More Colleges Than Ever Have Test-Optional Admissions Policies (theconversation.com) 180
Back in the 1980s, Bates College and Bowdoin College were nearly the only liberal arts colleges not to require applicants to submit SAT or ACT test scores. On Jan. 10, FairTest, a Boston-based organization that has been pushing back against America's testing regime since 1985, announced that the number of colleges that are test-optional has now surpassed 1,000. From a report: This milestone means that more than one-third of America's four-year nonprofit colleges now reject the idea that a test score should strongly determine a student's future. The ranks of test-optional institutions include hundreds of prestigious private institutions, such as George Washington, New York University, Wesleyan University and Wake Forest University. The list also includes hundreds of public universities, such as George Mason, San Francisco State and Old Dominion.
Yay, snowflake college (Score:1, Insightful)
Perhaps the next step should be skipping grades? They might indicate that we aren't all equally precious otherwise.
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To me, 'Pass' or 'No Record' count as grading.
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If you write 'No Record' on someone's transcript when students that completed the course get a 'Pass', it most certainly counts as a grade.
As long as you do not pass all students that take a course, you are grading them according to some schema, whether you call it Pass and No Record or 0,1,2,3,4,5.
A Few Problems... (Score:5, Insightful)
First, there is no such thing as a "non-profit" college. They ALL profit. Some are just more honest about where the money goes.
Second, Not relying on tests means relying on transcripts. Setting aside the stupid Pass/No Pass thing, relying on letter grades, however they are derived, is questionable since the grades are so variable. An A in one school could be equivalent to a C in another. Or, in the case of AP classes, an A in a regular class could be a C in an AP class.
Lastly, excluding any kind of objective or semi-objective measurements leaves only one criteria, the completely subjective measurement derived from essays, interviews, etc. That is how you get mostly illiterate morons accepted over potential geniuses because they interviewed better or expressed some form of SJW sentiments that impresses the interviewer.
What we have here is the gradual degradation of the US higher Education system due to the lessor of its graduates gravitating towards education where they implement their lessor standards.
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I've heard of people buying a degree. Now they're renting them?
Re:A Few Problems... (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, Not relying on tests means relying on transcripts. Setting aside the stupid Pass/No Pass thing, relying on letter grades, however they are derived, is questionable since the grades are so variable. An A in one school could be equivalent to a C in another. Or, in the case of AP classes, an A in a regular class could be a C in an AP class.
While grades may be bad at measuring absolute achievement, they may be better at measuring aptitude. If you get an A from a "bad" school, you may know less than someone with an A, or even a C from a better school. But you probably belong to the best pupils in your school - that you were not able to learn more may be more a problem of the school, not of you ability to learn and think. So in a different environment, you may be able to flourish and catch up.
As the original article states: high school grades are a better predictor of success in university than SAT scores.
What we have here is the gradual degradation of the US higher Education system due to the lessor of its graduates gravitating towards education where they implement their lessor standards.(emphasis mine)
I assume that is involuntary irony?
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It's one wrong fucking word. Which of course invalidates everything I said, eh?
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It's one wrong fucking word. Which of course invalidates everything I said, eh?
No, the fact that you ignore important other considerations and instead put up straw men is what invalidates most of what you say. Do you have anything to rebut the meat of my comment?
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It's one wrong fucking word. Which of course invalidates everything I said, eh?
A wrong word, fucking or otherwise, can have serious consequences. Consider the translation of the Japanese word mokusatsu:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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SATs (and similar admissions testing) are not particularly universal worldwide. They are not used in Canada, for example, your High School grades are. Ironically, I had to take an SAT to enter university, but that was because I didn't graduate from High School.
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First, there is no such thing as a "non-profit" college. They ALL profit.
This is a fallacy called equivocation.
The standard use of "non-profit" means that there are no dividends or revenues being paid out to investors or owners. Your use of "profit" in the second sentence is clearly intended to mean something else.
Second, Not relying on tests means relying on transcripts.
This is a false dilemma fallacy. There are more choices than tests and transcripts, including: recommendations, extracurricular/volunteer work, professional experience, essays or personal statements, interviews, and project/portfolio submissions.
I had all of those thin
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Useful for most students (Score:2)
In college, Pass/Fail grading or Pass/No Record grading is actually better for the majority of the student body, but worse for maybe the top third of the class.
In terms of applying for college, not having a testing policy is smart because it lets you admit people who may not have done a test but who are amazing. If you don't have the testing you will need to have done better at other things. This actually makes it harder to game the system, not easier. Optimizing on test-taking ability is easy if you have a
Re:Useful for most students (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, how can someone be said to be ready for college if they haven't even bothered to take the standard test? What is so amazing about them? Obviously not their work ethic or intelligence... or they would have taken the test.
