I am pretty sure if colleges thought they needed the SAT/ACT to predict who successful students would be, they wouldn’t drop them.
It’s not at all surprising to me to see more drop them as data from studies is collected over time.
Anecdotes can easily be outliers, exaggerated, or purely concocted to “back up” a story. They should always be considered knowing that.
It’s easy to dismiss someone’s first hand experience as an anecdote. One of the actual posts, as I recall, is in the thread where parents, whose children are currently applying for college, are sharing their application experiences. There wasn’t any reason for them to concoct a story to back up anything. The authors of some of these cited “studies” had a stronger motivation for concoctions.
It’s not dismissing it as an anecdote. It IS an anecdote by definition. It may very well be true, but it’s still an anecdote.
One study needs to be looked at the same way - interesting, but more studies are needed to back it up. When those additional studies come in and say the same thing, most people realize there’s something to them. It’s why more colleges were already changing pre-Covid TBH.
This, this, a thousand times this!
But then how are anecdotes about taking the SAT/ACT, or preparing (or not) for the SAT/ACT, or not being able to take it because of COVID-19 cancellations, or knowing that someone cheated, or being accused of cheating on the SAT/ACT, or hearing about someone getting questionable disability accommodation extra time, or not getting what should be legitimate disability accommodation extra time, etc. relevant to whether the SAT/ACT has value in a college’s admissions and the effects of a college’s choice to be test required/optional/blind?
Many colleges are likely to look at the data on the forced experiment of test optional non-submitter students to help them decide what policy they should do in the future. It is unlikely that they will make a decision because one admissions person encountered a test non-submitter student who graduated with a 4.0 college GPA in a hard major or flunked out the first semester and used that anecdotal example as a basis for the policy decision.
Anecdotal or not, college counseling, sometimes from the beginning of high school exists, in our area. I don’t think it’s the norm but it definitely exists. I have seen such services, and the package runs at $20k. These counselors fabricate a “passion” for the student and coach them every step of the way on how to produce credible ECs that look brilliant on paper. If you look at the stats threads on CC, there are lots of kids that start their own company and/or non-profits and do publishable research before finishing high school. This is not normal.
Parents’ money and connections can go a long way towards producing an amazing application.
One thing that has not been fully flushed out here—the role of where you attend high school.
Our three children attend a “top high school” in our state. Grade deflation is a norm. Kids in our town routinely lose sleep and live in chronic stress and grades are hard to attain. The kind of level they are taught at rivals what I had in college. It is one of the highest ranked high schools in our state and has a national reputation. For the record, it is not a happy place, and we often consider yanking our youngest who is in 8th grade.
I noticed some time ago that kids I knew well that i knew had questionable GPAs were getting into some decent colleges—not as the exception—but rather the rule. The kids that graduate from our high school end up at great schools routinely. The mystery cleared up when I got to chatting with a college consultant who used to be ad admissions officer at a top college. He told me not just that our high school was “known” but that schools assigned a numeric value to different kinds of high schools and counted that into effect. (Something like that)
Because I grew up in poverty, I am forever astounded at the different ways privilege plays a role. As a pragmatist, I get why a college gives a extra star or two to a kid coming from our HS. They know that these kid has been hazed plenty with work volume. They know these kids typically have either survival instincts or a hefty resource pool for tutors and support. They know these kids will graduate from their institutions with a network already built in to help them get a job. They know these kids have been trained in the world of the upper class and will likely come back to them in two decades with alumni donations and kids of their own. They know these kids can pay.
…and it all makes me sad for the kids like me. I came from none of this, had LDs to boot and was an immigrant. As I have watched my two older children’s college careers, I am forever imagining students like me trying to get a leg up. Class mobility is better in the US than other countries, yes, but these disparities will continue to exist. The HS advantage, or the tutoring, the test prep, the access to information and other resources and the money to pay for it all.
…so from that perspective let me say resoundingly that I am thrilled we are going test optional. One less barrier to entry, One thing that is hard to fake is a good essay. Sure someone can be hired out but ideas and stories are not there for the taking. They need an origin. So from that POV, I say demphaize the testing and give greater weight to the writing. In fact, I would say add more essays instead. A person’s life story is likely a better gage anyway.
If the choice is between true anecdote and manipulated data, I’d pick the former.
