Colleges should scrutinize their standardized-testing requirements and determine whether those policies serve the public good. They should regularly assess the extent to which ACT and SAT scores help predict student outcomes and publicly share the results. And they should offer applicants “simplicity and clarity” about the role of tests in “a time of complexity and heightened anxiety about the college admission process.”
Those recommendations come from a report released on Tuesday by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC. It urges colleges to consider how standardized tests can undermine college access and equity. That longstanding concern has intensified since Covid-19 disrupted the entire education system, preventing many students from taking the ACT and SAT.
This is a time to consider the well-being of higher education instead of just looking at your own institutional interests.
The report was written by a special panel of admissions officials and college counselors who originally set out to examine testing challenges faced by applicants outside the United States. After Covid-19 arrived, the panel expanded its focus to examine the implications of the pandemic on the use of standardized tests more broadly.
Their report, “Ensuring All Students Have Access to Higher Education: The Role of Standardized Testing in the Time of Covid-19 and Beyond,” offers an especially robust rendering of the huge role that the ACT and SAT play in higher education’s complex ecosystem, an issue that The Chronicle described in a recent in-depth article. Unlike many mealy-mouthed documents that line the shelves of academe, the new report — a clearly worded call to action — has the urgency of a blaring alarm.
Though the unprecedented crisis has prompted hundreds of colleges to at least temporarily adopt test-optional policies (out of necessity, if not conviction), the panel sought to frame fundamental questions about tests that might have lasting answers. After the pandemic recedes, “we cannot simply ‘go back to normal,’” the report says. “The tenuous grasp we hold on many of our habits and policies has been further loosened, and we must adapt if we are to continue to fulfill our duty to the public good.”
John F. Latting, associate vice provost for enrollment and dean of admission at Emory University, served as the panel’s chairman. Its goal, he told The Chronicle on Monday, wasn’t to tell colleges which testing policies to adopt. Rather, it was to encourage officials to evaluate the reasons behind their choices.
“This is not a time to leave unexamined your policies and processes,” he said. “If you’re an enrollment leader, president, or provost, there’s a responsibility on your shoulder to be willing to do things in a different way, with the public interest squarely in view. It’s not just a practical point, it’s an ethical point. This is a time to consider the well-being of higher education instead of just looking at your own institutional interests.”
The panel’s report raises many questions about testing requirements. Perhaps none is bigger than this: In the final tally, are ACT and SAT requirements really worth it? Sure, the scores from those exams might help your college predict student outcomes, such as first-year grade-point averages.
But do such benefits, the panel asks, outweigh the drawback of a heavy reliance on those exams? “It is up to institutions to determine whether admission tests add sufficient value to the admission process to justify the social and monetary costs.”
The report recommends that colleges should:
- Consider the public good. Evaluate how institutional policies and practices affect higher education — and whether they help expand college access to more students.
- Be student-centered. Articulate clear testing policies and recognize that Covid-19 has exacerbated existing inequities among applicants that are likely to endure, or increase, if traditional testing policies return.
- Focus on students’ success. Review historical data on enrolled students to clarify the factors that contribute to specific outcomes.
- Be transparent. Provide “clearly stated explanations” for testing decisions, sharing data that guided institutional policies, as well as data resulting from policy changes or continuations.
- Review frequently. Commit to regular assessments of institutional data that underpin testing policies.
- Consider unintended consequences. The report describes external assessments such as the ACT and SAT as a “counterweight” to information from high schools.
If there’s a strong movement away from using standardized tests in admissions, Latting said, “we need to be honest about how that would be taking away an external assessment that students receive, and there are dangers there. There are layers to this. External assessment is a pretty good thing, as a concept. The test-optional movement addresses some, but not all of the problems associated with standardized testing requirements.”
Though plenty of college officials surely would surely agree that external assessments are good in theory, in practice they’re riddled with existential problems, as the report underscores in numerous passages. Consider, for instance, all the students outside the United States who lack access to standardized tests and must — if they can afford it — travel to other countries just to bubble in the answers to multiple-choice questions on exams required by American colleges (really, you should read about international students’ experiences on page 15).
Latting, who said he had long appreciated the benefits of standardized tests, described how his experience on the panel helped him become “more awakened to the costs and the downsides” of ACT and SAT requirements. “I’ve long felt that these instruments were potentially good tools that, like any tool, can be misused,” he said. “What I did not appreciate is how difficult it can be for some students to meet our test-score requirements without any issue and have them transmitted to colleges and universities in America. I just wasn’t aware that people are getting on airplanes to fly to testing sites. We have not grown up with our applicant pool.”
Now, in the Covid-19 era, domestic high-school students are experiencing some of the same challenges that have long been familiar to international students. From California to Georgia, there just aren’t enough test-center seats to go around. As a result, students with the means have trekked across state lines since March just to take the ACT or SAT amid a raging deadly virus. That has led some admissions officials to question the ethics of clinging to testing requirements during a pandemic.
“The straw that broke the camel’s back was when students recently went to take the ACT and contracted Covid,” Angel B. Pérez, NACAC’s new CEO, said in an interview on Monday.
