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Alderman, vice provost for enrollment management at St. Mary’s University, in San Antonio, is just one leader at one small institution. But she’s been weighing the same question that many college officials have been considering during this tumultuous admissions cycle: Which standardized-testing policy is best for the long haul?
Since the pandemic began, many institutions have adopted a test-optional policy, allowing applicants to submit scores if they choose. St. Mary’s announced this week that it’s going a step further by becoming test-free, removing the ACT and SAT from all admissions and aid decisions.
Dozens of colleges have made the same move over the last year or so. In February 2020, right before Covid-19 shut down everything, tiny Hampshire College, in Amherst, Mass., was the only test-free institution in the nation. (Northern Illinois University had just announced a plan to follow suit, starting with the 2020-21 admissions cycle.)
But the pandemic shook up the status quo: In the end, 69 institutions had test-free policies for applicants seeking fall-2021 admission, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, known as FairTest. Though it’s too soon to say how many colleges will be test-free for the fall of 2022 and beyond, the once-exotic policy has become much more familiar.
That doesn’t mean it’s an easy path to choose. Whatever your view of test-free admissions, know this: Deciding to strip the ACT and SAT out of the entire process is a major chore requiring thoughtful deliberation, a trove of institutional data, and a long checklist of questions. It’s by no means as simple as flipping a switch from “test-optional” to “test-free,” as officials at St. Mary’s could tell you.
Alderman, who started at the Texas university as an assistant director of residence life in 1993, always saw high test scores as a byproduct of privilege. But she didn’t understand how large a role those scores played in the St. Mary’s admissions and aid process until she joined the enrollment division, in 2008. The university, which had required the ACT or SAT for as long as anyone could remember, used a relatively cut-and-dried formula to determine eligibility for admission and non-need-based scholarships: High-school grades and test scores drove those decisions.
That combination made sense to Alderman despite her concern about the weight of ACT/SAT scores. After all, the St. Mary’s process was efficient. And it was more or less the way admissions was done on many campuses. Especially in Texas, full of universities that relied heavily on test scores.
Moreover, at St. Mary’s — a tuition-dependent, Hispanic-serving institution enrolling many first-generation and low-income students — the annual push to bring in a class and meet revenue goals is intense. How much time and energy was there for innovation? “There’s a lot of pressure for a college like ours,” Alderman says. “We can only tweak so many things.”
Still, Alderman often thought about the human implications of testing requirements and financial-aid leveraging strategies that reward applicants who have high scores. On recruiting trips to her native Puerto Rico, she met students with top-notch grades who were interested in social justice and changing the world. These were students for whom, like many applicants in Texas, English was a second language. “They were excellent in everything,” Alderman says, “but they didn’t have the best test scores.”
For that reason alone, Alderman knew, those applicants wouldn’t be eligible for the university’s most-generous scholarships. “There was really no option for them,” Alderman says. “Following our admissions guidelines, I didn’t have any flexibility to go off-script.”
All of a sudden, St. Mary’s, like many other institutions, had to devise a different way to assess students. One adjustment: requiring test-optional applicants to submit a recommendation letter and complete a résumé using a template the university created.
That was fine for a small group of applicants. But as Alderman and her colleagues looked ahead to the 2020-21 cycle, they imagined the challenge of combing through thousands of PDF résumés. They concluded that the résumé was too confining for applicants, who had no place to describe after-school commitments such as taking care of a grandmother several hours a week. And Alderman worried that the information didn’t lend itself to objective assessment.
“It was incomplete and too much at the same time,” Alderman says. “It was indicative of us not trusting test-optional at first.”
After deciding to extend the test-optional policy for fall-2021 applicants due to Covid-19, St. Mary’s officials worked through the growing pains that often accompany shifts in admission requirements. They considered thorny questions, such as whether it would be fair to look at the academic strength of an applicant’s high school. Yes, they decided, but it wouldn’t carry too much weight. Students would have the option of submitting a résumé, essay, and recommendation.
