You believe these 800 schools, but you disregard the truly elites, which all still require testing. What do you know that they do not?
As I said on page 1, being test optional is a marketing effort. The near-elite do it to differentiate themselves from the elite. Since they can't compete on quality (yes, I realize the real differences are marginal here), they relax a part of their admission process and hope to find students that prove themselves just as good. It works for them.
Once you pass the roughly top 200 colleges (privates and public), selectivity essentially disappears, and the bread and butter comes from filling seats in classrooms, and beds in dorms. These colleges are well aware of the upcoming demographic collapse and will further continue to relax standards in order to survive and stay relevant.
@CaliDad2020 While I relish the idea of Jared plodding down to his basement to SAT-prep away his high school career – only to produce a sad-sackish brace of 720s – my point is that in the current state of holistic admissions, unlike all the other criteria, the SAT/ACT has more potential upside for Podunk Dorothy. Colleges know about Jared’s advantages & factor them in, so if he’s coming from the school of Rich Snooty Boys, he’d better damn well have a good SAT. Same goes for all the Janes or Sallies at top public schools. Podunk Dorothy has at least this one (small) opportunity to distinguish herself. Without a comparative test, Dartmouth admissions would never even need to blush before deciding that Jared’s prestigious B-minus background in a “rigorous prep school environment” qualifies him over her.
I suppose this is mostly directed at calidad2020… I live in a fairly affluent area of CT, and my kids go to a supposedly rigorous parochial high school. Lots of educated parents and lots of money there. My d’s tribe is mostly the top 10 to 15% of the students. The vast majority do little prep, if any, for the standardized tests, as you indicate. I would venture the types of kids you’re talking about who do intense prep and take the test over and over are a small minority of all test takers. Most of the kids around here don’t think too much of it one way or another. It’s a Saturday am (maybe two) in the spring or fall. That’s it. They get much more stressed out about the AP tests.
There is a cost-benefit analysis at play. Colleges look at what is gained from the info and compare it to what it costs to get it. There is a benefit to the colleges of the testing data (on that I think even you would agree). We can argue how much but there is a benefit. The costs to the colleges are negligible. So the benefit doesn’t need to be large for it to make sense to get the data. Compare that to the cost/benefit of requiring more essays. Benefit at some point decreases in terms of requiring one more. But cost is also significant because someone needs to read and evaluate them. So given a cost/benefit analysis, you do not require more essays.
In terms of why the pain falls on the students, two points. I don’t think the strong hatred of the tests is as universal as you have stated. There is also some inertia at play in that kids have been taking them to get into college for decades (something of a rite of passage). Two there is an element of the notion that life isn’t always fair.
(also, I was talking about Jared eeking out a 720 in each section, which is like 97 percentile or something… Jared’s advantage is he’s going to get 3, maybe 4 kicks at the can with some high-cost, specific test prep after the 3rd 'meh" attempt, Dorothy will probably only get 2 tests with some on-line in between.)
The question has to be: you think College Adcoms can account for the high school difference in terms of SAT but are incapable of doing so in terms of GPA, ECs, Rigor, Core Grades, CC summer course, LORs, etc? Why are they able to recognize Dorothy’s 90 percentile 1290 as “special” but not her “A” in her Stanford Online Latin course she took summer of Jr. year?
That is exactly right: In effect, colleges are offloading both time costs and real $$ costs to students/parents to make the COLLEGES life easier - so you can pay for your kid to go there! In what world is that a good deal?
As far as how much kids like or don’t like SATs? I’d just suggest you roll down to your local big HS on March 10 and ask around. (And we have not even gotten into how text anxiety can affect results - and why that reality also benefits higher income/better school students: they are more used to standardized testing. Perhaps why SAT scores rise substantially for subgroups who have taken PSAT10, ERBs etc.)
Here’s a simple question to ask any student: If colleges told you your admissions results would be the same with our without SAT/ACT would you still take the PSAT, SAT, ACT, and/or SAT?