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Honestly, how can someone be said to be ready for college if they haven't even bothered to take the standard test? What is so amazing about them? Obviously not their work ethic or intelligence... or they would have taken the test.
Um. No. Admissions decisions at anyplace that's any good are very individualized. Whether you take a standardized test is whether you jumped through a hoop and has little to do with work ethic aside from "Can I pay a fee or request a waiver and sit in one place for a few hours". You're also presupposing they measure intelligence well and that only people without intelligence will not take them. If you never took a standardized test but already had journal articles accepted in multiple fields, or they think
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All you need is 2 levels to be a grading system. IE, I could sell a product only in "Premium Grade" and "Standard Grade" and that would be a grading system.
"Pass" and "No Record" indicate two levels of performance, and as such is certainly a grading system.
Re: Yay, snowflake college (Score:1)
idiot millenials, lol
keep pushing back the date real life hits you, and that hit will be harder and harder
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"forecfully reduce the population to about 2 billion max." I suggest you live out what you advocate. Remove yourself from the population.
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Gaslighting BS (Score:1, Flamebait)
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You can't objectively measure the more important things about reality. You can't objectively measure who's more suited for success, except retroactively (and then only if you have an objective measure for success). Hard work is less likely to yield tangible benefits than a whole lot of other things. Deal.
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I'll buy this (Score:1)
Some of the stupidest people I've met had bachelor's degrees. Some people who aren't very good at math and science can absorb knowledge well. I'm down for the experiment to see if removing arbitary boundaries can improve the world.
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Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. All
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As long as quacks can sell you MMS and "Vitamin B17", you're already there. It's not like much would change.
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Or to be president.
Big Government Nonsense! (Score:3, Funny)
What kind of liberal socialist commy pansy talk is that? Government regulation is oppression! Let the invisible hand of the market decide what surgeons are qualified. The incompetent ones will soon be out of business and the good ones won't have the added expense of all that unnecessar
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Yeah, Dad has maimed and killed a ton of people and he keeps all their blood in case someone with the money needs some.
My Dad is a famous Back-Alley Doctor, he really knows how to make the most of his practice. Oh no, it isn't as bad as it sounds. Dad says "the dead ones can't sue."
Re: I'll buy this (Score:4, Informative)
To be a doctor, you need to do well on the MCAT, get into med school, take the USMLE, and get a residency. Or get into a combined medical program out of high school and still pass the USMLE and get a residency.
Engineering in life-critical fields involves passing the FE and PE exams. Not trivial.
There will still be standard exams as gatekeepers for both fields.
Re: I'll buy this (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm trying to remember the actual case, but I'm pretty sure it ran down like this. Person from India or Pakistan, came to Canada with a mechanical engineering degree. The requirements in Canada require that if you get a degree out-of-country you have to submit to reexamination. Went all the way to court, and the court said nope, you're just doing that because of his race. The examination rules were rewritten to get around that particular court case and still require reexamination.
If there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that in today's hypersensitivity of "you're only doing this because x, reason so I don't have to follow your rules!" bullshit, you can be sure that there's a judge somewhere that will agree with that "progressive agenda" and put people at risk.
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To be a doctor, you need to do well on the MCAT, get into med school, take the USMLE, and get a residency. Or get into a combined medical program out of high school and still pass the USMLE and get a residency.
Engineering in life-critical fields involves passing the FE and PE exams. Not trivial.
There will still be standard exams as gatekeepers for both fields.
Give it time. First diplomas, then 4-year degrees ... first entrance criteria, then protests that not enough graduate ... these things always move up the chain.
Just give it time.
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no prob, brah, there's an app for that
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>Some of the stupidest people I've met had bachelor's degrees.
Were they the kind of people that think anecdotes are the best way to understand reality?
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What does a college care ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless they are one of the top tier where their reputations depend on their alumnis having glittering careers, many colleges just want to have many students - as the fees will pay the bills. So accepting anyone who's father can afford to pay or who can raise a student loan is good: more students.
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Unless they are one of the top tier where their reputations depend on their alumnis having glittering careers, many colleges just want to have many students - as the fees will pay the bills. So accepting anyone who's father can afford to pay or who can raise a student loan is good: more students.
When students become catered to like customers, it tends to make you wonder what the fuck they're really selling, and why anyone would pay that much for it.
