Forget the hype, never mind the mystique. Whether you see standardized testing as useful or harmful, remember this: Even the most influential exams are mere products, made and marketed by human beings. And when the market changes, products once billed as essential can become obsolete.
The College Board announced on Tuesday that it would discontinue two of its offerings: SAT Subject Tests and the optional essay section of the SAT. Most admissions officers and college counselors will miss them as much as thirsty consumers miss Crystal Pepsi. Not. At. All.
For years, demand for the soon-to-be-scrapped tests has been dwindling. Then Covid-19 upended the admissions realm, limiting students’ access to exams and prompting most colleges to at least temporarily suspend their testing requirements. The pandemic, College Board officials wrote in a blog post, “accelerated a process already underway at the College Board to simplify our work and reduce demands on students.”
Two longtime fixtures in admissions testing are fading out. What might replace them?
Or, one could surmise, global disruption compelled the New York-based testing organization to cut its losses by nixing two flagging product lines, enabling it to double down on its biggest revenue-generating offerings. “We are investing,” the College Board wrote in the blog post, “in a more flexible SAT — a streamlined, digitally delivered test that meets the evolving needs of students and higher education.” The organization said it would share more details of its plans this spring.
And that’s not all. In the future, we might well see further expansion of the organization’s Advanced Placement program, a curriculum-and-testing juggernaut.
But first, a moment of silence for the Subject Tests, which, effective immediately, will no longer be offered in the United States. (There will be two final administrations for international students, in May and June.)
In case you never took them, the multiple-choice exams — given in 20 subjects, including biology, history, and mathematics — were long a means for high-achieving students to load up their college applications with additional evidence of academic prowess. Many of the nation’s most-selective colleges once required or encouraged applicants to submit scores from one or more of the exams.
But those additional requirements — costly and time-consuming — were also a barrier for many low-income students. Over the years, more and more institutions stopped emphasizing the tests, and fewer and fewer students took them. Last March the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it would no longer consider Subject Tests — even if students sent in their scores.
It wasn’t worth the cost, in terms of fair access in practice or principle, to continue to require them.
With fewer applicants taking Subject Tests, the exams “had become somewhat less predictive for us and more exclusive,” Stu Schmill, MIT’s dean of admissions, told The Chronicle last March. “It wasn’t worth the cost, in terms of fair access in practice or principle, to continue to require them. And if we weren’t going to require them from everyone, we didn’t want to consider them for anyone.”
The popularity of the SAT essay, which the College Board once promoted as a game-changer, had faded, too. Back in 2005, under pressure from the University of California system, which sought a way to assess students’ writing ability, the organization added a mandatory essay prompt to its signature exam. It proved more controversial than useful to colleges.
In 2016 the College Board rolled out a revised version of the SAT essay, making it optional. By then, only about one in 10 colleges were requiring it. One testing expert at the time called it “a superficial exercise that encourages students to write formulaically and adds little to a college application.”
In recent years, several big-name colleges stopped requiring the writing sample after finding that it didn’t help in admissions. Last spring the University of California all but killed the essay upon deciding to phase out the ACT and SAT altogether over the next few years.
Students will be able to complete the SAT essay through June. After that, its days as an admissions tool will be over (though it might still be used in states where it’s required for accountability purposes).
The controversial essay lasted a lot longer than the Ford Edsel did, but its demise, too, affirms that even robust marketing campaigns can’t make a product successful.
Anyone in the mood for a free-response question might ask what, if anything, those just-announced changes really mean. One prevalent answer on Tuesday was that life just got a bit easier for aspiring college students, who will have fewer testing options to consider, fewer potential headaches to endure.
Now, it would follow, beleaguered students can devote their time and energy to other things.
“Good riddance,” Tara Miller, a college and career counselor at Stephen F. Austin High School, in Austin, Tex., said of the discontinued tests, which she described as a means of maintaining a culture of exclusivity among colleges that used them.
Extra tests are never about access and opportunity, but rather hurdles to the many students who were already starting the race from behind.
“Extra tests are never about access and opportunity, but rather hurdles to the many students who were already starting the race from behind,” she wrote in a message to The Chronicle. “Students and parents who didn’t have the luxury of personalized counseling and insider knowledge would often miss deadlines to register for these exams, they often lacked access to testing and study guides, and, quite frankly, would find the doors closed to certain colleges before they could even knock.”
Matthew J. DeGreeff had a similar reaction. “This is a big win for college access,” he told The Chronicle. “Kids who do well on these tests tend to come from well-resourced schools. They can test-prep the hell out of these tests and do really well.”
Still, DeGreeff, dean of college counseling and student enrichment at Middlesex School, in Concord, Mass., acknowledged that the shift in the testing market, like most everything in admissions, is complicated.
After all, applicants’ situations vary greatly. Many colleges have long recommended that home-schooled applicants submit scores from Subject Tests or Advanced Placement exams, for instance. Now they’ll have fewer options. The same goes for domestic students applying to prominent colleges in Canada and Britain that either require, encourage, or accept the tests. And at independent schools that have dropped the AP program, Subject Tests are a popular way for students to show that they can handle, say, advanced chemistry or physics.
At Middlesex, top students tend to take four to six Subject Tests to demonstrate their mastery of the school’s intensive courses. But many of the nation’s applicants don’t come from widely known high schools with strong reputations.
DeGreeff, a former Harvard University admissions officer, recalls reading applications from far-flung schools and struggling to gauge a student’s level of preparation. In some cases, high scores on Subject Tests, he said, were “a confirming piece of evidence” that an applicant was capable of succeeding in college.
“These changes are going to put more weight on the applicant’s curriculum, course rigor, and performance in AP and International Baccalaureate courses,” DeGreeff said. “That’s the direction we’re seeing things going already because of Covid.”
Though many counselors applauded Tuesday’s news, Alicia Oglesby called it a “microscopic win.”
Oglesby, director of school and college counseling at Bishop McNamara High School, in Forestville, Md., advises many students of color. Colleges, along with the College Board, she wrote in a message to The Chronicle, long chose to use the exams “after decades of evidence that it disproportionately and negatively affects Black people. So I’m not at all excited.”
Last spring, as the world was shutting down and exams everywhere were being canceled, Adam Ingersoll, founder and principal of Compass Education Group, a college-advising and test-prep firm, made a prediction: “The more the value of standardized testing is diminished,” he told The Chronicle, “the more all of that effort will flow somewhere. Mainly, it will flow to whatever opportunity there is to stand out on a transcript.”
It would inevitably flow, he said, to specialized activities that are understood to reveal an applicant’s academic merit, be it a math competition or Model United Nations. The tests we know and love (or hate) might diminish in stature, but the will to maximize advantages in admissions won’t wane.
On Tuesday, Ingersoll, who broke the news of the College Board’s forthcoming announcement in an early-morning blog post, seemed to echo his previous remarks in an analysis of the changes. Even with no American college requiring Subject Tests for admission this fall, he noted, members of the high-school Class of 2020 took more than 400,000 of them, according to a tally of College Board data Compass published online.
That’s a lot of teenagers, at least within a specific band of applicants, trying hard to stand out.
“This energy has to go somewhere,” Ingersoll wrote. “Some of it will flow to heightened interest in APs and more pressure on schools to make AP-testing opportunities available to students.”
Testing nerds know that AP exams were not designed as admissions tests. But everyone knows that when one product dies, another usually replaces it.