New pet peeve: test optional at top schools

Parents Forum
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One thing to keep in mind - many (most?) D1 schools have special academic counselors and tutors for athletes. So, athletes with lower scores and grades often have access to support that other students may not have access to.

Admissions has a very difficult job as none of the measures are truly standardized. They can’t possibly be familiar with all of the 3,000+ high schools in this country. As discussed on another thread, school profiles can be uninformative as well.

However much a student wants it, it’s a disservice for admissions to admit students who aren’t prepared to succeed at a school. Standardized tests are just one more bit of information that admissions can use to help form a full picture of a student and their capabilities.

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Add me to those who feel the SAT/ACT are practically worthless.

One never knows if a 1310 was with prep or without. If without, that student could very well be right up there with the 1450.

One also never knows what was covered in the student’s school. Our school once eliminated teaching about circles in geometry (not enough time to get to them). That sure didn’t help scores, but it doesn’t mean students can’t figure it out at a later date. It’s not tough for an intelligent student.

Within our school I can tell who is likely to do well on the math portions of the SAT/ACT and those who have very low scores have never surprised me, but without the context it’s meaningless across the nation.

Then… if the student heads for a non-math heavy major they usually do fine. Maybe verbal counts more for the history, communications, or art majors, etc. I suspect it would for English majors.

And finally, I can predict a student’s likelihood of success far more by their known work ethic. A 1300 non-prepper with a solid work ethic could easily do better than a 1450 without, esp if the 1450 really prepped for the test score due to parental pressure or whatever.

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A very high level soccer coach once told me he could pick out the kids who were going to go far in the sport. It was not the ones with the most talent, it was the ones with the most drive. Applies generally to life, I think.

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In light of the difficulties that kids had in 2020 and are also experiencing now to get access to an SAT/ACT test, it is very odd that you frame test optional as a “pet peeve.” Colleges know very well the limits and inequities of these tests, and I think the fact that so many colleges have had to go test optional due to the pandemic has been a positive thing. Also, when a kid writes that they got a 1310 on the SAT, you are making all sorts of assumptions that may or may not be true. Maybe that kid got only one shot at taking the test; maybe that kid’s family does not have the resources to hire an expensive tutor to help prepare for the test; who knows. The point is that college admissions offices are far better equipped to understand that student’s capabilities and the context of that particular data point than you are, so it’s very odd that this is your “pet peeve.”

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The most selective colleges are selective enough that this is not a significant issue. Their admission bars are higher than the “can the student succeed and graduate?” level, so their graduation rates are very close to 100%.

It is in the moderately and less selective colleges where students may be admitted with a chance of graduation substantially lower than 100%. But then many of these colleges, particularly regional publics, exist to offer a chance of college education to a wider range of people than just those few with a predicted ~100% chance of graduating college, based on their high school achievement.

(Of course, graduation rates are also affected by affordability matters.)

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Given that many of the most selective schools are going test optional for the first time, we won’t actually know how successful they are at making admissions decisions without the tests until we see the graduation rates for the class of 2025.

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I have degrees from two of these “Elite” schools, and in my personal experience it is a lot harder to get admitted than it is to do well once there. Data 10’s post says it all: Harvard’s 6 year graduation rate is almost 100%. Do they literally never make a mistake and admit someone who can’t keep up? Or do they find a way to shepherd everyone through to graduation? I’m pretty sure it’s the latter, so I wouldn’t worry about those who get in test optional - they may struggle a bit, but they’ll end up with a Harvard degree. It’s like the old joke says - “What do you call the student who finishes last in her med school class? Doctor”.

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In rural or disadvantaged areas, many students don’t even take the SAT/ACT. It’s not pushed by the school. The highly selective AO can tell if the student will succeed. Top student in best classes available? Leader? Athlete/musician? Works a significant amount?

On the other hand, my son didn’t want to prep with free resources like Kahn Academy. I signed him up for a SAT prep course. He attends every week because I tell him that it’s got a guaranteed score result if he completes the course. Other friends pay tutors $200 per hour for test prep assistance.

Meanwhile, being TO has provided top colleges with more URM and economically disadvantaged apps. However, colleges on the lower end of the spectrum are getting fewer apps.

Ithaca College gives some preference to legacies. Money is important. 95.0% of incoming freshmen (1,590 total) were awarded scholarships at Ithaca College, averaging $25,526 per student.
Same is true for students who will contribute at a high level to organized sports, orchestras, etc.

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I think that due to Covid, having schools go test optional was the only way to go. Too many students simply did not have the opportunity to take the test. However, I wonder how many 3.8-4.0 students there are in this country each year? I wonder how many students test with 1500 - 1600 SATs or 34-36 ACTs? I speculate that there are far more of the former. A type of student I might think would improve their odds at an elite school is one who did exceedingly well at a marginal school and had the standardized test score to back it up. Does test optional influence their chances? I don’t know. I doubt it’s going to change the chances for good or ill for most public HS suburban students or those from private preparatory schools. I think most elite schools will have enough information to determine the academic preparedness of students for those schools. It will be interesting to me to see how it affect admissions at schools such as state flagships or at small privates or state directionals or similar schools. Those schools seemed to be more data driven and less likely to use less objective means of determining an applicants worthiness. We will see.

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It is not a pet peeve for me but I am interested in how students and faculty will adjust as the admitted students may or may not be at the caliber of previous students due to the lack of test scores for some students. At the U of MN, for example, students are admitted to colleges and the average ACT varies significantly across the colleges. Will the TO students admitted to the STEM colleges (ex. CBS) do as well as before or will some need extra help or advice to move to a different college.

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Have you considered that the admitted students who attend might be stronger?

