COVID-19 turned the college admissions process upside-down when 72% of four-year colleges and universities made the SAT and ACT optional in 2020 due to many applicants being unable to attend a testing session in person. Despite many schools opening up, 65% retained this policy into the 2021-22 school year. Whether this policy will remain is unclear.
Critics of standardized testing often argue that it discriminates against non-white and low-income students. White high-income students tend to achieve higher scores than students with less access to resources like private tutoring and supplementary courses, and critics link this discrepancy back to the origin of college admissions tests: the developer of the SAT, Carl Brigham, was a white supremacist and eugenicist, and according to admissions test expert Jay Rosner in How the SAT Creates Built-in-Headwinds, SAT designers used to engineer test questions to enforce this discrepancy:
“Compare two 1998 SAT verbal sentence-completion items with similar themes: The item correctly answered by more blacks than whites was discarded by [the Educational Testing Service] (ETS), whereas the item that has a higher disparate impact against blacks became part of the actual SAT,” he said.
“We still think there’s something wrong with the kids rather than recognizing there is something wrong with the tests,” Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist said in 2020. “Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools.”
2020 application data from the Common App suggests optional testing policies could empower more students to apply; the influx of schools adopting test-optional policies correlated with selective schools receiving 24% more applications from underrepresented groups.
Others argue that the demographic discrepancy in test scores is evidence of a problem with societal systems at large rather than the tests. “[The SAT is] not the most accurate measure of intelligence,” National Merit Semifinalist Arnav Mohindra ‘22 said. “People [who have] more resources and privilege available to them […] may have an advantage. But I think that may be more of a systemic problem because that can be true for many parts of the admissions process.”
Some supporters of the SATs and ACTs help to empower marginalized groups by giving them a chance to prove their academic proficiency even if they didn’t have access to the same resources as other applicants.
“National college entrance exams have provided proof of the continued existence of inequity in education, historical context has shown us how it came to be, and research has given us a path forward.” Eva Addae, a black parent and co-owner of tutoring company Summit Prep LLC said. “Eradicating [college admissions exams] does not fix the underlying problem — it only covers the problem of unequal education and makes it harder to fix.”
Another point of contention around the test-optional policy is whether schools will be able to select the most qualified candidate without viewing their test scores. As South English teacher and SAT tutor Matthew Isom sees it, college entrance exams tests are good at measuring some skills but aren’t necessarily a good indicator of intelligence: “I know people who are brilliant and very insightful who are slow processors,” he said. “[College entrance exams measure] a certain kind of success. If you want to be a trial lawyer, for example […] you need to be somebody who can think on your feet fast. Those kinds of people tend to do really well on these tests because they’re timed tests and tend to be a little bit tricky. Well, real life isn’t always tricky, and it’s not timed for the most part.”
Taking test scores out of the picture will naturally increase the emphasis on an applicant’s grades and people disagree whether grades alone are accurate predictors of academic success in college. Research from UC Berkeley and Boston University over the past decade named high school GPA, with course rigor factored in, as the best indicator of performance in the first year of college. However, Isom believes that many exceptions to this rule exist: “Sometimes, people who get good grades are just good at jumping through hoops.” he said. “There’s a pretty big difference between an ‘A-minus-minus-minus’ student and an ‘A-plus’ student.”
Supporters of standardized testing argue that making these exams optional won’t help make the admissions process become more balanced. They predict that students who choose to submit scores will be more likely to have very high scores and colleges will most likely favor them. They also assert that grades and extracurriculars alone are not thorough enough information for colleges to make the right decision about an applicant.
Isom said he would encourage students applying to colleges this year to take the SAT but to only report their scores if they believe it would positively impact their applications.
