Jamie Hansard knew something had to give. In mid-March, as the nation was shutting down, she and her colleagues at Texas Tech University asked how they could help applicants for the fall.
Temporarily suspending the institution’s ACT and SAT requirement was a no-brainer, says Hansard, vice president for enrollment management. After all, a wave of canceled test dates meant that high-school seniors without a score wouldn’t be able to get one anytime soon. Texas Tech’s decision allowed about 200 more students to apply without scores before August 1, the university’s final application deadline.
Whether to extend the test-optional policy for the fall 2021 admissions cycle, though, was a thornier question. Texas Tech has an “assured admission” program that guarantees admission to applicants with the required combination of class rank and ACT/SAT scores; applications from students who don’t meet those requirements — about half of the pool — are reviewed holistically.
The university processes nearly 30,000 freshman applications a year. How could an admissions office that had always relied on ACT and SAT scores conduct sound, efficient evaluations of applicants without that information?
“For large publics, this is uncharted territory,” Hansard says. “For so long, the admissions process has been mired down in standardized tests. If you take those scores off the table, what does it look like?”
College officials throughout the nation have been asking themselves the same question as they grapple with the implications of Covid-19. High-school closures and a shortage of testing opportunities have prompted hundreds of selective institutions to adopt test-optional policies, at least for one year — out of necessity, if nothing else. Now, conversations that once happened only at small, private colleges are happening at many big, public universities, too.
Fact: That trend was underway before the pandemic hit. Last winter Indiana University at Bloomington dropped its ACT and SAT requirements. And Northern Illinois University adopted a test-blind policy, announcing that it wouldn’t consider scores for admission or institutional scholarships.
But the pandemic has compelled Hansard and many other enrollment leaders to re-examine the role of standardized tests in ways that they might not have otherwise. That scrutiny is exactly what a sweeping new report from the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC, urges institutions to do in the name of access, equity, and the “public good.”
In June, Texas Tech announced that it would not require test scores — for admission or institutional scholarships — for all fall 2021 applicants. In a conversation this week with The Chronicle, Hansard described the challenges of switching to a test-optional policy on the fly and what she’s learned so far.
In many parts of the country, test-optional is a familiar term. Not so much in Texas, home to many large public universities. Does that present a challenge right now?
Yes. Test-optional is a foreign concept in Texas. Not just for students, but for admissions staffs and college counselors. It’s ingrained in most students and parents that we use a test score to determine an applicant’s academic ability.
That’s why it was important for us to make an announcement about our testing policy early, before the ApplyTexas application opened, on July 1. Most students in our state are just not familiar with test-optional. So it’s our responsibility to communicate to our constituents what it means and how we’re applying it.
At Texas Tech, we had been talking about test-optional for a while. I had a very preliminary conversation with our president about it last fall. We were talking about access and opportunity, our mission to educate the state of Texas. How could we do it better?
Covid-19 gave us the opportunity to stop just saying, “Well, we’ve always done things this way.” Now we’re trying to be brave, to really look at the evolution of college admissions in the 21st century. Our culture is changing. The landscape is changing.
You say the university had been discussing the possibility of dropping test requirements for a while. What kept it from doing so before now?
Tradition, absolutely, is part of it. When you make a decision to change a policy as a university, you have to consider what your peers are doing. In the public-university space in Texas, there has been this analysis paralysis about test-optional. It was a question of who was going to take the jump first.
Also it’s not one person or one office making this decision. It has to be the whole university. That’s so important.
It also comes back to tradition in the sense that test-optional is resource-heavy. When you think about how long the SAT has been around, the question is: How do you take all this objective information away? How do you handle the holistic-review process for students who do not submit test scores versus those who do submit? How do you determine academic ability if you don’t have a score?
How did you go about answering those questions?
We contacted a couple of test-optional universities. What I took away from those conversations was that we needed to start by looking at retention data and working backward to look at students who were academically successful here. The last thing we want to do is bring in a student and have that student not succeed.
When we looked back at historical data over the past three to five years, what we found supported a lot of the research out there: A test score wasn’t the be-all, end-all predictor of student success. When we analyzed those classes, breaking them down by SAT-score bands, we found that students’ performance in high school was much more powerful in indicating academic success and persistence at Texas Tech. High-school transcripts were a much better indicator than a test score over all.
That was especially true when we looked at students in the lower score bands. Let’s say there was a student with a 4.0 high-school grade-point average, but who maybe scored below our SAT average, with a 970 or 1000. The data confirmed that if we had been basing decisions solely on test scores, we would have been denying students who, based on their academic profile, have been extremely successful at Texas Tech.
