"A running tally shows that more than a thousand accredited, four-year colleges and universities now make their admissions decisions about all or many applicants without considering ACT or SAT test scores. The count is being maintained by FairTest, a non-profit that advocates against high-stakes testing in university admissions and public schools because of its potential negative consequences.
According to FairTest Public Education Director Bob Schaeffer, half of the top 100 liberal arts colleges listed by U.S. News & World Report show up on the test-optional list, as do most of the colleges and universities in New England and more than half in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The list covers colleges and universities in every state, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands." …
Personally I find this alarming: how do schools distinguish between students with a 3.7 and compare them from school to school? What is the real reason for doing this? Encouraging more applications thus goosing revenue and artififcally decreasing admit rate? @SatchelSF thoughts?
Many colleges are non-selective (e.g. community colleges), so SAT/ACT are irrelevant for admission (though some may use them for placement).
SAT/ACT are less predictive than HS GPA when predicting college GPA, according to some universities' studies.
Many test-optional colleges may be test-optional only in some situations. For example, California State Universities are test-optional only for California residents with 3.0 or higher HS GPA applying as frosh to non-impacted majors at non-impacted campuses. Texas public universities are test-don't-care for those qualifying for rank-only-based automatic admission (though that may not be the case for oversubscribed majors). There may also be colleges where an applicant may forego the SAT/ACT, but need to include something else (e.g. additional essay).
The test-optional colleges are probably free-riding on the external effects of SAT/ACT in deterring excessive amounts of grade inflation or derigorization (since many colleges are not test-optional), and many of them may be small enough that there is familiarity with high schools that are common sources of applicants.
Among less selective colleges that admit by GPA and test score formula, aim for those where the result is favorable for changes. Among more selective colleges that admit by holistic reading, aim for those which tend to favor test scores more than GPA when evaluating academic credentials (e.g. a test-score-heavy applicant probably has a better chance at USC than UCLA).
The comments after the article are quite interesting. I do think that many students will continue to take these tests, as long as the most selective schools still require them.
What part of the SAT/ACT covers the above attributes? These tests do not correlate well with predicting success, that’s why they are falling out of favor.
There are many paths to success in college and work. Some, like you, achieve it through mental toughness, hard work, and discipline.
OTOH, people who are very bright can achieve success with a lower level of discipline. That is what the SAT and ACT attempts to measure–another path to college success.
You missed the boat entirely on this. A college becoming “test optional” is a marketing approach. The leaders of the college and the admissions staff are doing a very careful calculation by asking: “Are we going to improve the college student body by adopting this approach?” And by improve that means everything from a stronger applicant pool, percent that are full-pay, yield, and post-graduate success.
When admission rates started dropping below 10% for a large number of elite colleges, it made great sense for the next tier down in terms of selectivity to go test-optional. In doing so, they get to pick off the kids that will be successful but that the elites missed due to their criteria. The elites don’t need to pick out every successful person–in fact they don’t have room for them. They just need to make sure the ones they pick are successful and they seem to be doing a pretty good job.
What you are seeing now is a different situation in the face of declining enrollments. While the truly elites (< 10% admission rate) and highly selective (< 20% admission rates) are still doing what makes sense from an admissions point of view, colleges that are considerably less selective are simply concerned with filling seats in classrooms and dorms. And if test-optional helps with that, so much the better.
@STEMteacher I appreciate the ACT for what it is - the great equalizer. GPA’s, rigor, etc are vastly different across the country. Some schools have ridiculous grade inflation, no fail policies etc that give their students a leg up over those schools that don’t, if you were to go strictly by the numbers. What happens to the kids that stumbled as freshmen that need another means to showcase what they have learned? Standardized tests do that. They gauge what a kid learned and how well he retained it.
And if standard test scores do not correlate well with predicting success, neither do GPA’s.
And test scores do correlate with college grades. Although “correlate well” doesn’t define “well”, the way people often use the term, nothing correlates “well”. However, it has been established over and over again that HS grades correlate, and SAT/ACT test scores correlate, and the correlation is better when the two of them are used together. And yes there is unaccounted for dispersion even when the two are used together, for which as far as I know no known factor is able to account for. And no, I don’t work for a testing company.
Also, @hebegebe hits all the key points about why some schools choose test optional.
The SAT in fact has been essentially a simplified IQ test for years. The screams to make it easier (ie not culturally biased etc etc) have watered it down a bit by dumbing down the math. Nonetheless. A test that is administered to all applicants is the only true standard measure. Grades and GPAs are a horrible measure by themselves.
