What you described is exactly what SAT or ACT is for an undergraduate program. I’m not sure that’s what you intended.
Long before a PhD candidate gets to this stage, s/he needs to pass a PhD qualifying exam for all reputable PhD programs. Written part of the exam is to see if the candidate has mastered all the materials s/he learned in all the required courses and apply them to solve problems s/he might face. Plenty of candidates fail their exams.
Most highly selective universities throughout the world use some form of standardized tests, and it works well for them. At some point students need to demonstrate mastery of material, and exams can do that. My college kids’ grades depend almost exclusively on exams; test-taking is a useful skill to master.
One of my kids didnt test well. We spent a lot of time and effort addressing it.
More or less entire rest of the world uses some form of standardised school leaving or university entrance examination, yes. Subject based and certainly not multiple choice format, based on what students are supposed to have learnt in high school (additional tutoring services notwithstanding).
Absolutely NO ONE in the rest of this 8 billion world uses psychometric testing for university entrance that is supposed to measure aptitude and that they pretend is unpreppable.
University of Oxford. Thinking Skills Assessment.
These are aptitude tests…that is what I was always told. They are not supposed to benefit from prepping other than reading about whether to guess or skip, and to not spend too long on any one question! However, inequities in secondary education, home enrichment, and other factors really do interfere with measuring aptitude in any kind of neutral way. And all this prepping throws it off further. I admit my kids did not prep: they had better things to do and we felt keeping stress down was a priority. But every family is different and sometimes money is involved. I really like the idea of all schools being test-optional. College admissions are often not precise (especially where holistic), and scores give a false idea that acceptance odds can be measured by stats.
Question for anyone arguing here:
If the SAT and ACT were thrown out and a new nationally available standardized test (or group of tests) to be used for college admission in the US were put in its place, what would you want it to be like? Or would you want such a thing at all?
Any future test developed is going to run into the same avalanche of objections as the current one, which is why there will not be a future test.
Nope. Absolutely not the same thing. It‘s not used by „University of Oxford“, but for a very precise selection of courses (Experimental Psychology, Human Sciences, Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics) and it is used on addition to three A levels in relevant subjects - which would be AP tests for US applicants.
I will concede it is the closest to a verbal IQ test you can find in international admissions.
If there were going to be standardized tests I think tests that address subject matter mastery would be better than what we have now. Although I’m not a strong proponent of SAT style tests I can see the utility of subject matter testing - especially for students who plan to study the hard sciences, math and engineering (STEM fields).
Fairness is difficult to achieve, period. Without standardized tests, how does a lower income student who works at, say, fast food, stand out, without the kind of extracurriculars others might have. And kids with parents who aren’t working or who can afford to hire someone to drive them to after school enrichments also have an advantage. We could go on and on
. So is a highish SAT score the only way for colleges to tell that a student can do the work given differences in school rigor? What are the “holistic” ways to evaluate applicants without a benchmark for scores? Certainly regular jobs and family responsibilities need to be honored by admissions, and they have been trying for a few years now.
I honestly don’t know. As soon as I posted support for test-optional, I started thinking about the inequities that result that way too.
If we could get rid of prepping, and make every school and family environment equally enriching, the SAT/ACT would be fine. Clearly that is not possible. But what is the alternative? I would love to hear answers to the question posed by @ucbalumnus .
I’d want it to test baseline knowledge in a variety of subjects. Typically kids take geo, alg 1,2,pre-calc etc.
I would have on my wishlist that the test was more difficult so you could see the full variation in learning across a wider spectrum.
No time limits.
Bring back a writing section. Should have multiple selections so kids aren’t pushed into poetry/analytical/fact based. Instead they can choose.
Take out the gotcha’s and tricks that kids can learn in test prep.
Make it really, really difficult or have multiple tests. This is to be able to pinpoint kids with exceptional knowledge in an area.
Put less focus on doing well in both math& English. Most people are lopsided and better in one area.
I read somewhere that highly selective universities resisted making the SAT more difficult for fear of highlighting demographic disparities in those admitted.
True equity is probably impossible to achieve. Regardless which way we go, there will be someone who is unhappy. I’d give more credence to tests like the SAT if prepping weren’t such a big business. Interestingly, while the average/median SAT hasn’t changed much over the years (around 1050), I read somewhere that the number of kids scoring 1400+ and 1500+ has doubled over the past 10 years. The number of kids scoring 34+ on the ACT has also doubled.
That’s my understanding too, and that includes writing essays…one reason why the ACT/SAT writing sections never became important in the grand scheme of things. Pre-covid many schools were making it clear that applicants didn’t need to sit for those sections.
I would like to see any new college admissions test have a much higher ceiling than the ACT and SAT. Also, cover more subject matter.
I do not think you can design a test that is going to result in a different set of kids taking the top spots which is what seems to be a main objective.
I think this is because they have made the tests too easy.
No one can see the tail end. Here we are talking about fairness, income level and all the rest instead of content. Why isn’t the test harder?
You are right about the lopsided scoring - in my own case (back in the dark ages when dinosaurs walked the earth and SAT prep was non-existent) I got a 780 Reading and only a mid 500s score in math (which I never took again after HS). Why should super STEM kid have to score equally well in reading as they do in math or science to be considered for top engineering programs (given a reasonable level of competency in reading/writing).
Well as long as “top spots” are holistic, plus legacy, urm, geo, sports and all tge rests; The you really can’t say the test matters for entrance. I think many like their advantages and don’t want any single national point of comparison. Even if the test were changed they’d be unhappy since they don’t philosophically agree with 1:1 comparison. They like holistic/equitable admissions.
BTW, I like national standard testing specifically for the 1:1 comparison. You can see inequities elsewhere in the app.
It could definitely be harder, but I also think the amount of prepping among a certain segment of students has pushed the number scoring at the top levels really high. Maybe without the crazy amount of prep some of those 1400/1500 level scorers would fall more naturally into the 1200-1400 range. Back in the day, relatively few kids scored above 1500 and most kids (even very strong students) didn’t prep. Things are very different today, of course.
If we get to redesign college admissions to top schools and the entrance test then I would certainly like to see the holistic admissions be seriously changed too.
Definitely getting rid of legacy, parents are celebs, and sports preferences at a minimum. I can see necessities of URM, gender, and geo for certain schools, perhaps not the top STEM ones though…