Did that surprise you?
I wasn’t surprised. If anything, I felt affirmed by that information. We’ve never admitted students strictly off a test score.
In our research every year we look at retention and graduation rates. We had just never looked at it through the lens of “What does a test score mean to us?” We had never taken the test score out. When we put that score on the shelf and looked at all these other factors, it affirmed that we were making the right decision in our holistic reviews.
The other takeaway for us was the importance of looking at students’ intended majors more critically than we had in the past. If a student was interested in a STEM program, we saw that we needed to pay a lot of attention to their performance in STEM-related courses. It’s important to really dig into high-school transcripts more than we have done in the past.
If the only thing you’re looking at is high-school GPA, that brings a whole set of complications, because different schools use different grading scales; some weight grades and others do not. So we took GPA and stripped it back to look at the core curriculum. Then we looked at commonalities among students who succeed here, examining small versus large schools, public versus private, grades in certain classes, Advanced Placement scores. We got a clearer picture of how all those factors indicate success here.
How many students have applied without test scores for the fall 2021 so far? And what’s your early impression of the test-optional experiment?
About 45 percent have applied test-optional. That’s to be expected because there really haven’t been many ACT and SAT tests offered.
For us in admissions, some assumptions have been removed.When you take away a test score, you don’t assume that because this applicant got a 1400 on the SAT, they’re going to be an amazing student. Or that because this applicant scored a 900, they’re not going to be successful.
Without a test score, you just have to look at what the student is providing to you. While it’s more difficult having to dive into that application file so much more than we ever have, it’s freeing to not have to center the decision around that score.
This week, NACAC’s report urged colleges to consider the impact of their testing requirements on “the student experience.” Those policies can affect students’ behavior, even their well-being.
Yes. There are a lot of students who don’t have the score that, in their mind, they need. For some students, there’s this number that makes them feel less than. When you take that worry away from them, it does something to their feeling of self-worth. I think that’s a really important factor to talk about.
Students use test scores to compare themselves with others. Parents do it. High-school counselors do it. From the minute high school starts, students are talking about tests. So there’s a lot of anxiety in a 17- and 18-year-old’s mind because of them.
How do we shift that thought? We do it through transparency and education.
What do you mean by that?
One takeaway for us is the importance of looking at students individually and no longer putting them in groups academically. So we’re expressing to them that if they apply test-optional, they really need to provide supplemental information: personal statements, essays, letters of recommendation, things that help demonstrate how they will be academically successful. We have tried to over-communicate this, not only to students, but to counselors and parents, so they understand what the test-optional process looks like.
When admissions-leadership teams make decisions, they don’t always communicate them clearly to the staff members who are talking with families. There can be a lot of information that gets lost in translation. That’s where the distress starts. If something is new, miscommunication can make it worse, and people defer back to “I’ve got to submit test scores because that’s the only thing I know.”
For colleges and universities, too, test-optional can seem mysterious, even scary. What would you say to other large public universities that have dropped their ACT and SAT requirement for one year or more as a result of Covid-19? And what would you say to institutions that haven’t made that move?
To the institutions that haven’t made this decision, I would ask: How are you going to have an applicant pool? Because if students can’t take a test, how are they going to apply? I don’t think you have an option at this point.
Institutions have to be brave. You have to take that leap of faith. In admissions, we sometimes put ourselves in a box, and then we can’t think outside of it. People get mired down in thinking, “This is impossible, there’s no way we can do this without test scores.” That concern stems from volume — the volume of applicants, the volume of time it would take to individually review all these files.
Half of our 30,000 applications were already being holistically reviewed. This year, that percentage is going to increase, and that will require additional resources. But if we’re thinking about what’s best for students, it doesn’t matter how much more time and work it might take. What’s important for your institution, your institution will make time for.
Ultimately, this decision gives you the opportunity to re-evaluate what you’re doing. If, in the end, you decide your institution shouldn’t be test-optional, it’s almost certain you will have found certain things in your process that you could be doing better.
Texas Tech is calling its test-optional policy a one-year pilot. How will you evaluate its impact? And what’s the likelihood of its becoming a permanent policy?
It’s difficult to change a policy forever based on one year. My hope is to continue to be test-optional at least for this next cohort, to see what the actual impact is on persistence and retention. The question will be: Did we create more opportunities for students? And were they able to succeed?
If not, we would need to re-evaluate what we’re doing. But if we have done what’s right for students, then, for me, it would be a no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we make this permanent?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