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I don't think that assumption is right. Nearly all colleges get way more applicants than they accept. If what you say were true, they'd simply accept every applicant. (The ones which do accept everyone are usually scam colleges - soaking up subsidized Federal loan dollars in exchange for a middling or useless education, then leaving the student stuck with the bills.)
I suspect colleges aim for a certain uniformity in their s
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Because as an employer in the medical field who needs competent people, I will pick someone who came from a rigorous college, instead of an untested malpractice lawsuit waiting to happen.
That "rigorous" college cares more about getting more and more revenue in the door than ensuring the quality of the product being sold or the end-result is good. They're not students anymore. They're customers, and removing testing standards is just one way of catering to as many of them as you can. Everyone is welcome; just bring your wallet.
As a parent, I will send my child to a school that uses objective requirements for admission and grading, because life isn't fair, and only the competitive survive.
Given what TFS stated, good luck with that. Education standards are dropping lower than the attention span of a GenY/Z'er. You know, to ensure they maintain a goo
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The biggest problem is that the buyers (new students) aren't very intelligent consumers. It's 18 year old kids, many of whom don't have parents with any more experience or knowledge a
George Washington (Score:5, Insightful)
more students = profit (Score:2)
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The big problem with this is that some students do end up paying the full listed price, and these people get screwed royally.
dumbing down? (Score:3)
There's some lesson to be learned in there, but I'm not sure yet what it is.
and japanese-colleges are party schools (Score:2)
https://www.tofugu.com/japan/j... [tofugu.com]
He doesn't really study during college. But then he's really not the only one. The statistics are clear – Japanese students do not study. An earlier Japan Times article quoted some University of Tokyo research which stated that Japanese students study far less than American college students. Takashi skips a few classes a week, and for the lessons that he goes to, even if his classmates are physically present a large number are having a mental vacation in dreamland whil
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Would be nice. Learning for 12 years in public schools will teach you a lot of useful things, but prep courses work to raise SAT results. You might want to ask yourself exactly what the SATs measure, given that.
Funny, when they choose to drop the tests. (Score:2, Interesting)
Then came Y2K problem. India was about 30 years behind USA in IT and so it had a huge army of Cobol programmers. In the 1990s the Indian cobol programmers were imported at the rate of about 100,000 a year. The H1B visa was raised from 65,000 to 130,000 at that time. And most of it went to Indian Cobol programmers.
They came in, most of them immigrated, married,
Re:Funny, when they choose to drop the tests. (Score:5, Insightful)
The colleges want to limit Asian Americans to less than 1% of admissions. Finding the right legal way to do that is the long term project.
I'd love to see one shred of objective evidence to support that -- if you have one.
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I'd love to see one shred of objective evidence to support that -- if you have one
Top colleges say they want a student body that looks like America, percentage of Asian Americans, Jews, Whites, Blacks and others in America and in their student bodies to be similar. That means less than 1% Indian Americans, is the desired level of admissions, because our population is around than 0.5%.
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That means less than 1% Indian Americans
You realize your first post said "Asian Americans," right?
That aside, I take it you have nothing more concrete than this mushy aspirational language that you're attributing to the entire college body, yet haven't provided a single example of any of the colleges actually saying?
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India is part of Asia
Venn diagram, anyone?
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So what you've just revealed to me is a map is a fancy Venn diagram that comes with latitude and longitude.
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I'd love to see one shred of objective evidence to support that -- if you have one.
See the current cases against Yale and Harvard. [chicagotribune.com] Or one of the dozens of articles on it, this isn't new or unknown. [businessinsider.com] That's not even touching on the "affirmative action" bullshit with SAT scores [latimes.com], where blacks and mexicans are give massive point boosts simply because they're black or mexican. While asians and whites are punished and have points removed.
Basically if you're asian or white, you need to do twice to four times better then anyone else to land a position. Seriously, there's real racism going on h
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See the current cases against Yale and Harvard.
To my untrained eye, your article gripes that Asians are being limited to 18-19% of the Harvard undergraduate population, not less than 1%.
Or one of the dozens of articles on it, this isn't new or unknown.
This article simply bitches that not all Asians with good test scores get in (and references the above Harvard lawsuit).
Again, if you have anything at all that suggests that top colleges actually want to limit Asian admissions to "less than 1%" per OP (or anywhere even close), I'd love to see it.
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At first, there was an entrance exam.
Turned out the Jews seemed to be very good at them, up to the point where 1/4th of the new students were Jewish.
The solution was to change the admission process into one where "character" and such were also important. Enter the interviews and recommendation letters.
Result was a drop of 10% of Jewish students.
