Many universities and colleges have reinstated the requirements for submission of standardized test scores (primarily SAT and ACT) for application for admissions. Many schools did away with the requirement, especially during the pandemic, and a large number of universities and colleges followed through claiming a number of reasons for eliminating the requirement or making the submission optional.
Some of those reasons that have been put out there are:
scores aren’t good predictors of success in college
rankings of academic acceptance isn’t a key criteria for applying to a school
many students are bad test takers
tests are racially bias and hinder a school’s ability to create a racially diverse student population
Fairer criteria to select students for admission
Fewer lawsuits from prospective white students that may have been denied admission, even though they had higher test scores
My daughter is junior in high school this year and we began the year with several meetings with faculty college counselors and admissions professionals from various universities, lauding the movement to go to test optional.
But like most things it comes full circle. Most recently a number of prominent universities and colleges are reinstating the requirement for standardized tests for application and admission. These include Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, M.I.T., Georgetown, Purdue, and University of Texas. And I’m sure more will follow. Just as the reasons originally for making the tests optional varied the reasons for reinstating them is also varied.
Accepted students that didn’t submit test scores are not faring as well as those that did
Many low income students that didn’t submit test scores could have increased their likelihood of acceptance if they had submitted test scores.
Some recent studies have now shown that test scores are a better indicator of student’s future performance than grades, essays, or teacher recommendations.
Maybe tests aren’t as racially biased as orginally thought
I’m sure that the college admissions professionals will have a new spin as we get further into my daughter’s college application process.
Or the college education itself is racially biased in the same way that the tests are.
I actually think that the vocabulary test is a good proxy for the amount of time spent reading, which in turn is a good indicator of success in universities. As long as everything doesn’t hinge on a single high-stakes test, by all means use them.
I don’t know it’s like 75th percentile or something. I guess the bragging part is that it’s said that if you don’t take the right dosage of a drug it doesn’t work properly in some people. This may be true for me with a drug like adderall.
Agreeing with @Chronos, I was hungover as hell and popped a 1440 on the SAT (split 720/720), then took the ACT with no prep whatsoever and got 31.
But I was: 1. Extremely well-read. 2. Pretty good at math through trig and pre-calc. 3. A good test taker. 4. Have an above average memory for what I’ve read/learned. In other words, the perfect guy for a “winner-take-all” test.
My son, on the other hand, is at least as smart as I am and actually has a better memory, but is a terrible test-taker. His autism/anxiety gets in the way.
The kid next door took the ACT this year and scored a perfect test. He’s all honors, straight A student. Good thing, too, because I bet his parents haven’t saved a dime for his college education.
At a certain point, when you have a huge number of students vying for a limited number of slots, you’ve got to go by quality or some sort of metric to decide who gets in. So…yes.
This. The SAT and/or ACT isn’t a perfect predictor of college success, but neither is anything else. The fairest, most useful, least biased thing to do is to use multiple criteria.
It sounds like not requiring test scores was an experiment, and by doing the experiment, they found that test scores really are of some use.
There is that. Both the testing companies and the “test prep industry” have a huge financial incentive here. But I don’t know how much influence they have over the colleges and universities.
You should keep in mind that you’re hearing mostly about what the very top schools are choosing to do, and even among them, some are remaining test-optional while others have gone back to requiring them. These are schools whose acceptance percentages can be in the single digits, so they want as much information about their applicants as they can get to help them make their decisions.
The school where I work, we have aspirations, but we’re a couple tiers down from those top schools. Our acceptance rates are much higher. We went test-optional several years before COVID, as part of a movement that started long before the epidemic came along. I’m not in admissions, so I’m not familiar with all the figures, but we’ve been able to continue improving the quality of our incoming classes (as measured in other ways) while also improving their diversity. We’ve been happy with the results and, as far as I’ve heard, there’s no talk of our going back to requiring the tests.
And, as far as I know, the testing companies and the test prep industry have zero influence on what we do and do not require. There’s nothing that would give them any leverage over us.