When inputs from both high schools and colleges to these “studies” came from disparate grades in disparate courses from disparate schools with different rates of grade inflation over different periods of time, when “college success” was measured by mere graduation, I’m not sure what it means to be “predictive”. If one sets the bar low enough, anything smells like a “success”.
Shall we apply the same standard to ECs, essays, and all other criteria?
The decison has been made for them. The train has left the station. They won’t have the option to decide.
Posters who complained about standardized testing for its negative effect on low-SES students, or the influence of money on testing, or its supposed lack of “predictive power”, never seem to apply the same standards to the other admission criteria. Do ECs, essays, etc. meet any of these standards? If the justification for them is that they can be looked at “in context”, why couldn’t test scores be looked at in the same “context”? It seems a little hypocritical to me.
Few doubt that the wealthy have an unfair shot. And those who doubt it are likely looking through rose colored glasses.
How one does in the birth lottery means so much in life.
Quite honestly, what it seems like you are doing is cherry picking what you want to believe. That’s fine for you, but it’s also fine when colleges prefer looking at the data.
Success to a college is graduation BTW. That said, if you look at many successful people out there by any definition and can find their SAT scores, they weren’t always (or even often) in the Top percentile. Every now and then such lists are published. Google should be able to find some.
Colleges have been looking at the data for a long time. Few of them preferred to ignore the test scores until the pandemic forced their hands and the few that did prior to the pandemic were motivated by other factors. All of them likely won’t have a choice post pandemic, but that doesn’t in any way indicate that they prefer to ignore the tests.
Are they not anecdotes? Even for anecdotes, I’d like to see if you can find more than a handful of them with low test scores (say, 1000 or whatever your definition of low score is) in your Google searches.
This article is from Sept 2019, well before the pandemic:
https://www.fairtest.org/2019-best-year-ever-testoptional-higher-ed-admissi
"This is a record year for colleges and universities deciding that students can apply without submitting ACT or SAT standardized exam scores. Over the past twelve months, 47 schools have announced new test-optional admissions policies, according to the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), which maintains the master database. That brings the total of accredited, bachelor-degree institutions that will make decisions about most applicants without regard to test scores to 1,050.
More than half of the U.S. News “Top 100” liberal arts colleges now have ACT/SAT-optional policies. So do a majority of colleges and universities in the six New England states and several other jurisdictions including Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the District of Columbia.
All told, U.S. News includes more than 360 test-optional and test-flexible schools in the first tiers of their respective categories. Top-rated test-optional colleges include Bates, Bowdoin, Colorado College, Furman, Holy Cross, Pitzer, Rollins, Sewanee, Smith, Trinity, Wesleyan and Whitman. Among leading national universities, Brandeis, George Washington, Rochester, University of Chicago, Wake Forest and Worcester Polytechnic are all ACT/SAT-optional.
“The past year has seen the fastest growth spurt ever of schools eliminating ACT/SAT requirements,” explained FairTest Public Education Director Bob Schaeffer. “This summer alone, 20 colleges and universities went test-optional, a pace of more than one per week.”
“We are especially pleased to see many public universities and access-oriented private colleges deciding that test scores are not needed to make sound educational decisions,” Schaeffer continued. “By going test-optional, they increase diversity without any loss in academic quality. Eliminating ACT/SAT requirements is a ‘win-win’ for students and schools.”
Few, if any, folks here are saying 1000 and 1500 are similar in academic ability heading into college, but a very quick Google search brought up a wide range for success in life:
There’re more than 5,000 colleges in the US. Most of the 1,000 or so colleges on the FairTest list are unrecognizable by most students. The few well-known ones were doing it to increase the number of applications. If they had thought the tests weren’t useful, shouldn’t they have gone test blind?
Test blind and test optional are two different things. TO means schools know some students can put their best foot forward including a test score and others can use something else. Schools will look at both when making their decisions.
Otherwise, I’ve shown data. You’re continuing your same unsupported arguments. Readers can decide what they want to believe. I see no need to continue the debate.
I’m not sure what that proves. Perhaps politicians and low test scores are not mutually exclusive or even positively correlated?
TO may sound like a free lunch, until testing becomes unavailable to anyone due to the economics of testing. We’ve all seen the quick and sudden demise of SAT Subject tests.
Data is for school year 2019-2020. The data consist of 2,679 four-year and 1,303 two-year public and private (profit and not-for profit) degree-granting institutions.