Perhaps, but again, actual stats don’t bear this out (and I think it discounts the amount of “baked in” test prep in private, parocial and top public schools. They integrate it in your educational experience.)
Again, even the minimum possible costs: 2 million kids at 12 bucks a head for one school is 20 million bucks wasted. And the reality is probably closer to $50 bucks a head - if not more. That’s a lot of dough, not to mention 8 million hours per test (just the kids in the room) another 4-8 million hours minimum in test prep…
Again again: if, as 800 colleges now claim, they can do just as good a job admitting students without standized test, it would save a lot of time and money to believe them.
At the very least, colleges should allow students to self-report all test scores and only confirm them upon an acceptance of offer of admission. That at least woould save students/parents 10’s of millions of $$ every year and would actually benefit Patty in Podunk and Single-Working-Parent Sal.
I do think the SAT and ACT top employees appreciate you all’s dedication to their continued mid-six figure employment, lol!
@CaliDad2020 I don’t know why you think the link doesn’t agree with me. My point all along is that the game is asymmetrical, with wealthy/ resourced students holding the trump cards. Where we seem to disagree is on the question of how removing tests changes the game. My general argument is that to do so tilts selective college admissions even more toward Jared. Having said that, I agree with @Data10 above: it’s good for the world to have lots of colleges, test-optional & not.
To answer your question: yes, I think there’s something different about adcoms & SATs. When Jared has Dumbledore writing LORs for him on embossed stationery and the business plan of his whole Boarding School is highly incentivized to get him into a good college, then there aren’t many places where Dorothy can cut through the noise and show that she’s smarter. Are her As in podunk HS really better than his Bs in Snoot School? Did she really do those online Stanford courses herself? The SAT is a qualitatively different data point.
@CaliDad2020 you mock the SAT and ACT employees but you don’t mock the fact that most universities are as big or bigger than many for profit (LOL) companies. There are dozens if not hundreds of VPS of development and diversity and admissions, and the school attorneys and maybe the patent office, and then there are the coaches and the folks managing the endowments. All under the guise of being a non profit. Education is big business. If we can all agree that not everyone starts at a level playing field and that education is a racket then having some tests that are uniform across all applicants would seem to me to be the most straightforward, unimpeachable piece of the whole admissions puzzle. You have two kids from two different schools and one has a 1500 and one has a 1260. It shines a light on the equivalence of the their high school transcript. Then a true decision can be made.
Sure, of course it does. And, as studies indicate, then taking the SAT II in a few subjects shines “more” light on their high school transcript. I’m sure flying them in for a face-to-face interview with the Dean of Admissions would shine more light. Making them do a semester at the school before they are “officially” accepted would shine more light…
The issue is not (and I’ve been very clear about this) are the SATs, in many cases, also a valid data point. Sure, in many cases they are.
The issue is are they a NEEDED or even “helpful enough” (given the the time/money costs) data point.
And thus far not a lot of folks are making statistic based arguments that they are. Nobody here is doing any sort of cost/benefit analysis to argue that the benefit to Podunk Pedro is worth the 8 million wo/man-hours, the ~$15 million in single-submission test costs alone.
I’m mocking the SAT and ACT employees (and not the low-level employees - I think it’s good for grad students etc. Tutoring is relatively lucratic vs. other gig-economy jobs.) because they are getting paid 100-500k to do somethin 800 college claim they don’t need. And they are fostering the scam.
Here’s one small point. In the years leading up to the SAT revamp, top SAT officials claimed up, down and sideway that the SAT was the best way to measure likelihood of thriving in college. The SAT was the “gold standard…” until, of course, less kids wanted to take it, suddenly the NEW! IMPROVED! ZERO CALORIE! SAT was the “Gold Standard…”
Except that GPA, which is less affected by income/socio-economics, would be a “greater leveler.”
My guess is that in the “real world” SAT/ACT allows schools/Adcoms to be a bit lazy. What’s the cut off at some random school for non-URMs/Special circumstance applicants? Let’s say it’s 1200 SAT, 3.33 GPA .
