Research has shown that standardised test scores contain real information, helping to predict college grades, chances of graduation and post-college success. Test scores are more reliable than high school grades, partly because of grade inflation in recent years.
Without test scores, admissions officers sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between applicants who are likely to do well at elite colleges and those who are likely to struggle. Researchers who have studied the issue say that test scores can be particularly helpful in identifying lower-income students and under-represented minorities who will thrive. These students do not score as high on average as students from affluent communities or white and Asian students. But a solid score for a student from a less privileged background is often a sign of enormous potential.
“Standardised test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades,” Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University in the US, recently wrote. Stuart Schmill — the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US — one of the few schools to have reinstated its test requirement — said, “Just getting straight A’s is not enough information for us to know whether the students are going to succeed or not.”
“Test scores have vastly more predictive power than is commonly understood in the popular debate,” said John Friedman, an economics professor at Brown.
Easy to dislike
Given the data, why haven’t colleges reinstated their test requirements? For one thing, standardised tests are easy to dislike. They create stress for millions of teenagers. The tests seem to reduce the talent and potential of a human being to a single number. The SAT’s original name, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, implied a rigour that even its current defenders would not claim. Covid-19 created an opportunity for American society to cast off a tradition that few people enjoyed.
But another part of the explanation involves politics. Standardised tests have become especially unpopular among political progressives, and university campuses are dominated by progressives.
Many consider the tests to be unfair because there are score gaps by race and class. Average scores for modest-income, Black and Hispanic students are lower than those for white, Asian and upper-income students. The tests’ critics worry that reinstating test requirements will reduce diversity. Today, perhaps the strongest argument in favour of the tests is that other parts of the admissions process have even larger racial and economic biases.
A fixed benchmark
The data documenting the predictive power of standardised tests is extensive and growing. In the study of Ivy Plus colleges, Chetty, Deming and Friedman looked at several measures of college success, such as whether students did well enough to earn admission to a top graduate school or be hired by a desirable company. Standardised test scores were a good predictor. The tests create a fixed benchmark that can be more reliable than high school grades, teacher recommendations or extracurricular activities. “The SAT just tells you a lot about how well prepared students are for college,” Sacerdote said.
A question of values
The strongest case against the tests comes from educational reformers who want to rethink elite higher education in fundamental ways. To them, the country’s top colleges should not be trying to identify the very best high school students; instead, they should use their resources to educate a diverse mix of good students and, in the process, lift social mobility.
Comeaux — a professor of higher education at the University of California, Riverside, US, and co-chair of the state’s review of standardised tests — favours this approach. He agrees that the SAT and ACT predict later success. But he prefers a stripped-down admissions system in which colleges set minimum requirements, based largely on high school grades, and then admit students by lottery.
That’s not so different from what many colleges already do.
The SAT debate really comes down to dozens of elite colleges. The people who run these institutions agree that social mobility should be core to their mission, which is why they give applicants credit for having overcome adversity. But the colleges have another mission, as well: excellence.
They want to identify and educate the students most likely to excel.
In today’s politically polarised country, however, the notion that standardised tests are worthless or counterproductive has become a tenet of liberalism. It has also become an example of how polarisation can cause Americans to adopt positions that are not based on empirical evidence.
Intuitively, the progressive position sounds as if it should reduce inequities. But data has suggested that some of these policies may do the opposite, harming vulnerable people. In the case of standardised tests, those people are the lower-income, Black and Hispanic students who would have done well on the ACT or SAT but never took the test because they didn’t have to.
NYTNS
Last updated on 16 Jan 2024
