Many times, social trends ride a pendulum. A longtime practice grows out of fashion, then years later bounces back as society comes to realize that what it had abandoned wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
Such appears to be happening with college entrance exams.
Several years ago, some of the nation’s top colleges and universities bought into the notion that these standardized tests were discriminatory and thus should become optional.
What they learned, however, is that the SAT and ACT tests were fairly accurate predictors of how a prospective student would do at that college. Without the tests, the admissions offices had to depend on grades, which can be inflated and don’t take into account the undeniable differences in academic rigor between schools. A high school student who makes A’s at a substandard school is not likely to be anywhere as prepared for college as one who makes A’s at a highly demanding college-preparatory school.
Some might not like that fact, but it is a fact. And admitting kids to highly select colleges for which they are not ready does a disservice not only to the school, which has to devote resources to remediation in the faint hope that the student can catch up, but to the student, too, who is likely to be frustrated, feel inadequate and drop out.
Among those schools that have recently made the college entrance tests mandatory again are Dartmouth College and Brown University from the Ivy League and other institutions of a similar caliber, such as Georgetown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Others are sure to follow.
Interestingly, not everyone who might be expected to be upset about this return to mandatory testing are. Some of those who advocate for Black and Latino students say that making the tests optional had an unintended consequence for minority applicants. Admissions offices, because they had no objective standards by which to judge schools, were less likely to admit students from those schools with which the counselors were unfamiliar, fearing that the students’ grades might be inflated. It also cut these students out from some scholarship opportunities that are based on these standardized test scores.
So instead of advocating for doing away with the tests, the trend is toward ensuring that students have a more equal opportunity to get ready for them in the way of prep courses and online resources, since the SAT has gone to an all-digital format and the ACT is headed that way.
That approach makes sense. We need objective ways to measure students’ aptitude, but we also need to give them a fair shot at demonstrating how much they know.