Well, more La Jolla kids are going show a 1200/3.33 GPA than rural inland empire kids. So maybe 1 kid from Salton Sea cuts through the noise with a nice SAT, but many, many more, who might show a 3.8 GPA but only an 1180 SAT are going to get binned.
Now lets do the same thing without SAT. Well then you’ve got a 3.8 from Banning competing head to head with a 3.8 from La Canada- even if the Banning kid has test anxiety and “only” pulled an 1190. Now this is where everyone comes in a cries “grade inflation!!” How can we know the 3.8 from Banning is as “worthy” as the 3.8 from La Canada… And then, this is where your socio-economic factors are going to screw the kid from the less affluent/educated community in MOST cases.
As SAT itself admits low GPA/High SAT happen in only 16% of all students. So already you’re looking a small subset. MOST Podunk Petras are going to have HIGH GPA if they have HIGH SAT scores. (and an additional 16% will have HIGH GPA and LOW SAT scores - so it’s probably a wash, just as many kids are getting dumped for low SAT scores - perhaps influenced by social factors more than ability - as might get helped by them.)
The question remains: why can’t an Adcom just look at a GPA. Look at the transcript. Look at the trend in the transcript. Look at the school. Look at the courses. (I mean CA has approved honors courses for EVERY school in CA. You can find them on-line. These aren’t APs, they are honors courses that meet state standards. UC give an extra GPA for those. That’s 10% of all the national college applicants right there. It would take an Adcom reader 10 mintues to check the core honors courses. Other States might have a list as well.)
Again, I do not think, in aggregate, that the stats suggest that SATs are more helpful to small school rural top acheivers. I do think some sort of standardized testing is probably important for home school.
@CaliDad2020 There are people who think its a good deal to pay $65k+ for private colleges and there are people who don’t think so. There are people who think its a good deal to pay $40k+ to an out of state public and there are people who don’t. Some people think its a good deal to pay $20k for a state flagship and other people do not. Some think its a good deal payment $10k+ for room and board and others do not.
Point being different people find deals where others do not. To my knowledge, colleges that require SAT/ACT are doing quite well. They are not hurting for kids/families who think its a good deal to take the tests required to gain admission. I get it that some people don’t. Seems to me the logical step if you are in that camp (besides going back and forth on a college discussion board of course) is only apply to colleges that are test optional. There are a number of very good colleges out there who do not require tests (just like I would tell someone who doesn’t think private colleges are worth $65k+ to apply to publics, or do not find value in OOS to apply to in-states, etc.). And if you want to go a step further, let the testing required colleges (or at least the ones your kid would have been interested in but for the testing requirement) know you didn’t apply because they required tests. And encourage friends to do the same. As I believe the testing optional approach is in large part marketing, you may well have an impact going forward.
No need for me to “roll down” to my local big high school. I have two kids in college now who both attended said big high school. So I know the view of a number of high school kids in terms of SAT/ACT testing day. And I have plenty of friends and relatives who have kids who go to other big high schools and private high schools. So I have a good understanding of the views of a fair number of high school kids. As a general rule, kids don’t like tests. Of any kind. SAT/ACT. Finals. Midterms. Mid-quarter. Math and science seem to be on a lot of kids’ dislike list. They also don’t like writing papers or homework. Words like “hate” and “despise” and “loathe” are often tossed around for pretty trivial things. So doesn’t seem to me to make sense to take them at face value when talking with high school kids. One of my daughter’s biggest beef with SAT/ACT was noting being able to sleep in on a Saturday (which was the only day of the week she could do so). Ask her and she will definitely tell you she “hates” the tests.
In terms of your question about whether kids would still take standardized tests of their admissions results would be the same if they didn’t, what do think kids would do if they were told their admissions results would be the same if they have a 3.0 as a 4.0? Or if they didn’t write any essays. Or what do you think they would do if they were told they would get the same grade in the class if they didn’t study for the final? Or tell an employee they will still get paid even if they don’t show up for work?
