This past year might be remembered in the annals of education as the beginning of the end for standardized testing. Institutions long venerated for their academic quality, such as Colby College and the University of Chicago, have become new disciples of the test-optional movement, with the University of California considering such a move systemwide. But as is the case with many educational fads, ideology can often eclipse substance.
Perhaps the greatest charge levied against standardized testing is that it routinely disqualifies otherwise capable disadvantaged students from the admissions process. It is worth noting, however, that the proposed alternatives — emphasizing high-school transcripts, extracurricular activities, and letters of recommendations — would do little to address that accusation.
Students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who tend to either be underrepresented minorities or hail from economically depressed regions, have probably been educated in elementary and secondary schools that cannot compete in terms of the impressive array of courses found in their more affluent public- or independent-school peers. Nor does this population have access to chic extracurriculars and international service trips that can dazzle admissions officers. Moreover, the opportunity to work in superstar internships, where a letter of recommendation from an alumnus can grab the attention of admissions gatekeepers, is well beyond the reach of many of those students.
Regrettably, some of the most underprivileged schools are so woefully bereft of resources that they barely have enough desks for students or an adequate supply of teachers, let alone extra money to invest in varsity crew and squash teams. For those students, standardized testing is the best way for them to compete on equal footing. Interestingly, the very same test-optional institutions require international and home-schooled students to submit standardized-test scores, signaling that administrators are acutely aware of their own policy’s limitations.
The barriers for disadvantaged students do not evaporate after admission. Because most of those students cannot shoulder the burden of ever-increasing tuition, they rely on as much aid as possible. However, while many test-optional institutions may not require standardized-test scores for admission, those applicants may be at a disadvantage when being considered for merit-based aid.
Adding to those students’ financial woes, upon enrollment, they must often take remedial courses, which do not count toward a degree but still cost money. All things considered, what appears to be a blessing to disadvantaged students by way of test-optional admissions quickly turns into an academic and financial boondoggle.
The test-optional movement has even seeped into the world of graduate education. Regrettably, as is the case in much of higher education, reputation and rankings matter. Graduate departments prefer candidates who have gone to what they believe to be the best colleges, and in the absence of some standardized metric such as the GRE, graduate admissions will face the same problems as their undergraduate counterparts.
Another criticism of standardized testing is that it fails to predict first-year grades at either the undergraduate or graduate level. That is true — not because standardized tests are inaccurate measurement instruments, but because grade inflation has made it virtually impossible to accurately predict academic quality to any substantial degree. At the undergraduate level, A’s have become so ordinary that they now constitute 43 percent of grades awarded, with D’s and F’s accounting for less than 10 percent. Even at the graduate level, an A has become the de facto grade and the C a proxy for outright failure.
That lax grading has led to a statistical irony of sorts. Standardized testing is grounded in the field of psychometrics, which uses rigorous statistical analyses to measure mental capacity. Standardized-test scores are thus normed to a virtually perfect bell curve that accounts for the breadth of content, level of skill mastery, and difficulty of questions based on the entire population of test takers, past and present.
However, when that perfect distribution of standardized-test scores is compared to the highly skewed distribution of grades in higher education, there is little commonality between the two curves. Consequently, this leads to the flawed impression that the former does not accurately predict the latter when, in fact, the problem does not lie with the scientific development and scoring of standardized tests, but with the highly subjective and inconsistent nature of grading in higher education.
The claims against standardized testing overlook a fundamental point: It is not testing that needs re-evaluation but curricular and instructional quality in higher-education programs. Rather than using standardized-testing data to implement a rigorous and coherent program of study, complete with improvements in instruction, higher education has opted for the path of least resistance — discarding the measurement tool altogether.
Moreover, while many educators lament what they believe to be standardized testing’s outsize role in the admission process, it is important to keep in mind that this is not the fault of standardized testing per se, but of the cryptic formulas designed by admissions offices to evaluate candidates. The lawsuit over the admissions process at Harvard University illustrates the whimsical nature of admissions, in which candidates with strong standardized-test scores are dismissed for arbitrary personality traits.
If educators are serious about improving academic standards, they should see standardized testing as an ally rather than a foe, raising the bar instead of eliminating it altogether. Anything less would be what a former president, George W. Bush, once described as “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Ethan S. Ake-Little is a Ph.D. candidate in urban education at Temple University.
