Beware of anyone peddling absolutes about standardized tests. The usefulness of college-entrance exams differs from campus to campus, applicant pool to applicant pool, as plenty of candid admissions officers will tell you.
That’s why William C. Hiss doesn’t describe his latest findings as a definitive answer to an important question: Are test-optional policies a good idea?
Still, Hiss wants everyone to know what those findings suggest. “Frankly, it works,” he says. “Kids who don’t have great test scores, but for whom everything else looks fine, are proving themselves to everyone except the testing agencies.”
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Beware of anyone peddling absolutes about standardized tests. The usefulness of college-entrance exams differs from campus to campus, applicant pool to applicant pool, as plenty of candid admissions officers will tell you.
That’s why William C. Hiss doesn’t describe his latest findings as a definitive answer to an important question: Are test-optional policies a good idea?
Still, Hiss wants everyone to know what those findings suggest. “Frankly, it works,” he says. “Kids who don’t have great test scores, but for whom everything else looks fine, are proving themselves to everyone except the testing agencies.”
Hiss, a former dean of admissions and financial aid at Bates College, is co-author of a new report on the effects of test-optional policies at 28 institutions. Most increased their enrollment of underrepresented minority students after dropping testing requirements, the researchers found. Those outcomes, they write, “occurred without any signs of academic slide,” such as lower graduation rates.
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The report, “Defining Access: How Test-Optional Works,” is based on a study of nearly a million student records from public and private colleges varying by size and selectivity. The researchers examined records consisting of 40 variables for each applicant from (where possible) two cohort years before and two cohort years after colleges enacted a test-optional plan. The goal was to gauge the policy’s impact on applicants as well as students who ended up enrolling. At each stage of the enrollment “funnel,” the researchers compared students who submitted scores with those who did not.
In the tug of war over standardized tests, perhaps no results will pull anyone to the other side. Yet the report bolsters the case that test-optional policies, in tandem with other strategies, can help colleges enhance student diversity without jeopardizing academic quality or other important outcomes. The findings come with a crucial reminder: Colleges are all different, and the results of any policy change may vary among campuses.
“Higher education is diverse — we’re all over the map,” says Steven T. Syverson, assistant vice president for enrollment management at the University of Washington at Bothell and coauthor of the report. “There is not just one truth. There are all these mini-truths out there, and we were trying to capture that.”
As always, you should dive into the numbers and nuances. Meanwhile, here’s what you need to know:
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Nonsubmitters and submitters did comparably well.
These important findings affirm the conclusions from several other studies. Yes, students who didn’t submit ACT/SAT scores had “modestly lower” high-school grade-point-averages (-0.12) than submitters did. Nonsubmitters also had lower first-year GPAs (-0.17), Nonetheless, the two groups graduated at rates similar to, or slightly higher than, submitters.
Moreover, the findings indicate that for nonsubmitters, high-school grades had a stronger correlation with success in college than test scores did (though the researchers had scores for only 27 percent of those students). There was a stronger relationship between test scores and college GPAs for submitters, the researchers found. For nonsubmitters, they write, there was generally a weaker relationship, “essentially under-predicting the college GPA.”
Such findings prompted the authors to call for a broader understanding of student success. “An increasing number of voices,” they write, “are challenging the notion that predicting whether a student is likely to achieve, say a 3.3 GPA versus a 3.2 at the end of their first year in college is synonymous with ‘predicting success in college.’”
As in previous studies, underrepresented students were more likely than other applicants to withhold test scores.
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About a quarter of all students in the study did not submit ACT/SAT scores. Underrepresented minority students, as well as first-generation and Pell-eligible students, were more likely than other students to apply under test-optional plans (35 percent of black students did so, compared with 18 percent of white students). And women were more likely than men to keep their scores under wraps. Generally, nonsubmitters had greater financial need than submitters did.
During a time of demographic shifts, it’s important to embrace admissions policies that serve students who, in general, don’t perform as well on standardized tests, says Laura E. Martin-Fedich, vice president for enrollment at the University of Puget Sound, which participated in the study. “Some colleges out there,” she says, “haven’t woken up to the fact that our country, she is a’ changin.’”
Some, but not all, colleges that went test-optional saw an application surge.
Critics of test-optional policies often describe them as a ploy to increase applications. Not surprisingly, each college in the study saw an uptick after dropping their testing requirements. But, wait, most colleges have been seeing their app-counts climb for years.
So the researchers compared each college’s increase to that of a similar peer institution that required the ACT/SAT. Just more than half of the colleges, they found, saw application growth surpassing that of the rival.
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Going test-optional helped some colleges attract and enroll more-diverse applicants.
About two-thirds of the colleges saw an increase in applications from underrepresented minority students above that of a similar peer institution. The same proportion also enrolled more of those students. About half saw an increase of a similar magnitude for Pell-eligible students.
But the two groups of applicants fared differently in the admissions and financial-aid process.
It’s often said that it’s “harder” for nonsubmitters, when compared with submitters, to gain admission to many colleges.The findings here lend some weight to that assumption: Nonsubmitters were admitted at lower rates than submitters On average, though, they enrolled at “substantially higher rates,” the authors found.
Admitting a student is one thing, of course; making college affordable for her is another. The researchers’ data suggest that — surprise! — test-optional policies place a greater financial-aid demand on colleges. “While the proportion of students with need did not necessarily increase after policy adoption,” the report says, “average demonstrated needed and gift aid per capita did.”
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Also, the researchers found significant differences among colleges’ aid strategies. Most, the report says, gave less-generous aid packages to nonsubmitters, regardless of need, than to submitters. (Those findings were most likely skewed by the fact that some colleges required test scores for scholarships.)
“You have to have the funding piece in place as well as a test-optional policy,” says Martin-Fedich. “You can’t expect more of these students to flock to your institution and then leave them this great big gap.”
This research builds on findings of previous studies — and complicates the conclusions of others.
Four years ago, Hiss and his coauthor, Valerie Franks, a researcher, released “Defining Promise: Optional Standardized Testing Policies in American College and University Admissions,” a large-scale multi-institutional assessment of test-optional policies. That report concluded that nonsubmitters at 33 test-optional colleges graduated at essentially the same rate as submitters did. The findings also emphasized the importance of high-school grades in predicting college success.
Other researchers have studied the success of test-optional policies. In 2015, for instance, researchers at the University of Georgia published a report concluding that selective liberal-arts colleges that had adopted test-optional policies hadn’t increased their enrollment of underrepresented minority or Pell-eligible students.
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The authors of the new report propose a possibility: “In focusing on high-level, averaged outcomes, that study may not have been able to discern impact at the institutional level.”
Your results may vary.
By first taking a case-study approach, the researchers sought to capture a diversity of institutional experiences. That diversity is evident in the responses of admissions officials at institutions included toward the end of the report.
“It has absolutely worked …” one said. “We’ve seen a steady increase in ethnic diversity.”
“It has worked,” said another, “though it is not nearly as popular (widely used) as we thought it would be.
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In the end, many institutions will have to take a second look at their testing policies in the name of access, says Jared Cash, vice president for enrollment and external relations at the University of Maine at Farmington, which participated in the study. After all, most institutions are looking for reasons to admit students — not deny them.”
“As with many institutions, we’re not chasing our profile as so many super-selective colleges are doing — we’re trying to admit kids to serve their success,” Cash says. “For some colleges, producing that shining profile every year becomes the goal itself.”
Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
Eric Hoover writes about the challenges of getting to, and through, college. Follow him on Twitter @erichoov, or email him, at eric.hoover@chronicle.com.