The Faux Righteousness of Test-Optional Admissions

Standardized testing’s stranglehold over college admissions is breaking. The inability of millions of students to sit for the SAT and ACT exams in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic has pushed hundreds of colleges to stop requiring prospective students to submit their scores. While Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and others have made it clear that this is just a short-term solution, many more colleges are rethinking the value of the tests to their admissions practices for the long term.

College leaders at these institutions are finally acknowledging what critics of standardized testing have been saying for years: That the SAT and ACT don’t provide much predictive value in determining which students will succeed in college; that the tests serve as a barrier to low-income and minority students who tend to score lower than their more wealthy and white peers; and that the exams have created a test-taking frenzy in affluent communities where wealthier families hire high-paid coaches and tutors to help their children learn the tricks of the tests, so they can artificially inflate their scores.

While some brave colleges, such as the California Institute of Technology, Catholic University of America, Dickinson College, some University of California campuses, and the entire California State University system, have chosen not to consider test scores at all, most colleges are taking a middle-ground approach known as “test optional” admissions. Going test optional means it is up to prospective students to decide whether to submit their scores.

Going test optional is not new. Bowdoin College stopped requiring students to submit standardized test scores in 1969. Bates College joined Bowdoin in 1984. Then, for years, these two liberal-arts colleges in Maine stood pretty much alone. But over the past decade, as concerns about standardized testing have grown, a test-optional movement has gained significant momentum. Before the pandemic hit, more than 1,000 colleges had chosen to go test optional, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest). Since March, at least another 500 colleges have joined them.

Typically, when a college decides to go test optional, its leaders say the institution is doing so to become more socioeconomically and racially diverse. For example, that’s the line Laurie Koehler, then George Washington University’s senior associate provost for enrollment management, offered in 2015 when announcing the university’s move to test optional: “The test-optional policy should strengthen and diversify an already outstanding applicant pool,” she wrote, “and will broaden access for those high-achieving students who have historically been underrepresented at selective colleges and universities, including students of color, first-generation students, and students from low-income households.”

A paradox emerges in such statements. Despite recognizing that these tests disadvantage low-income and minority students and do not provide much predictive value, advocates for test-optional admissions say it is appropriate for colleges to continue allowing high-scoring students to submit their scores. “Going test optional is a great option because it empowers students to put their best foot forward in presenting their talents,” Robert Schaeffer, interim executive director of FairTest, told me when I interviewed him last year. In other words, students should be allowed to submit scores if it helps them make their case for why they should be admitted.

But recent reporting in The Chronicle and elsewhere shows why going test optional is nearly as inequitable as requiring students to submit scores. It turns out that students from affluent families don’t really believe that their odds of being accepted at a selective college are just as good whether they submit test scores or not. That’s why so many wealthy families have gone to extraordinary lengths to have their children take the SATs or ACT even in the face of a deadly pandemic, with some jetting around the country to find open testing sites.

“‘Optional’ means nothing to privileged kids,” Adam Ingersoll, a co-founder of a test-preparation firm, recently told the education writer Jeffrey Selingo (a former editor of The Chronicle). “They interpret it as required. It doesn’t matter what the policy of a college is. It’s what’s happening in my local sphere. Are kids in my school, in my town, still trying to take the test? If so, I’m going to do everything I can to get a score.”

Officials at test-optional colleges are well aware that those privileged students, who tend to do best on the test, will continue to submit their scores, and that their institutions benefit from their doing so. The truth is that many colleges that go test optional aren’t sincerely interested in increasing socioeconomic diversity on their campuses. Instead, they choose to go test optional because it allows them to artificially inflate their average SAT and ACT scores, a key component in the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, since generally only students with good scores submit them.

This is a strategy that Miami University, in Ohio, considered pursuing in 2019. As part of its strategic planning process, Susan Schaurer, then the associate vice president for strategic enrollment management and marketing, wrote that the university “could take a bold step toward increasing its rankings in USNWR” by moving to test-optional admissions. Noting that colleges that have done so generally “see increases in their overall academic profile,” she wrote: “This process naturally allows schools that are test optional to submit test scores only for a portion of the applicant pool that chose to submit scores — as they self-selected and saw themselves fitting an already high student profile.”

“If Miami went test optional and retained its merit guarantee, we would likely see a boost in our profile with students who fall within the grid and our admitted-student profile, whereas students who feel outside the grid would likely not submit,” she explained. The university did not move in this direction until the pandemic hit, and the institution is currently test optional for the high-school Class of 2021 only.

It is also important to note that U.S. News tries to guard against this type of manipulation in its rankings — the editors reduce by 15 percent the average standardized-test scores of colleges that receive scores from less than 75 percent of their incoming class. However, many test-optional colleges come in over that threshold, and thus go unpunished.

Miami University is hardly alone in considering moving to test optional for strategic enrollment-management reasons. A 2014 study by researchers at the University of Georgia examined U.S. Department of Education data at 32 selective liberal-arts colleges that have adopted these policies, finding that “test-optional policies overall have not been the catalysts of diversity that many have claimed them to be.” The study did not find any evidence that test-optional colleges had made “any progress” in enrolling greater numbers of low-income or minority students. The study did find, however, that after going test optional, these colleges saw their mean SAT scores rise, on average, by 25 points.

Advocates for test-optional admissions have raised some questions about the study, but even friendlier studies have been unable to find compelling evidence that test-optional colleges have opened their doors wider for low-income students. In 2018, researchers who support the movement released a study in which they compared four-year colleges that have gone test optional with peer institutions that continue to require standardized-test scores. They found that colleges “achieved proportionally greater increases in enrollment” of underrepresented minority students after going test optional, as compared with their peer institutions. However, the results were less impressive for low-income students: half of the newly test-optional colleges surpassed their peers in enrolling Pell Grant recipients, the other half did not, with many losing ground in comparison with peer institutions.

At George Washington University, for instance, the share of freshmen receiving Pell Grants has barely budged since the institution went test optional. Since 2015 (the year it did so), the share of freshmen receiving Pell Grants has fluctuated on a yearly basis in the 13- to 15-percent range.

Questions about their motivations rankle the test-optional movement’s supporters. But if they truly believe that standardized tests do not add value in admissions, systematically disadvantage low-income and minority students, and are easily gamed by students from wealthy families, their colleges should stop considering scores altogether.

Up until this year, colleges had a good excuse for not going “test blind” — or completely ignoring standardized testing. U.S. News refused to include these institutions in its rankings. This year, the editors of the magazine realized that policy was no longer tenable. In June, the magazine announced it would start ranking the colleges. (According to the methodology of its most recent rankings, it continues to unfairly penalize test-blind colleges by assigning them an arbitrarily low average SAT score — “equal to the lowest test score by a ranked school in their category.”)

Since the start of the pandemic, 59 colleges have gone test blind. The leaders of these colleges generally recognize how self-serving and unfair it is to consider only the best scorers. Will others join them?