<p>and beats USNews by a day!</p>
<p>U</a>. of Rochester Adopts 'Test-Flexible' Admissions Policy | Inside Higher Ed</p>
<p>“The University of Rochester has announced that it will no longer require all undergraduate applicants to submit either the SAT or ACT, but they will still have to submit some test. Others that might be used include the SAT subject exams, Advanced Placement tests or International Baccalaureate tests.”</p>
<p>This is silly. Everyone who takes SAT subject, AP or IB exams also takes the SAT or ACT, so Rochester is discarding valuable information about some applicants. Since not everyone takes a specific SAT subject, AP, or IB exam it is more difficult to applicants on these measures.</p>
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<p>Not silly at all. Presumably, those with low(er) test scores will not send them to UR. Thus, UR does not have to report those low(er) scores to the reporting agencies (such as IPEDS and USNews).</p>
<p>Voila. Instant increase in ‘selectivity’.</p>
<p>Maybe not an increase in selectivity but in the class averages…</p>
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<p>I understand that, but the admissions process should be about finding the best students, not massaging statistics.</p>
<p>If a student presents good scores on exams that measure some actual academic achievement, Rochester may feel it knows enough already.</p>
<p>"Not silly at all. Presumably, those with low(er) test scores will not send them to UR. Thus, UR does not have to report those low(er) scores to the reporting agencies (such as IPEDS and USNews).</p>
<p>Voila. Instant increase in ‘selectivity’. "</p>
<p>From I know about UofR, believe me, quite a bit, this is the exact reason behind the move. The university has been “stuck” in the sub-elite status for so long, it is willing to try anything to improve it ranking.</p>
<p>The available reasearch seems to indicate that students who do not submit any scores do as well in college as those who do. Bates, no slacker in ratings, studied 7,000 students over 20 years of admissions, and found, ironically, that the main difference was in graduate school success–since you have to take another standardized test, e.g., GRE, LSAT, MCAT. It would be interesting to see outcomes if there were test optional grad/professional schools. As far as undergraduate GPAs, graduation rates, choice of majors, or career success goes, there were no significant differences between submitters and non-submitters. </p>
<p>[News</a> | Bates College](<a href=“http://www.bates.edu/news/2005/10/01/sat-study/]News”>20-year Bates College study of optional SATs finds no differences | News | Bates College)</p>
<p>I think one reason that more schools aren’t test optional is because it’s easier and cheaper just to feed scores into an algorithm than to intensively read applications. Most test optional schools are small lacs with relatively large adcoms.</p>
<p>Would have been nice if they would have done this either earlier in the admissions cycle or waited for Class of 2014 HS grads; too late for kids to “readjust” testing if applying ED</p>
<p>Standardized tests probably add less value to individual evaluations than they do in aggregate, by being a check and deterrent against high school grade inflation and lack of course rigor. “Test flexible” schools could very well be taking advantage of the former (not bothering with the tests due to their low value in individual evaluations) while free-riding on the latter (deterrent against high school grade inflation and lack of course rigor).</p>
<p>Nevertheless, some big state universities are effectively test-optional or test-does-not-matter-in-some situations. For example, Texas public universities have auto-admission of Texas residents based on threshold HS class ranks, and non-impacted majors at non-impacted California State Universities admit California residents with a >= 3.0 HS GPA, even without test scores.</p>
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<p>Exactly. But the question is, how would Bates’s selectivity and, thus rankings, measure up IFF they were not test optional?</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-rochester/1388137-change-test-score-requirements-fall-2012-applications.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-rochester/1388137-change-test-score-requirements-fall-2012-applications.html</a></p>
<p>Actually, this move fits very well into the philosophy behind the Rochester Curriculum. It is not nearly as important to Rochester to have the ubiquitous “well-rounded” student. The student who is passionate about certain subjects, but indifferent about others, fits very well there. Just as the open curriculum allows students to “play to their strengths”, so does the new testing policy.</p>
<p>Last I looked, Rochester did not have an open curriculum, in that a student must complete at least three courses in each category of humanities, social studies, and science.</p>
<p>UR has a version of the open curriculum. How you define that is up to you. You need to take clusters, but there are no standard distribution requirements. The policy is an attempt to minimize the number of students taking classes they don’t want to take. The goal is as much to benefit faculty as students; faculty don’t have kids in their classes who are there solely to fulfill a distribution requirement. The idea of clusters is that you take a sequence of related classes - and you can sometimes create your own - that interest you. </p>
<p>This is a post on the UR forum by one of their admissions reps. It explains the testing policy:</p>
<p>"In terms of the “testing requirement”, you need to provide the University of Rochester with only one of the following: a SAT score, ACT score, or two or more results from AP, IB, SAT II, AS- or A-level exams. You can also submit any combination of these exams (ex. 1 AP score and 1 IB score) to fulfill the testing requirement. A full list of accepted exams to replace SAT / ACT scores can be found here: University of Rochester : College Admissions</p>