Re:Funny, when they choose to drop the tests. (Score:5, Informative)
I've listened to admissions people, since my own kids are in high school now. The reason admissions offices are dropping the test requirement is that it no longer has a strong correlation with college success. That's it. The colleges are not dumbing anything down; to the contrary, admissions offices are widening the scope of their criteria in an effort to find the things that DO correlate with success.
The SAT is broken and doesn't serve anyone but the College Board. [wikipedia.org] Good by and good riddance to it.
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For a long time Hispanics and African Americans were complaining these tests are unfair to them. [...] Almost all Indian parents know their children need to score 150 points over Whites to get admission to elite colleges
How can a test be able to guess your race ? Please explain as I've never actually seen those tests. Or is it just that the people selecting the candidates discard based on names or pictures ? In that case the problem lies not with the tests. Evidence ?
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1990s comp sci dept and med schools were the leading edge, the parents coming in.
2000s it was high schools all across the country, spelling bees and debate competitions. These are the kids of your class mates
2010 onwards it is the elite top 10 colleges that see over representation of Indian Americans compared to their percentage in the total population.
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You don't really think that they are dropping test requirements because hwites can't cut it?
Yes, that is what I am saying.
As long as test scores were beneficial to the Whites, they kept it.
Now Asian-Americans are beating them under those rules, they are changing the rules.
It IS a test. (Score:1)
So, you want to attend an extremely expensive Liberal Arts college and get a degree in something that only makes you qualified to work at Starbucks and burying yourself in student debt that you have no hope of every paying back.
I see.
I'm amazed tests (or people) are still used... (Score:2)
All you should need to do is shove the name of the kid's high-school, their high-school grades, a list of extracurricular activities, their facebook feed, and their essay into an AI application and let it do the deciding based on those. Could be much more efficient and accurate than admissions officers and their shortcuts (which is what the tests are).
This information may not apply... (Score:5, Interesting)
It was not uncommon when I was applying to universities in Canada to expect them to do their own testing of prospective students, since they generally didn't trust high schools not to inflate marks, and didn't have faith in the relevance of what standard testing was available (not a lot - IIRC, standard testing did not continue through high school).
In my opinion, if an educational institution cares about its reputation it should have its own entrance tests.
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My University required a decent grade on the ACT, but then administered its own set of placement exams. ACT scores were used for such things as determining scholarship qualifications, while the the school's placement exams were used solely to determine which (if any) classes could be skipped.
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The trend is in the other direction; get rid of entry testing and put more trust in high school grades (even student self-reported grades, I kid you not).
https://www.ecs.org/moving-from-single-to-multiple-measures-for-college-course-placement/ [ecs.org]
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As a University Professor (of Education), I really appreciate this suggestion. However, I don't see how it would be feasible at scale, considering how challenging it is to design assessments that are valid and reliable.
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Still merit based: SAT Score - Credit Score (Score:2)
How can we expect people to contribute in an automated society if we give them inadequate education?
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You left out one...how about that upper level education (college) is for the qualified??
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In my country it's for those privileged with a brain. Anyone can get in. For free. Which means that about 90% fail. We can afford it. There's plenty of student material to work with, shooting down 9 out of 10 is no problem.
Studying here basically means that you're told what you're required to know. Now go and find out where to get that knowledge. Ok, it's not quite as cruel, but the lectures are usually a joke, the materials are ancient and you should be willing to camp in front of the various departments t
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I think he got his local Apple store confused with the University.
THIS. we need to learn from this country. (Score:2)
There is much to learn from others and this is something we could use over here in the USA. The biggest problem in the USA is we think we are #1 (we are not by almost every metric) and nobody can teach us anything; it's actually worse, we don't even bother to think about anybody else except who to bomb (and not even where to bomb, an embarrassing number of Americans couldn't find Iraq on a map; I think back during the war it was one third.)
We raise over confident students who are not very motivated (or laz
Canadian universities donâ(TM)t use test scor (Score:2)
Most or all Canadian Universities havenâ(TM)t ever bothered with test scores (except perhaps for foreign students). Entrance is based on high school grades. Unless this has changed in the 20 years since I applied, I really think this is a better way, or at least, just as meaningful. You spent your whole high school career taking standardized tests, and the government has been writing curricula and standards to attempt to equalize the educational experience across the county. An extra exam seems superfl
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Colleges began using test scores because different high schools (and in fact different teachers) awarded grades differently. An 4.0 in one high school might only be worth a 3.2 in another high school. A 4.0 by a student who took the "easy" teachers' courses might only be worth a 3.5 by a student who took the harder courses at the same high school. The test scores were used to try to normalize the grades.