“Testing is so deeply embedded in our culture that young people are willing to put their lives at risk because they’re worried that if they don’t they will be disadvantaged in the admissions process. That is deep. What power do we have to say, ‘Enough is enough’?”
Pérez, who was previously vice president for enrollment and student success at Trinity College in Connecticut, believes that the admissions profession has reached a pivotal moment in its longstanding relationship with college-entrance tests.
“It’s not just the pandemic,” Pérez said, “it’s a perfect intersection of variables coming together. We as a profession realize that these exams aren’t moving us in the direction of serving the public good and being student-centered. We’ve reached this level of true exhaustion with testing, and we now have much more national research and data that shows its inequities, how testing favors the wealthy.”
The exhaustion Pérez describes is real. Though opinions of standardized tests vary among admissions and enrollment officials, it’s easy to find those who are frustrated by the importance that many institutional leaders attribute to ACT and SAT results. Some describe a constant struggle to convince presidents and trustees that slight rise or fall in an incoming class’s test scores is insignificant.
Back in 2008, as true admissions nerds will remember, NACAC released a sweeping report on the use of standardized tests. Though the document, written by a panel of admissions experts, stopped short of condemning ACT and SAT requirements, it urged colleges to regularly scrutinize their testing requirements, to stop using minimum scores for scholarships, and to ensure that admissions policies account for inequities among applicants, including access to test preparation.
The new report echoes many of those recommendations. But this time around, the words are sharper, the tone is more forceful, and the suggested actions more concrete.
The report suggests that colleges requiring the ACT and SAT should conduct regular “predictive validity” studies and share the results; report the middle 50th percentile of test scores for admitted students and consider more transparent reporting to allow students to assess their prospects for admission; and weigh the impact of score policies on “the student experience.”
When is the last time you thought about how your college’s testing policies might encourage teenagers to take the exams again and again — and how that might affect their lives?
Colleges that don’t require the ACT and SAT, the report says, should clearly explain the rationale for test-optional policies and acknowledge that “certain populations of students may still feel an obligation to submit scores”; explain exceptions to test-optional policies (such as for scholarship consideration); share outcomes data by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, financial aid, and high school type; and “provide clear guidance about how applicants will be evaluated” if they don’t submit test scores.
The report is lined with several “Call to Action” items. Those include urging college-ranking outfits to remove class-rank and standardized-testing variables from its methodologies; asking colleges to consider how rankings and other “reputational” considerations shape their testing policies; and requesting more information from testing agencies.
As the report explains in Appendix D, the panel sought information from the ACT and College Board that it thought should be “publicly and easily available to accurately define the student and secondary school experience with testing.” But those organizations, the report said, did not respond to the panel’s questions in a timely fashion. NACAC and its members, the panel recommended, should “pursue this information over time … in order to further inform the professional discussion.”
Over all, the report reflects an inherent tension in admissions: Testing agencies are major players in the entire process. In an introduction to the report, Latting writes that 2020 “is a year to partner with the College Board and ACT on test administration and fairness for students and secondary schools the world over.”
Yet some passages seem to echo widespread frustrations with those same agencies. Colleges, the report says, “have effectively entrusted the College Board and ACT with the authority of serving as a third-party certifier of students’ qualification for admission. But as the college-going population has grown and diversified, “testing agencies have not been able to ensure that access to and availability of test administrations, the quality of the testing experience, and the integrity and validity of test scores are preserved consistently.”
In a written statement, the College Board said: “Colleges understand that due to the pandemic there are limited opportunities for students to take a college entrance exam. The College Board has urged colleges to be flexible in admissions for the upcoming admissions cycle. In the longer term, as the admissions process is able to stabilize post-covid-19, we will support our higher ed members as they transition back to requiring test scores, or as they implement permanent new policies. We have always advocated that colleges use test scores in context, as one part of a holistic admissions process, to make more equitable and inclusive admissions decisions.”
The ACT also issued a written statement, saying: “While many of the claims in this report are not supported by longstanding ACT and external research, we invite an open and honest discussion with members of the NACAC task force as a next step in our continued collaboration with college admissions professionals. Our desire is to engage more closely with stakeholders who are involved in the college admission process, to honestly examine the critical issues outlined in this report.”
Robert A. Schaeffer, interim executive director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, known as FairTest, said NACAC’s report provides useful guidance to colleges.
“NACAC is on target in posing the fundamental question about the ACT and SAT: ‘Does the value justify the costs?’” he wrote in an email. “Prescription drugs must demonstrate that they are safe and effective before they can be widely used. Similarly, the burden of proof should be on the testing industry and admissions offices that require scores to show that the exams are fair, accurate and useful. Based on the evidence reinforced by the new NACAC report, current undergraduate admissions tests fail to meet these basic standards.”
The panel’s report isn’t a list of solutions. But it’s a document full of timely, compelling questions that help capture the tradeoffs inherent in testing.
In its recent article, The Chronicle asked: “If an admissions policy disproportionately harms low-income and underrepresented minority students, is it right, in this broken world, to cling to that policy?”
The report puts it like this: “If standardized testing perpetuates or worsens inequities, and if it is to remain a part of the undergraduate admissions process at all, it must receive the most stringent of reviews.”