@CollegeIsBad I think you have it wrong. I don’t think these trust funders are stupid at all. These masters of the universe are a smart bunch and by and large so are their offspring. However, there are stupid trust funders. But they work for Daddy or start a gallery or start a hedge fund. Yes-holistic admissions gets in dumb trust funder johnnies but it also gets in boatloads of under-qualified minorities, athletes and other politically appetizing buckets-like first gen and so forth
“The elites hate standardized testing because it allows gifted poor people an easy way to become the elites. The move to holistic admissions is to protect the undeserving childrens of the oligarch from competition from the proles.”
Well, that was the original intent of holistic admissions, yes. Specifically, it was first started by some Ivies to keep the percentage of Jews to what they deemed a sufficiently low number and to keep the percentage of the student body who are WASP high.
However, one American elite does not discriminate by legacy, race, or athletic ability, focusing solely on academic ability (and gender): Caltech
Unis overseas (such as the UK and Canada) also tend to focus almost solely on academic ability (sometimes taking SES in to account).
Test scores do have a weak correlation with college grades in isolation, but they add very little beyond what is available in the rest of the application in predicting college grades, particularly when the application includes both a measure of HS GPA and a measure of HS course rigor. For example, a couple days ago I posted the study at http://www.ithaca.edu/ir/docs/testoptionalpaper.pdf , which describes Ithaca’s reasons for going test optional and results of implementing a test optional policy. They found that by using a model that includes GPA, strength of schedule, AP credit hours, gender, first gen, and URM; they could explain 43% of variation in cumulative GPA at Ithaca. If SAT scores were included as well, the predictive accuracy increased from explaining 43% of variation in Ithaca GPA to explaining 44%. The only SAT section that had a statistically significant benefit in improving GPA prediction beyond the other factors was the SAT writing section, which no longer exists. The author writes,
If a college’s internal studies suggest that test scores have little benefit in predicting academic success during college and put certain lower SES groups at a disadvantage, then it seems reasonable to not require them.
A list of top 25 USNWR ranked test optional colleges is below. There is a clear pattern, but it is not one based on acceptance rate or tiers of selectivity.
Bowdoin – #3 LAC (roughly the same acceptance rate as other highest ranked LACs)
Colby – #12 LAC (only a slightly higher acceptance rate than highest ranked LACs)
Smith – #12 LAC
Weslayan – #21 LAC (only a slightly higher acceptance rate than highest ranked LACs)
Colorado College – #21 LAC (only a slightly higher acceptance rate than highest ranked LACs)
Bates College – #23 LAC
@Data10 I don’t buy a self serving report generated by Ithaca College. A college’s “internal studies” could not be less meaningful. First It would take brighter minds than the nobel prize winners at Ithaca College to find a way to create and validate “a model that includes GPA, strength of schedule, AP credit hours, gender, first gen, and URM; they could explain 43% of variation in cumulative GPA at Ithaca. If SAT scores were included as well, the predictive accuracy increased from explaining 43% of variation in Ithaca GPA to explaining 44%.” This is classic educrat mumbo jumbo. @SatchelSF would love your input.
Note that Ithaca’s term for URM is ALANA, which includes Asian as well as the “usual URM” groups.
Ithaca is a relatively small college that probably draws a large percentage of its applicants from a set of high schools that it has become familiar with, so the value of the SAT/ACT to it is probably not all that great in terms of offering a common rating factor over many high schools of unknown varying quality.
But note that Harvard and UC also found in similar time frames that the SAT/ACT were the lowest value of the various academic criteria (both also mentioned that the writing section of the SAT/ACT of the time was the highest value component of the SAT/ACT, more comparable to SAT subject tests in value).
The authors explain their methods clearly, which look standard to me. However, if you don’t like that study, there are numerous others to choose from. Every study I have ever seen that includes both HS GPA and a measure of HS course rigor found test scores add little to the prediction of college success beyond those measures. For example, the CUNY “College Selectivity and Degree Completion” study controlled for HS GPA and some measures associated with HS course rigor such as HS math curriculum, so they found:
“The ATT indicates that there could be a small SAT effect on graduation (2.2 percentage points for a standard deviation increase in college SAT), but this does not reach statistical significance. The ATU is much smaller in magnitude and is not significantly different from zero.”