@blossom can you address these issues and their frequency/growth in current hiring practices?
To each their own. Some find high stakes testing stressful. My daughter does and I have never liked it much myself. Given my own anti-standardized-testing bias, I have certainly never pressured her to undergo this testing. And despite my own standardized testing aversion, I have functioned just fine in college, grad school, and life.
True story: I did my PhD at UCB almost solely because they were one of only two universities that agreed to exempt me from taking the GRE. This was a number of years ago, well before the current test optional movement. And despite refusing to take this test, everything worked out just fine and I did not singlehandedly drag down the university with my lax attitude toward ETS.
Everyone is different and deals differently with these things. People find value in different things.
I for one am very glad to see this flexibility in testing policy to accommodate those who find this kind of testing needlessly stressful and a poor use of their time.
Not everyone needs to have the same opinion on the matter and clearly many don’t: hence, test optional seems like a reasonable policy to me.
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I have one of those kids who have great grades, hard classes, and a pretty mediocre test taker. Turns out when she was taking standardized tests, she was over thinking her answers and looking at different scenarios. Took her to a tutor and it was an easy fix “answer the question you are asked, not what you think would happen in x,y,z” Scores went up about 250 points. Got accepted pretty much every where she applied. Money spent, problem solved. But not every parent is going to do that, or has the resources to do that. She got good grades in college and is working in a top PR firm. So her test scores had absolutely nothing to do with performance.
Second child got 1520 out of the gate on SAT. But grades were streaky in high school. If he wasn’t interested in the material, he didn’t study. Went to college intent on majoring in one field and working for one company. Turns out he had no interest in his dream major and had the grades to prove it. Changed major, loves it and will graduate in May and get a job doing what he wants.
So in one house, controlled for income and parenting style, 2 kids who pretty much performed in college in completely opppsitional ways than what taking 1 SAT blind would indicate.
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No doubt the SAT only measures, to some extent, whether a student could handle the courseload if he wanted to do so. Some might lack the motivation, or issues of substance abuse, mental or physical illness may interfer.
There you go. Problem solved.
Now turn this around and ask what about ECs, opportunities etc.? Where does the poor kid go? I was that low SES kid. But the library had books and the SAT was exactly like what was in those books.
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That seems to be in conflict with what The College Board found in https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563419.pdf on SAT discrepent (i.e. higher SAT than predicted by HSGPA) and HSGPA discrepent (i.e. higher HSGPA than predicted by SAT) students.
Page 11 shows that, compared to nondiscrepent students, SAT discrepent students were more likely to be from higher income and higher education parents, while HSGPA discrepent students were more likely to be from lower income and lower education parents.
Article is interesting but even with their number calculations it is hard to define what is concordance between a particular SAT/ACT score and a particular HSGPA. That aside it was interesting to note issues of discordance with a higher HSGPA and lower SAT were found in women (I’m only the messenger) so the SAT would be a negative factor for women vs men. Also a similar discordance was found in black students whose GPA was higher vs test scores vs white students whose test scores were higher vs GPA (yes we know about financial issues). Other interesting point is parental income had no effect on GPA but higher income positively effected SAT scores (again obvious) as did parental education effecting both GPA and SAT scores.
To be fair, it’s only been a year or two. The bigger issue seems to be the capped recalculated gpa and test blind combined. There are going to be tons of kids with identical statistics. I think there may be complaints about the arbitrariness of results.
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Some hedge funds want to use test scores as one of their initial screens. They tend to run resource-intensive selection processes (multi-day interviews, internal proprietary tests, etc.) Fairly or not, they don’t want to spend their resources on candidates who they believe are unlikely to be good fit for them.
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If your state is California, no they do not share your view. They dropped standardized testing for ther clear and stated reason (and it wasn’t bcos kids have “better ways to spend their time”.)
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Yes, it is a small number of employers for high prestige roles. Most college students would not be impacted
The old adage that “All politics is local” seems very germane to this topic. I suspect that the students/parents most in favor of using standardized testing as an additional data point in college admissions likely are the folks whose own experiences or their child’s experiences with the SAT/ACT/GRE/LSAT/GMAT resulted in a strong score. On the flipside, those who are in favor of test optional are likely those who themselves were not comfortable with standardized testing when they themselves took the exam or their kid was somewhat averse to it.
As for Columbia University, its position is most advantageous for the institution, as the test optional position ensures that the interquartile range for its standardized test scores will be higher than if Columbia went back to requiring test scores, and it ensures that the school’s application count will remain as high as possible because test scores won’t be used as a front-end application gatekeeper of sorts.
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Maybe those schools have a way to fairly reliably figure out readiness then, without a test score. Maybe without the test to help them ascertain readiness, they need to see very robust ECs, awards, very strong essays, etc.
Several years ago GT did an experiment- they had AO’s review applicants with and without standardized test scores. They found that they still would have made the same admission decisions with or without the scores.
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My S was recently asked for his ACT score when applying for consulting jobs/internships.
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Actually, one of my kids did well on the SAT, one did not. Both were accurate reflections of their relative academic ability and guided me in finding schools appropriate for their levels.
I am a proponent of testing at the high school level for arguments that it benefits poor kids. I don’t have skin in the game anymore because both kids are in college already. Also I suspect their outcomes would not have been different without testing.
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That’s were ECs and PIQs and, in some cases, LORs will come into play. But yes those will often require qualitative, rather than quantitive, judgments and that always lands colleges in a bit of a grey area.
You are being a bit too literal here in my connecting my subjective point of view on testing with the objective reality of California going test blind.
Could you provide a good source for this? Every source I’ve seen says the opposite, so would like to see counter argument to that.
I don’t have a source. I don’t care about testing for my kids.
It is already too hard to get noticed if you are from one of the thousands of schools all showing a large number of kids with a 4.0, with nobody believing that 4 means anything. I grew up in a country where some colleges gave a national exam to pick kids, and kids came from all nooks and cranies of the country. The test was truly hard. And there was a lot of room on the right tail to separate people out and give each of them a rank. Obviously we are not going that far here. But it is pleasant to have a clean objective shot to be noticed if you put in the work.
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