<p>This should be good news for anyone who has had a bad test day, and great news for anyone who doesn’t believe that their SAT / ACT score represents their academic potential.</p>
<p>If you took the SAT or ACT multiple times, you can submit all of your scores to the University of Rochester because we will “super-score” your results. We take the best sub-scores from each exam and merge them together to create the highest possible composite score. This super-score is the score that we will consider while evaluating your application. </p>
<p>Do you have a lot of strong test scores? Feel free to submit as many exam results as you would like to the University of Rochester. The information above only highlights the minimum testing requirements in order to be considered an applicant.</p>
<p>(note: International students must provide us with a TOEFL exam in addition to the requirement listed above.)"</p>
<p>ucbalumnus, in the “pure” sense you were right in our previous discussion about a “true” open curriculum but as you can see by this link, many schools have versions of more flexible curriculums and are categorized in the open category.</p>
<p>[College</a> Lists / Open Curriculum - schools with more flexible curricula](<a href=“College Lists Wiki / Open Curriculum - schools with more flexible curricula”>College Lists Wiki / Open Curriculum - schools with more flexible curricula)</p>
<p>Interestingly, UR was the only school my son applied to that suggested he could send his official SAT 2 scores and AP scores to help in the reviewing of his application. They also send out a request for students to have a friend or family member send a personal recommendation. My sense is that they are open to alternative ways to view prospective students.</p>
<p>And actually students may submit their lower SAT/ACT scores along with their high SAT 2 or AP scores because they know UR will see their higher separate test scores and pay closer attention to them, unlike other schools that only look at SAT/ACT. </p>
<p>It could in effect lower the SAT/ACT average reported to those ranking agencies.</p>
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<p>Rochester requires students to do a cluster (three courses) in each division that they do not do a major or minor in, where the divisions are humanities, social studies, and science. That looks a lot like breadth or distribution requirements to me, and not all that much different from how many other colleges impose breadth or distribution requirements.</p>
<p>Re: [College</a> Lists / Open Curriculum - schools with more flexible curricula](<a href=“College Lists Wiki / Open Curriculum - schools with more flexible curricula”>College Lists Wiki / Open Curriculum - schools with more flexible curricula)</p>
<p>That list is stretching the definition of “open curriculum” pretty far. St. John’s College “great books” curriculum has no electives at all. Indeed, it is the complete opposite of an open curriculum in that the entire curriculum is specified (like a core curriculum that is the entire curriculum).</p>
<p>If Morse had an ounce of integrity, he should respond with the Sarah Lawrence treatment. When SLC tried to push the gamesmanship too far, they found themselves in the alphabetical ranking --where they belonged. </p>
<p>The schools could decide on what is important to them. Flexible policies or being ranked. NOT both.</p>
<p>Does not get simpler than that. Unfortunately, the USNews is no longer about offering a ranking with integrity. It is about surviving at all costs, and they no longer have a soul to sell. It’s been gone for a while.</p>
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Actually, it’s quite different. There’s a lot of flexibility in the clusters. For example, you don’t have to take a math cluster if you don’t want to; you can take a bio cluster and never touch chemistry or physics, or any combination. You don’t have to take a foreign language; three English or film or music courses can satisfy the humanities cluster. And many kids use a required course for a major as one of the three courses in a cluster. (For example, psych majors have to take a neurobiology class; that can be used in a science cluster. Or the statistics class can be used in a math cluster.)</p>
<p>Of course, that may still not satisfy you, but it does seem to satisfy the science kid who doesn’t want to “waste time” with English or the humanities kid who can’t stand the thought of lab work.</p>
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<p>Actually, no. The vast majority of colleges have ‘distribution’ requirements which allow one to pick and choose outside of their major. The point is that the must pick and choose outside of their major, unlike a truly open curriculum, ala Brown/Amherst/Smith. Whether clusters, disciplines or 'outside your field or major" they are still requirements; the rest is just terminology/semantics.</p>
<p>The number of truly open schools is small, as is a true Core colleges (i.e., Columbia, Chicago, Boston College, St. Johns).</p>
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<p>Looks a lot like the distribution requirements at the UC’s to me.</p>
<p>Not sure that it’s important to clear up on this thread about testing requirements, but from putting together spreadsheets comparing requirements back during the application phase in our house, the UR cluster requirement is different from the gen ed requirements (or core requirements) of most schools my kids applied to in that rather than having a requirement to do at least one course in 5 or 6 categories (perhaps Eng, Foreign Lang, History, Science, Math…), UR requires three related courses in each of two categories outside your major. So rather than taking 101-everything, students can get into upper level courses as part of their cluster. The structure makes your gen ed (or core or cluster or whatever you want to call it) experience deeper and more focused instead of a broad range of intro classes. As Chedva said, it fits with the students UR attracts - often very interested in what they’re interested in, and not real interested in taken a bunch of intro level classes that don’t get very deep.</p>