Why Colleges Across the Nation Are Dropping Entrance Exams

 

Lori Loughlin, convicted of a cheating scandal involving wealthy parents paying imposters to take SAT or ACT tests for their children so they could get into elite schools, began her two month prison sentence in November, 2020. 

If you’re following the news lately you may have noticed that the College Board has just dropped the SAT writing and subject tests. They are doing this because Covid has played havoc with testing since last year. At this point, nearly all US universities (including all of the Ivy-League universities) have announced that they won’t require tests like the SAT or ACT for 2021 applicants. Naturally, Covid has a lot to do with this, but it accelerates a trend that was already happening: Many colleges began to phase out requiring test scores years ago, and last spring, the huge University of California system phased out testing permanently. Many think that we may never go back, so now is an important moment to consider how colleges use tests and why many are phasing them out. 

Colleges have used entrance exams for years when it comes to deciding what applicants to let in. Actually, colleges use 3 things to determine who to admit: Cumulative GPA (especially what courses kids took and grades kids earn in high school), standardized test scores, and external factors like a student coming from poverty and overcoming adversity. Don’t confuse college entrance exams with the myriads of state tests we’ve forced kids to take since 2001...those tests can’t be used by colleges since different states use different tests and don’t help students in any way. Generally, colleges have used either the ACT (American College Test) or the SAT (Standard Achievement Test) exams in conjunction with cumulative GPA and the application essay (where kids can identify external factors) to determine which students they accept or deny.

Why use GPA, test scores, and essays to determine who gets in? The primary goal of a College Admittance Counselor is to choose students who have the highest likelihood of graduating college. Most people give college a try in their lives, but nationally only 25% of people get a 4 year degree or higher, so that means all colleges have a high dropout rate. With that in mind, colleges use GPA, test scores, and application essays as predictors of whether students will graduate or drop out. Let’s consider each predictor for a moment:

• Students’ cumulative GPA (and transcripts) is a good predictor because if a student took challenging courses like AP and Dual Credit courses in high school and maintained a good GPA throughout, it’s a good sign she is a hard worker and is going to be fine with the rigor of college courses.

• Test Scores are a predictor because they are indicators of basic academic skills in reading, writing, and math. If a student does well on the SAT or ACT, it’s considered a good indicator that he won’t struggle with the academic material he’ll encounter in college.

• Application Essays let the college know about extenuating circumstances. If an applicant writes that she picked crops in the fields and moved from town to town yet also graduated with a high GPA, you have a kid who deals well with adversity and pressure, a good predictor she’ll finish college. 

Those are the 3 basic standards all colleges use for admittance, but for years now colleges have said that GPA and the Applications Essays are much better predictors of how students will do in college than test scores. As an educator, I’ve had access to student test scores for many years, and this points out something I already know: there is not a very strong correlation between test scores and grades. 

In my school, we do a lot of direct academic interventions when kids aren't earning credit. A few years ago we tried to tie these interventions to the standardized achievement tests that all students took. We thought that there would be a direct correlation between test score and student grades, but that wasn’t the case: To our dismay, we discovered that some of the students with the highest test scores had the lowest grades, and some of the students with the lowest test scores had the highest grades. If we tied our academic interventions to test scores, we would be trying to intervene on some kids who were passing courses and would have to ignore others who were failing but had high test scores. This didn't make sense. 

While test scores may seem to indicate basic academic proficiency, passing courses requires hard work and effort, and tests don’t measure that. So why do colleges say that GPA matters more than test scores? Because I imagine that like me, they discovered that there isn’t much of a correlation between test scores and grades once kids get to college, but there is a stronger correlation between high school GPA and college GPA. The same is true with the application essays: if a student has demonstrated ability to overcome adversity in the past, it’s a good indicator that they will also overcome adversity in the future. By the way, doesn’t that make sense? 

Last spring, Covid made giving the SAT and ACT pretty much impossible, so colleges had to adjust and they did that by dropping the testing requirement. This wasn’t hard because an increasing number of colleges had been doing this for years. They had been doing this because they knew their other indicators were better, but there are also two more reasons colleges have cooled on tests. You may remember the Lori Loughlin cheating scandal involving using someone else’s test scores for her two daughters to gain admittance to University of Southern California? Ms Loughlin got caught, but what she did is common practice among rich people getting their kids into elite institutions. Not just American rich people either; rich people from all over the world like their kids attending American colleges, and cheating the SAT or ACT either using imposters or taking the exam in crooked test centers is a lucrative industry. The second reason is that though there isn’t much of a correlation between test scores and GPA, there appears to be a better correlation between test score and socioeconomic status. In other words, that student who picked crops and moved around but still managed good grades is likely to have a mediocre test score.

I think that all adults should read Hans Christian Anderson’s folktale The Emporer’s New Clothes from time to time because we adults often engage in things that are clearly idiotic but we don’t point out the truth because no one else has and we don’t want to be perceived as incompetent. There is a moment in the story when an innocent kid says in front of the crowd, “But he hasn’t got anything on,” and then the whole town cried out at last, “He hasn’t got anything on.” I believe that we are witnessing this kind of moment among our nation’s universities. I personally hope that even after Covid recedes we abolish using test scores for college admittance and that K-12 educators and policy makers take this lesson to heart concerning our own use of standardized exams and the importance we attach to them.