The problem started when some college admissions staff g
SAT & ACT don't measure competency (Score:1)
Disclaimer: I just went through this with my kid. The test had little to nothing to do with what she learned in high school or what she's learning in college right now. It did, however, make it that much harder for her to get the already scarce scholarships since I couldn't afford the t
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they measure how much money your parents have. If they can afford to send you to test prep classes you do well. If they can't you don't.
No, prep classes might make you feel slightly more comfortable taking them, but they won't significantly improve your score (well, they didn't in the past; not sure if the tests have been de-objectified enough now for that to have changed.)
They were a rough proxy for IQ, itself a good predictor for academic success.
Re:SAT & ACT don't measure competency (Score:5, Interesting)
they measure how much money your parents have. If they can afford to send you to test prep classes you do well. If they can't you don't. SAT/ACT are multi-million dollar scams to make money for the ones running the tests.
On the math side of things, definitely not.
Our university went though years of trying to figure out the best way to place freshmen in the sequence of math courses, even designing our own math placement test. It's a hard problem. You don't want to set up someone to fail by tossing them in over their head. Likewise, you don't want to waste someone's time by putting them in a class full of stuff they already know.
Guess what? The single best predictor of success in the vital calculus series of classes (which are pre-reqs for lots of of ther STEM courses) was the student's math ACT score. Better than custom placement tests. Better than high school transcripts. Actual data over many years as analyzed by a department full of actual statisticians concerned about their own students' success.
Were "test prep" courses a factor? I don't know. But, if the test prep was inflating student math ACT scores, then it was also inflating their success in university calculus, so sounds like money well spent if that was the root cause. I'd also like to call "BS" on the raft of cynical posts in this thread claiming universities are only interested in scamming students out of tuition. While the US university system has plenty of faults, that's not one of them. Student success is a driving concern in academia. Maybe even to an extreme, as we are currently in the grips of an "assessment" frenzy that tries to quantify it in an overly bureaucratic way.
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As a student, I took no test prep courses and did really well on these things (National Merit scholar and all). My oldest son just did the same, no special prep classes. I was a fairly "meh" student, but did well on standardized tests (my boy is better at both aspects, yay for him). Lucky for me.
If I were to take it now, though, like you I also probably wouldn't do as well as I did when I was a student: even having a job as a professor. Why? As a student I was taking tests of all sorts all the time.
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The test had little to nothing to do with what she learned in high school or what she's learning in college right now
Note that this is intentional. The SAT is intended as an aptitude test. As such, it is intended to measure your ability as independent of knowledge and learned skills as possible. This is obviously impossible, but tests like the SAT and IQ tests try to get as close as they can. Unfortunately, it is often possible with such tests to learn for a particular style of test (and you can't significantly change the style without compromising reliability). There's some research that indicates that you get much
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they measure how much money your parents have. If they can afford to send you to test prep classes you do well. If they can't you don't. SAT/ACT are multi-million dollar scams to make money for the ones running the tests.
My son got a 35 on the ACT, never did a single test prep class. This suggestion is BS, and those prep classes generally don't help at all anyway.
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SAT/ACT are multi-million dollar scams to make money for the ones running the tests.
I 100% agree with this. At some point these tests measured something useful, now they only measure amount of prep for these tests. You can't, for example, take a smart kid and expect him to get a good score without extensive prep.
Is not it great to not have government-mandated? (Score:1)
Whether or not they should, the reason the can do this is the absence of governmental control of the admission policies.
That government is best, which governs least. We all better remember this principle next time we think something we like ought to be mandatory or something we dislike — banned.
Sounds about right (Score:2)
the only test needed if can get loan with low bar (Score:2)
At some the only test needed if you can get an student loan that that test has a low bar.
Corporatized College (Score:3)
The college system been successfully corporatized; that is, taken over by pointy-haired administrators instead of educators. The motivation becomes simply more students/money/diplomas, and the professors who care about upholding disciplinary standards have less and less say in the matter. Having more unprepared students in the classroom means more money/prestige for administrators, at the price of more ongoing nightmares for classroom educators.
See Ginsburg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters [insidehighered.com].
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Edit: "has been successfully corporatized"
How about the opposite? (Score:4, Insightful)
My kids, for some reason I can't quite figure out, flat out can't bring themselves to do homework. They'll always ace tests though. Something to do with their particular flavor of ADHD [scarymommy.com], I'm told. Most "solutions" to this problem involve extreme parental intervention, which aren't practical when you have more than one of them at once, and flat out doesn't work when the young person goes off to college in another state.
So what I really need are colleges that do the opposite - Test-only policies.
List of most selective colleges. (Score:2)