Junior Christine Nguyen reluctantly studies for upcoming SATs. Photo by Tracy Lam.By Justin Hsieh, Staff Writer
Even as students across the country head into the thick of SAT testing season, some of the nation’s most prominent universities and colleges are deciding to drop SAT and ACT scores from their application requirements. While this change may seem too good to be true, the reality is that our country’s finest educators are finally catching on to something that we students have known for a very long time. The SAT and ACT suck.
The SAT has been developed and administered in the United States since 1926 by the College Board for the purpose of identifying student readiness for college. It and its competitor, the ACT (owned and administered by the nonprofit organization of the same name), have long been instrumental metrics in the college admissions process. In recent years, however, they have come under increasing criticism and have been dropped from many prominent college and university admission requirements.
Today, over 1000 colleges and universities in the US are “test-optional.” The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, which keeps an updated list of these institutions, defines this as schools that make “admissions decisions – without using ACT or SAT scores – for all or many applicants who recently graduated from U.S. high schools.” The schools on this list aren’t limited to small, local colleges, either. In June of this year, the University of Chicago made headlines when it became the first top-ranked US higher-education institution to drop SAT and ACT requirements.
But criticism of the SAT and ACT is nothing new. Students, parents, and educators alike have complained about these tests for decades. Why, then, has there been such a dramatic surge in test-optionalization in recent years?
The answer is data. One of the most important developments of late in the debate over standardized testing has been the major study released in April that analyzed data from 28 US colleges and universities and over 950,000 applicants spanning more than a decade and a half. The study’s key findings included increases in numbers of total applicants and in black and Latino applications and admissions following the adoption of test-optional policies, equivalent or slightly higher graduation rates of non-score-submitting students compared to submitting students, and a stronger correlation between test scores and family income rather than academic success.
The conclusions of this study support the fundamental argument that has been made for so long about standardized tests: they offer no real benefits and very many drawbacks. Our current system of standardized testing is not consistently or meaningfully representative of students’ abilities or potential for success, as parity in graduation rates (which the study calls “the ultimate proof of success”) shows. On the other hand, what these tests have been shown to do is systematically value wealth over capability, marginalize certain ethnic minorities, add unnecessary stress and expense to high school families, promote a view of student potential as relegatable to a numerical value and stifle students’ opportunities to let their other talents show by dominating the college admissions process.
Fortunately, the leaders of the best schools around the country are seeing these numbers too. Right here in the Golden State, the mother lode of higher education institutions, both UC and Cal State leadership met in late September and early October to call for their own studies investigating the efficancy of standardized testing in predicting student success, citing a need to review application and admission procedures to ensure maximal fairness for students of all demographics.
Of course, many students do excel at the SAT and ACT, and their scores can be an essential tool in getting them where they want to be. This new movement does nothing to undermine those students’ efforts. What it does is clear a new pathway for students who may not be fortunate enough to have the time, talent or tuition to ace the tests, but still have the abilities and intelligence to deserve consideration at the schools they apply to. After all, fairness isn’t about giving everyone the same thing – it’s about giving everyone what they need.
It s hard to argue that data shouldn t play a larger role in education. Big data is already a cliche in the business world, where it powers everything from Google search results to Netflix recommendations . It seems only reasonable that applying that same logic to schools would result in a more powerful and supple education system—one that gives teachers and parents as fine-tuned a look at their kids academic profile as Netflix knows about each subscriber s idiosyncratic tastes. The problem is that as of right now, our best method for collecting that data is standardized testing. And, as a data-collection technology, standardized testing sucks.