Reality is apply to a test required college without taking the test or don’t write required essays and you won’t get in. Apply with a 3.0 GPA and your chances are a lot lower than with a 4.0. Don’t study for the final and the odds of getting a good grade are typically greatly reduced. Don’t show up for work and the paychecks will stop.
In life there are things you need to do that you don’t want to do or like to do. To me its the great dividing line between being a kid and an adult (the number of such things greatly increase as you get older until at some point they start to decline).
There is a growing list of colleges out there that do not require tests. For those who “hate” the tests so much or do not want to pay the fees, apply there. But I don’t think those colleges removed the test requirement because they thought it was an undue burden on kids/families. Or that kids hate the test. Though they did in large part do so to appeal to kids/families who do. But rest assured that if those colleges determine that being test optional does not serve the best interests of the college, they will go back to requiring the tests.
Lets ignore the notion that a large part of going test optional is marketing, something that you need to understand is what works for one college or even a group of colleges doesn’t necessarily work for all of them. What is in the best interests of any number of colleges isn’t whats in the best interests of all of them. And kids are different and looking for different things. So if standardized tests bother you so much, have your kids apply to one of those 800 colleges and be done with it. Assuming 2020 is when your kid graduates high school, the changes you will get all colleges to go test optional in time to be relevant to you is pretty much zero. Good luck though.
I have given you the cost/benefit analysis. The colleges are the ones making the decision as to requiring tests. Not the applicants. So its just the cost/benefit to the college that matters. The costs to the colleges are negligible. Numbers appear on applications which can be compared easily to numbers on other applications. Much less costly to analyze than essays, GPAs (because you need to normalize them somehow based on the school and course selection), letters of recommendation and ECs. So test results are the cheapest part of the application to evaluate.
Even you appear to agree that there is some benefit to the tests (you just do not think its worth the costs but are looking at the costs to the applicant which is outside the colleges’ cost/benefit analysis). Others believe there is a greater benefit. Given the low costs (again to the college not to the applicants), makes sense to require the data.
You also keep tossing out the aggregate costs of the tests (both in terms of hours and dollars). But that isn’t how families are looking at it. Its just their own costs. And again, many families believe its worth the costs to go to testing required schools. Others do not and that is their choice. If you look at the total amount a family spends on college (in terms of tuition, fees, room and board, books, etc.), the amount spent on testing isn’t material for many people. The “costs to society” point you keep making isn’t really relevant in terms of the decision (barring some type of government intervention in the process to ban required tests which maybe is something you support).
The overwhelming majority of test optional colleges are not “near elite”, Some of the top ranked LACs are test optional, as are some of the middle and low ranked LACs. It’s far from just “near elite” colleges.
It really interests (and surprises) me how many of the folks paying the price of the SAT/ACT standardized-testing industry support them. I wonder if it’s because most of the folks on CC are actually from those social strata that benefit more from testing (due to parent demographics.)
You are the only one to adress the cost/benefit and you agree with me: it harms the “consumer” (parent/student) to the benefit of the “seller.”
Of course it makes sense of the college to require the data - it make their life easier.
What doesn’t make sense, to me, is all the sheeple who are willing to buy the argument that those aggregate hours and costs are worth it.
But there you go.
At least, however, decent-minded colleges should allow self-reporting of test scores (like UCs do for grades) to be verified at acceptance of admission. That would at least save kids/families $20 million a year. And since SAT/ACT are non-profits with only the good of the student at heart, I’m sure they won’t mind…
Do you have any evidence for this kind of assertion? At highly selective colleges, Students from both rigorous private high schools and small public high schools are expected to be successful and get mostly A grades. B- students are unlikely to get in to Dartmouth, regardless of whether they attended a “rigorous prep school” or a small, public HS. Dartmouth doesn’t publicly report GPA, so I’ll use Harvard as an example instead. In 2014 (the last year where the wrote this type of GPA summary), their freshman survey found the following. The mean GPA was 3.93, and the lowest GPA in the entire class was a B-. You can bet the strength of B- kid’s hook was a lot more than attended a rigorous private school.
