Let's Discuss One Of The Worst Ideas Influential Public Intellectuals Have Embraced Recently
Don’t confuse symptoms with causes
For a long time, the Scholastic Aptitude Test or its sister test, the ACT, were just about mandatory if you wanted to go to apply to solid colleges.
That’s changed a bit in recent years. Both the post–George-Floyd’s-death reckoning and the coronavirus helped supercharge a long-running effort to raise awareness about the supposedly discriminatory nature of this type of standardized testing. By October 2020, CBS was reporting that “A growing number of U.S. colleges and universities are abandoning ACT and SAT scores as part of their admissions process,” and attributing this decision to the fact that the virus led to widespread cancellation of these tests. It proved an excellent opportunity for the test’s opponents to urge universities to experiment with eschewing it altogether.
By January 2023, Inside Higher Ed, among other outlets, was reporting that more than 80% of four-year higher-ed institutions were now at least test-optional. So the movement against these tests has been remarkably successful in a rather short period.
I cannot claim to be an expert on this debate. But my understanding, which I believe to be well-founded, is that 1) the SAT is about the best single tool we have for predicting a high school student’s future college performance, and certainly better than high school GPA, even if it isn’t a perfect or profoundly powerful predictor, but that’s a ridiculous critique because what tool is perfect or profoundly powerful?; 2) while it has produced certain consistent patterns that kids from some races outperform kids from other races, on average, this is in and of itself (obviously) not racist; 3) the downsides to deweighting the SAT, and as a result, more heavily weighting other aspects of the admissions packet, are blazingly obvious and likely to hit poor kids the hardest; and 4) one of those downsides is that standardized tests offer kids from poorer, less “traditional” backgrounds the chance to demonstrate their potential via a widely disseminated and traditionally respected test. (Correction: The bolded sentence originally read “the SAT is about the best single tool we have for predicting a student’s high school performance,” but of course I meant “college performance.” I fixed the sentence post-publication.)
You can read more about all this here, if you’re curious, but from a policy perspective the most important point is the third one, I think. If the SAT is unfair, but other measures are more unfair, it obviously wouldn’t make sense to reform college applications by relying more on those other measures.
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