg obviously wants to see things be measured, and while I doubt anyone is a huge fan of taking lots of tests, it is useful to measure.
When we teach the SAT, we give you five proctored practice tests. There’s a reason we do this: not only are WE measuring where you are and how much you're learning, but YOU are also getting more comfortable and confident with doing things under a pressurized environment. And that's life: doing stuff under pressure. I do stuff under pressure all the time. It stinks, yes, but it’s inevitable.
I hope the assembled colleges of the United States listen to Michael Bloomberg, and I hope that this Hechinger report acts as a wake up call. I think we’ve got a scenario where every college is encountering all these problems but figure that they’re the only college dealing with them. But it's all of them. And maybe, if the president of every small college read this article and realized that they are not alone in the admissions problems they are having - that MIT is having these problems, too - they might consider bringing back a test that actually allows students to prove their mettle. Here's hoping. As always, I am a tireless advocate for our kids. Whether they're low-SES or high-SES, kids who are willing to try deserve the best.