The average self-reported unweighted GPA on a 4.0 scale was 3.93. Fifty-four percent of students reported a perfect 4.0 or above, the same as last year, and the lowest score reported was a 3.3, a marginal increase over respondents to last year’s survey.
As stated in numerous other posts, there are many ways to distinguish oneself besides test scores, within the context of holistic college admissions. I’d wager that the overwhelming majority of Podunk high school admits to elite holistic colleges primarily relate to other criteria besides test scores.
Uh… no on the “Dartmouth admits prep-school kids with B-'s.” That’s just flat out wrong.
The only kids going to Ivies with a B- are the legit Jared Kushner - and his dad bought a building.
You find me a kid with a 2.66 from Andover or Cate who does not have some insane extra hook or 2 or 3 getting into even Cornell hospitality or Penn nursing and I’ll eat my hat. I personally know a couple of east coast Prep school kids with near-royal Dartmouth lineage, multiple legacies who had to defer for a year 'cause they had A- grades.
It just don’t work like that these days.
And again, STATISTICALLY the B- Jared is way more likely to have a HIGHER SAT/ACT than the B- Tuba City kid. It’s just a fact.
The primary criteria for college admission is not who is smarter, and SAT/ACT is not an IQ test. Suppose Dorothy is a profound genius. You don’t think this is likely to be reflected in any other areas of a holisic application besides SAT/ACT? For example, maybe she did especially well on Siemens or IMO, maybe she revitalized her school’s dead physics club and led them to a state champ win in a Rube Goldberg competition, maybe she is beyond the level of her HS’s math and science and had the initiative to take classes at the local university where she received A’s, maybe she was the author of a published novel, maybe she…
Generally yes, in the context of college admissions. Highly selective colleges want students to be successful and get mostly As (or equivalent), regardless of high school attended. It’s better to be an A student at a small public HS that offers few AP/IB/DE classes than to be a B student at a rigorous private HS while being stressed out taking 10 AP/IB/DE classes. Less selective, less holistic colleges generally don’t put that kind of weight on attending “snoot school” instead of the local public high school; so again it’s generally better to be an A student at a small public than a B student at rigorous private.
Not sure about the SES of people on this site as a whole. I suspect it skews at least somewhat to the higher end of the spectrum. But if you read the various threads (particularly those for parents of the class of 20xx) and you will see a lot of people struggling to figure out how they will pay for college, looking for as much need based aid as possible, etc. So I doubt most people here are from the social strata that benefit more from testing.
In terms of sheeple, what do you propose? Assuming your kid wants to go to a testing required school (and said school would be a good fit), should the family refuse to submit test results? Should they “fight the man?” Or should they just go to a testing optional school?
Issue you have (and I have seen it with other issues unrelated to college), is there is a very small window in which anyone cares. I would guess that most kids only take the SAT/ACT once or twice. So we are talking 2 Saturdays at most. And most kids spend little to no time preparing. So probably less than 10 hours additional time. And there are a lot of kids who apply to less than 5 colleges. How much effort do you think they are willing to put in to avoid all of that? Especially knowing that its unlikely they will be able to get the testing required policies changed in time for them to apply to college. And after they have graduated high school, how much interest do they have in pushing for change? Won’t benefit them.
And they will not look at the costs in the aggregate over the entire country. You can keep quoting aggregate costs but its just not relevant to decisions being made on the individual level.
In Ohio, state will pay for juniors to take SAT or ACT once. And one way to graduate high school (in addition to satisfying the requirements for classes) is getting a certain score on the ACT/SAT. Another option is to get a cumulative score on a 7 part end of course series of exams in 7 separate subjects (more tests likely standardized to a large degree). Or obtain a license/job qualification certificate.
Colleges are big businesses. No matter what they tell you, they do that is in their best interests. Doesn’t matter that they are non-profits/not for profits. Same for the testing services. They will do what is in their best interests. Expecting them to look out for the best interests of their customers (at least unless it lines up with what is in the best interests of the businesses) is sure to lead to frustration.