This year, a virus has swayed the hearts, if not the minds, of many in higher education with an agility and swiftness unmatched by decades of research. The novel coronavirus has started a flood of America’s colleges adopting test-optional policies in undergraduate admissions.
This spring alone, over 70 institutions have adopted test-optional policies, falling into one of three categories. Some are pilot programs, like those at Tufts University and Davidson College, that have been designed to monitor results closely, presumably with the intent of making the policy permanent if it appears to work well. This is often an effective way to move ahead at highly selective institutions or at colleges where skepticism might be substantial, and it’s how we did it at DePaul University in 2011, when I worked there.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
Other institutions, like the University of California system, Cornell University, and Pomona and Williams Colleges, have recently announced policies that are ostensibly a direct response to Covid-19, intended to accommodate only the students entering in the fall of 2021 who are disadvantaged by canceled or rescheduled administrations of the SAT and ACT. These types of announcements span the gamut: Some appear enthusiastic and hopeful that the policy will eventually be permanent, others seem apologetic, and still others make it clear that students shouldn’t expect this temporary, reckless abandonment of sacred traditions to continue into 2022.
Finally, there are those colleges where it’s clear that the policy has been under consideration for a while: Indiana University, for instance, and all public institutions in the state of Oregon (where I work), which announced it in unison. It was gratifying that we made this joint announcement on March 25, a day I’ve unilaterally dubbed Test Optional College Day to recognize the birthday of the late Norman Borlaug, whose research may have saved a billion people from starvation but who failed to pass his admission exams to the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Recently, in an even bolder move, the California State University system announced a “test blind” policy, in which tests are not considered even if submitted.
While many colleges are taking a wait-and-see approach, there are, of course, holdouts at the other end of the spectrum: Harvard and Yale have both indicated that they have no plans to consider a test-optional policy, although Harvard suggested it won’t penalize students who cannot retake a test. Purdue University, where the president has publicly stated it will never abandon tests , recently voted down the test-optional proposal before its University Senate.
Regardless of the ways or the means, those who advocate to reduce or eliminate the influence of standardized testing on the college-admissions process have found much to celebrate in recent test-optional announcements. Many of us have privately speculated for years about the eventual tipping point, that precipitating event initiating the landslide. We always thought it would be an announcement from one of the Ivy League institutions, or perhaps from the UC system. (It was that system, by the way, whose adoption of the SAT in the 1960s started the cascade of standardized-test adoption at public universities across America. When California gets a cold, the adage goes, America sneezes.) Some of us thought that the announcement by the University of Chicago two years ago would light the fire. It didn’t, but it certainly kicked up some sparks.
None of us thought it would take a little strand of RNA in a lipid and protein wrapper, invisible to the naked eye. But now that a pandemic has upended daily life in America, many of us are wondering if this moment will be remembered as a disabling blow or perhaps, even the death knell of the institution of standardized testing in American admissions.
Not if the testing agencies have anything to say about it, of course. As is always the case when they feel threatened, the College Board and ACT will dust off the specious (but highly effective) claims and obsolete clichés they rely on to make their case: The “diamond in the rough” theory (how will we find talented students in the poor schools without tests?); the “grade inflation makes it impossible to rely on high-school performance” trope that scares wealthier people into believing that students from “weaker” (read: poorer or more diverse) schools will suddenly take away their child’s advantage; the “more information is better” proposition that, while technically true, fails to take account of the tremendous real and opportunity cost that testing imposes on us in exchange for a slight statistical edge; and, of course, the “eliminating tests doesn’t increase diversity,” fallacy for which the agencies cite a study of 180 liberal-arts colleges and attempt to generalize it to the entire population in a way no credible researcher would likely endorse.
How will admissions officers, once they’ve been liberated from thinking about students in two dimensions, feel about going back to requiring standardized tests?
They will continue to fight against the tide, of course, in the ways that the former president of the University of California, Richard Atkinson, outlined in the documentary film The Test and the Art of Thinking. For those who have heard Atkinson, it did not escape notice that the paper from the UC Senate (prepandemic) recommending against a test-optional policy had over 50 mentions of the College Board in just over 200 pages of text. You cannot fault businesses for acting like businesses. It’s what they do.
In fact, both ACT and the College Board have already announced that they will be able to deliver admissions tests at home in the fall if high schools don’t reopen or large gatherings are not permitted. Just as the College Board surprised everyone (including colleges) by proclaiming that the 45-minute, open-note, open-book, AP test administered at home will be both valid and reliable, and then proceeded to remind students that they have a previously undisclosed “responsibility” to take the exam, so too, they now assure us, will at-home college-admissions exams be equivalent to the traditional exams, and just as secure. These assurances ring hollow and carry the specter of a business holding onto a revenue stream. They offered these assurances without publishing any proof, thereby making colleges the villains who must insist on adhering to traditional test construction and validation procedures if they refuse to accept the exams.
As I think about how hard testing agencies fight back every time they hear the phrase “test optional,” I am reminded of the song from World War I: “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm?” that asked parents in America how they think their sons will feel coming back to rural life once they’ve experienced the culture and sophistication of Paris. So too, one wonders how admissions officers, once they’ve experienced test-optional, will feel going back to requiring standardized tests. Can we expect someone who’s been liberated from the constrained thinking about students in mostly two dimensions to then abruptly return to those familiar constraints they’ve successfully thrown off?
Throughout the years, I’ve talked to hundreds of admissions officers about testing, and the testing agencies, and the ways in which tests measure social, economic, and political capital more than they measure potential. I’ve explored the issues of the troubling history of the tests and their inappropriate use even today; the problems we have in America “equating merit and achievement,” in the words of Harry Brighouse at the University of Wisconsin at Madison; and how often we expect students to do well on a test that covers material that, through no fault of their own, they may not have been exposed to. While my opinion is, of course, not shared by all admissions officers, and while fans of standardized tests may never agree, the overwhelming majority of admissions officers I’ve spoken to are in favor of reducing or eliminating tests all together.
They recognize that the testing agencies are simply private companies, not elected to represent us in driving curriculum, not appointed by any government agency to establish standards, and not accountable to anyone but themselves. They recognize that the College Board, probably burdened by fewer government regulations than the hot-dog vendor on the streets of Manhattan, has over a billion dollars in revenues and a billion dollars in assets. And they understand the injustice of the business model in which colleges order the exams and require that students pay for them in cash (fee waivers for low-income students notwithstanding), in time, and in the opportunity costs of real instruction that could take the place of test prep.
None of this information is new. Joseph Soares, a sociology professor at Wake Forest University, points out that, as early as the ‘60s, at least one Ivy League institution recognized that tests did little to predict anything other than parental income. While the tests have changed several times since then, the things they’re good at — sorting students by income, ethnicity, and parental attainment — have not.
This pandemic is a turning point for many institutions in America. Perhaps it could be a watershed moment in changing how we look at and evaluate candidates for admission, free of those tests that tell us little more about students than what their ZIP codes already reveal. I hope it’s the first drop of not just the flood, but the tidal wave.