Before application-review season commenced, the admissions staff completed implicit-bias training to prepare for a more-subjective review process. It was eye-opening, says Alderman, who came to a realization that some of her peers at other colleges might be afraid to admit: “Holistic review scared the crap out of me. The question was: How subjective are we going to be? Does it put us in a more precarious place than leaning on test scores?”
In its first full year without an ACT/SAT requirement, St. Mary’s doubled down on applicants’ high-school transcripts, looking carefully at their grades, their course selection, and the connection between those courses and their chosen major. For the first time, the admissions staff factored class rank into the scoring of applicants, though it played a small role. Some students were sure-fire admits; others, like the one who had excelled after a rough year as a high-school freshman, required a closer look.
The new process at St. Mary’s meant saying goodbye to “the grid.” It was a chart the university started posting on its website several years ago to allow applicants to see the ranges of grade-point averages and test scores they would need to be admitted. They could also see that if they had X GPA and Y ACT/SAT score, they would get a scholarship worth Z dollars (the university awarded additional need-based grants in a separate process after admission). The straightforward transparency of the grid, Alderman says, proved helpful to applicants worried about the cost of attending the university, which has a $50,000 annual sticker price (the average net price for students receiving aid is less than half that sum, according to federal data).
For fall-2021 applicants, St. Mary’s officials knew that a more holistic review process would not lend itself to a chart or rubric, especially because many students wouldn’t be sending scores. So the scholarship grid came down. “That felt like a risk,” Alderman says. “The grid had worked well for us.”
This time around, St. Mary’s ran a two-lane process. If an applicant submitted scores, the university considered them for admission and scholarships. If an applicant didn’t submit scores, the university considered everything else for both.
Before the next admissions cycle began, St. Mary’s would have to decide if a half-in, half-out testing policy made sense.
St. Mary’s officials had already been thinking about how their scholarship policies might change before the pandemic. Covid just made the discussions more urgent. For months, the question of affordability loomed over recent discussions of testing requirements.
“In some cases over the years, that merit scholarship was making or breaking a student’s ability to come here,” Alderman says. “For us, this really turned into a conversation about trying to more equitably award our scholarships. The higher the test score, the more merit aid a student gets, the more it’s likely we’re giving aid to a student who doesn’t need it.”
During a meeting several months ago, Tony Sarda, director of undergraduate admission, asked his colleagues a question: “Is there room for us to consider going test-free?”
No one objected. The question, though, was how the university would know if test-free were the right path. Alderman told Sarda the answer would depend on sound data. So he helped gather it.
Sarda knows his way around numbers. In his previous job, at Lamar University, in Beaumont, Tex., he scoured internal data and found that students’ high-school grades and class rank reliably predicted their first- and second-year retention rates, but that the SAT didn’t add any predictive value. Two students with the same GPA and a 100-point difference in scores were just as likely to persist. Those findings helped persuade Lamar to drop its testing requirements last year for good.
At St. Mary’s, Sarda helped lead a deep dive into institutional data, which revealed this: For 80 to 85 percent of first-time students at St. Mary’s, test scores provided no additional predictive value in first- to second-year retention beyond what an applicant’s high-school transcript revealed. For a small group of students — applicants with lower GPAs and higher test scores — the scores were helpful on that count, Sarda says.
But was that enough to justify a test requirement? No, Sarda thought.
“I was OK losing the marginal added value of what testing gave me for a small population of students, and making life easier for all students,” Sarda says. “I had to ask myself, Why are we adding to the stress students experience in the admissions process by putting on a pedestal this idea that you are defined by this one score you make on one Saturday of your life?”
To help St. Mary’s assess the desirability of a test-free policy, Sarda had enlisted the help of Enrollment Research Associates. He also hired Akil Bello, senior director of advocacy and advancement at FairTest, as a consultant.
In weekly Zoom meetings, Bello posed many questions to Sarda. One concerned the university’s mission and level of selectivity. St. Mary’s admitted 79 percent of its applicants for the fall of 2019, and 84 percent for the fall of 2020. Why had a college-access engine ever required test scores in the first place?
“Especially at institutions with higher admit rates, you have to ask if the test is really an academic indicator or just a random hoop to jump through,” Bello says. “We spend a lot of time debating as a society whether we should get rid of tests instead of reversing the conversation and asking how the test is performing. It can’t be, ‘We’ve been using it for a while, therefore it must be good.’”