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To repeat what has been written here and elsewhere

SAT is highly correlated to family income, because of a long list of issues, including, but not only, access to specialized test prep, the ability to have a quiet place to prep, the chances of having a quiet, stress-free place to sleep the night before a test, the ability to take the test multiple times (in Chicagoland’s most affluent school district, kids take the ACT, on average, three times), and access to doctors and therapists who provide the assessments for accommodations (in low income districts, there are around 1.5%, in some of the most affluent schools districts, these reach over 25%).

It is also known that income is one of the strongest predictor for whether a student will drop out of college. So the fact that SAT adds 1% explanatory power to predictions of student success is just as likely to be related to family income than to any innate abilities that a student has.

Moreover, and this is important, college success is not based on standardized tests.

I will repeat this, because it bears repeating: students in college are not passing classes, and are not getting grades, and are not graduating, based on the results of a series of standardized tests.

Success in college requires the skills and competencies that are required for a high GPA in high school. It requires the ability to maintain high levels of quality work over a long period. It requires perseverance and focus to do high quality work repeatedly, over a long period.

THAT is why GPA is a better predictor of college success than any standardized tests.

Furthermore, I am 100% sure that the vast majority of the students with an SAT of 1380 who are accepted to highly selective colleges because (maybe) they applied test-optional will do well in college.

As an aside - income also affects GPA. Kids from higher income families will have the ability to achieve a higher GPA than kids of the same abilities from lower SES families. However, the advantages which allowed higher SES kids to do better in high school than kids from low SES families will likely be carried over into college.

So using GPA is a better predictor, and is likely more equitable, than tests scores, but it is far from being actually equitable. However, that is because low SES kids are more likely to not be prepared for colleges. So to truly make college more equitable, K-12 education has to be more equitable, which is not within the power of colleges admissions people.

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I don’t think HY athletes and their ilk are good data points to make this case as athlete’s average academic index at those schools is probably significantly higher than the average non-athlete at a school like Bates, used as an example of a “highly” selective school by another poster in this thread.

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Things are starting to open up a lot. The number of Covid cases has fallen dramatically. This likely will translate into many more kids taking SATs and ACTs than last year when it was frankly nearly impossible for many to get a sitting. Although schools will waive the testing, you can be sure that kids with 36ACT and 1600 SAT scores will be sending them in. The only kids who won’t send the scores are those who are below the mean.

Will some just decide not to take the test given the craziness of the world right now? Of course, but many don’t want to be at a disadvantage and realize that admissions is a crapshoot. Why have less variables? Unless of course the variable is weak.

Are there kids from well known public and private who will decide not to take it? Of course but that’s also a gamble. There aren’t that many schools that know every high school in American ( and abroad). So if you are applying to a top school, it’s also likely that things which are national in scope are also being canceled. That national exam, tournament or event. Yep, might not be happening and the easiest way to show a stat will be a standardized test. Low hanging fruit.
There are also a large number of camps/internships and Summer program that will not be held this year. These are programs which have filled in the blanks in the past for test optional kids.
IMO, a lot is going to depend on how many are actually able to test this Spring and early Fall.

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My problem with “test optional” is that if you examine the history of standardized testing for college admissions, it was instituted as a tool to fight against racism and antisemitism. (See Harvard’s disgust with the results of test based admissions - too many Jews - and sudden discovery of the wonders of holistic admissions.)

Determining admissions based on legacy, race and ethnicity (whether used to exclude or include) character, interviews and recommendations creates such a degree of opacitiy in admissions that it enables and nigh encourages admissions officers to rig the process however and in whatever manner they wish.

My son went through many rounds of admissions from preK through grad school for the most elite (define that however you want, though highest-test-scores-required wouldn’t be far off) programs. The defining characteristic of all his fellow students outside of academics wasn’t wealth, race or ethnicity, it was this:

Raised in a household with two parents present!

Maybe we should just assign bonus points to kids from broken families and be done with it?

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For the subset of TO students who had low test scores from multiple testing dates but chose not to submit them, I would not hypothesize they would perform better than students with higher submitted test scores.

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That claim seems at odds with the viewpoint of the SAT’s creator Carl Brigham, who designed it intending it to be an intelligence test while believing in a racial hierarchy of intelligence.

Some colleges used it to look for students beyond their usual feeder prep schools, though not necessarily intending to bring in more minorities. That Jewish students did well on the test was obviously unintended by the colleges that wanted to limit the number of Jewish students enrolling.

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Around where I live, some better applicants quit the test rat-race early and focused on doing something key to their development during COVID. Those kids may actually outperform the testers. It was near impossible to get one test, never mind multiple dates.

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I don’t understand why preparation for a high-stakes test invalidates (or diminishes) the value of the score. Don’t kids study for final exams? Prepare for chapter/unit tests? Get a Physics tutor? Use Khan Academy? Join study groups? How is that different from preparing for the SAT?

If we are saying that preparation for the SAT/ACT is “unfair”, wouldn’t we also need to say the same about any other type of tutoring, coaching or preparation for the host of things that parents invest in? Is it unfair for a student to have a chess coach? A debate coach? How about private voice lessons? Or attend a specialized baseball coaching camp?

The SAT/ACT is, in part, measuring the students commitment to doing well on the exam (i.e., their work ethic). And while test prep can help, it’s not going to turn a 1100 into 1500. Not everyone has access to private tutors, but everyone has access to practice tests and Khan Academy.

If you’re saying that you can predict a student’s likelihood for success based on their known work ethic, why doesn’t that work ethic extend to preparing for standardized tests?

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That is a reasonable point, but I would say that fewer people than ever believe test prep is a worthwhile focus area relative to other pursuits.

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