During Covid, many schools dropped the requirement that prospective students submit their SAT or ACT scores. Many students did not have access to testing due to closures during the Pandemic, so circumstances required relaxing this requirement for incoming students. Today, there is a movement to extend these Covid-era policies in perpetuity at over 600 elite institutions. Despite accusations of bias, inequality, and elitism, standardized testing remains the premier mechanism to level the playing field for prospective college students.
First off, if standardized testing is such a biased metric of student evaluation, one would expect to see increased diversity among admitted students following implementations of test-optional policies. A study by the American Education Research Journal examined the effects of test-optional policies at 100 private institutions, finding that the effect of these policies on diversifying admissions was negligible. In the same study, the proportion of students from underrepresented minority backgrounds (URM) and Pell Grant recipients increased by around one percentage point. As Andrew Belasco of the University of Georgia explains, test-optional policies “have done little to meet their manifest goals of expanding educational opportunity for low-income and minority students.” Instead, Belasco concludes they have increased the “perceived selectivity and status of these institutions,” ultimately “serv[ing] to reproduce and maintain the current social structure–and its inequalities.”
Many argue that standardized tests are skewed toward students from wealthy families. I contend that virtually every metric of student evaluation is even more biased towards privileged students. In a report published by the University of California system, they conclude that admissions poorly reflect the racial and socioeconomic composition of graduating high school classes in the state. The “single largest contributing factor” to this phenomenon is lower completion of college-preparatory coursework in high school.
If standardized testing is removed from the application process, students from lower-income backgrounds have fewer opportunities to stand out. As colleges rely less on standardized tests, they must weigh other metrics more heavily, like essays and extra-curriculars. In the words of Michele Hernández, a former admission officer at Dartmouth, being the “captain of a team or two, concertmistress of an orchestra, [or] president of the senior class” puts an applicant in the middle of the elite college applicant pool. Yet, in a book on Race and Class in Elite College Admission, the authors find that lower-class applicants are far less likely to participate in the “performing arts, community service, and part-time employment,” the most important factor for high application ratings outside of academic achievement.
According to the UC report, constructing an application that incorporates extra-curricular activities, as well as essays that demonstrate the applicant’s unique abilities or values, is “facilitated greatly by financial resources and a sophisticated understanding of how the admissions system works.” The authors add that “the less specific the demands of university gatekeepers, the more important the role of the candidates’ cultural capital,” defined loosely as the well-connectedness of admissions counselors and parents. An Opportunity Insights study on elite college admissions sums it up nicely: “While holistic evaluations permit broader evaluations of diverse candidates in principle, in practice they appear to create incentives and scope for students from high-income families to further differentiate themselves from others.”
Standardized tests, when implemented correctly, do hold some inherent value. The most important use of test scores is their predictive value of college success. The UC report found a “substantial relationship” between “test scores and college retention, grades, and graduation,” and the study from Opportunity Insights finds the same. For the UC system, schools can compare individual test scores with those of their socio-economic peers, allowing otherwise underrepresented students to stand out. According to MIT’s director of admissions, standardized test scores “help [to] identify academically prepared, socioeconomically disadvantaged students who could not otherwise demonstrate readiness” due to “educational inequalities.” Despite their bias towards privilege, required standardized test scores offer a degree of fair access to disadvantaged applicants who are otherwise disadvantaged by an admissions process composed of inflated grades and school-specific measures of privilege.
Elite schools have proven time and again that they prefer elite applicants regardless of which metric they use. These institutions value growing their endowments while keeping their class sizes and acceptance rates low. When most college-educated Americans attend schools with acceptance rates higher than 75%, we should de-essentialize admittance to elite institutions. Rather than eliminating test scores, we should pursue well-funded public higher education to solve social mobility issues.
Photo by US Navy (2004)