Bello encouraged Sarda to consider a permanent test-optional policy instead of test-free one. That way, applicants who are proud of their ACT or SAT scores could still submit them. After all, those scores might help them. Why take that choice away?
But Sarda heard a different view from Tara Miller, a longtime college counselor in Austin, Tex., whom he had invited to participate in the weekly meetings. He wanted to hear her in-the-trenches perspective on how testing policies affect students.
Calling something optional doesn’t actually make it so, Miller told him. “This process is so driven by colleges, and students have been taught to fall in line,” she says. “You give students a choice, and they feel like they still have to jump through the hoop. If you remove the hoop, it’s not ambiguous anymore.”
Over the last year, St. Mary’s contacted several prospective students whose applications were complete except for an ACT or SAT score, but who had not selected the test-optional path. When admissions officers explained that the students were free to choose whether to submit scores or not, some seemed skeptical: “Is this a trick?”
Simply put, test scores are tied up in the systems colleges use to protect their bottom line and keep their business wheels turning. The numbers underpin the statistical models institutions use to predict yield — the percentage of accepted students who enroll — as well as net revenue. And to leverage aid.
Under a test-optional policy, St. Mary’s had to adjust its scholarship-eligibility thresholds to (a) preserve an equitable means of distributing aid to students and (b) ensure that the university didn’t exceed its aid budget. In turn, the institution had to adjust the predictive models it uses to enroll a first-year class.
“What we didn’t know was if we could still hit the discount rate we have to hit when we apply a whole new way of looking at students,” Alderman says. “That was the gamble.”
So far, so good, Alderman says. As of mid-May, the university’s discount rate was holding steady compared with last year’s. St. Mary’s expects to enroll a class of 580, up from 514 last fall. Though applications were down slightly from 2020, they were on pace with 2019, when it received just under 5,000. The university’s yield rate was 15 percent, up from 10 percent at the same point last spring.
To date, 75 percent of accepted students were evaluated under a test-optional policy. The high-school GPA for the incoming class is the same as the previous year’s. About 40 percent are eligible for Pell Grants. Those results assured Alderman and Sarda that St. Mary’s can make sound decisions without test scores.
In the end, St. Mary’s officials decided to make a clean break from the ACT and SAT. They didn’t want students to second-guess whether a test-optional policy was really optional.
This spring, the university’s leadership approved a test-free policy, starting for applicants for fall-2022 admission. With that, St. Mary’s became the first institution in Texas to cut the ACT and SAT out of its process.
Alderman, who oversaw the university’s retention efforts in her previous position, was struck by the finding that, for most students, ACT and SAT scores didn’t help St. Mary’s predict persistence. She came to see the test-centric status quo as more precarious than trying something new. Though she suspects some prospective students steeped in the culture of testing might write off St. Mary’s because it’s now test-free, she hopes it appeals to students, particularly disadvantaged ones, who otherwise might not apply.
Still, there’s uncertainty. While Alderman would welcome more applications, she says, she can’t guarantee that a test-free policy will improve the university’s market position. “Can I tell you that this decision will translate to more students? I can’t.” There are also still many details to hammer out, such as the best way to determine course placement for students who don’t submit scores.
Recently, admissions officials at other colleges have asked Sarda what should be used in place of the ACT and SAT. It’s a logical question, especially if one thinks in terms of a recipe: Typically, when you take one major ingredient out, you need to swap something else in.
But that’s the wrong way to look at it, Sarda says. “Needing to replace the test with something else means that it told us something critical to begin with,” he says. “We just don’t find that to be the case.”
Examining test requirements has made Sarda question the entire admissions process. What other means of defining a qualified applicant are ripe for reconsideration? “We need to be making space as admissions professionals to ask questions of ourselves,” he says, “even when the answers might make us uncomfortable.”
On any campus, a testing policy is just one piece of the big enrollment puzzle. Colleges now scrutinizing their testing policies must decide whether the option they choose will mark the end of the discussion or the beginning of a broader one about how the admissions and aid process should evolve.
