We may not yet know what college admissions will look like after the pandemic, but the influence of the SAT and the ACT — once critical requirements in a student’s college application process — is rapidly eroding before our eyes.  

And that’s something to celebrate.

The College Board and ACT will still continue to offer these tests and to contend that test scores can provide value to admissions offices. But the power that these tests and the companies that profit from them once held in the college admissions landscape is forever diminished.

With hundreds of thousands of students unable to safely sit for the proctored tests during the pandemic, universities were forced to recognize that they do not need test scores to make good decisions.

Last spring, hundreds of universities adopted temporary, permanent or multiyear pilot programs that eliminated their test score requirements. Many are now announcing extensions of those policies for the high school class of 2022.

Many seniors graduating in 2021 have not been able to take the SAT or ACT due to pandemic-related testing cancelations and space issues. More than two-thirds of colleges — including all the Ivy League universities and almost all public flagships — will make their admissions decisions for this year’s class without a test score for a significant portion of their applicant pool. At Worcester Polytechnic Institute, or WPI, less than half of our applicants submitted a test score this year — compared with 84 percent last year.

Standardized test scores have a problematic correlation with family income, gender and race and ethnicity. At a time when universities across the U.S. have made commitments to root out structural racism and inequitable practices, the consideration of SAT and ACT scores should top the list of practices targeted for elimination.

Test scores are a lazy sorting mechanism. The mistaken assumption has been made that, since most students take these tests, they’re a good way to compare the academic abilities of applicants. In reality, that could not be further from the truth. It’s impossible to tell the difference between a 1450 SAT score that was earned by a first-generation student who took the test cold without practicing and a 1450 received by a wealthy student who had expensive test preparation and tutoring that increased his score by 200 points.

In March, faculty at WPI overwhelmingly adopted an eight-year test-blind pilot, transitioning from 13 years of test-optional admissions to a process that will not consider test scores for admission or financial aid. Importantly, this vote eliminated the antiquated use of SAT and ACT test scores because faculty recognize that they are poor predictors of college success, and they introduce and reinforce inequities that our university is committed to eliminating.

It’s impossible to tell the difference between a 1450 SAT score that was earned by a first-generation student who took the test cold without practicing and a 1450 received by a wealthy student who had expensive test preparation and tutoring.

WPI’s student data since adopting the test-optional admissions policy in 2007 shows no significant difference between test score submitters and non-submitters in retention or graduation rates — two of the most important student success metrics in higher education. If the test scores aren’t needed to make good admissions decisions but do reinforce inequality, why would universities continue to include them — even optionally — within their selection processes?

In addition to student success rates, it’s just as important to note how our student body has evolved since the adoption of test-optional admissions.

We have seen significant enrollment increases in the number of women and students of color who are historically underrepresented in STEM during this time; the number of women has increased from 771 to 1,948 (from 26 to 40 percent of the student body) and of underrepresented students of color has increased from 226 to 646 (from 8 to 13 percent).

Related: Advocates hope pandemic shift away from requiring SAT and ACT will help diversity

By adopting a test-blind admissions policy, we further remove barriers to application and admission by eliminating additional costs and the anxiety around test scores. It is important that we continue to identify and address such barriers because studies have proven that increasing the diversity of a student body improves educational outcomes for all students.

A year ago — before the pandemic — there was just one selective test-blind college. With its recent faculty vote, WPI became the 70th university, according to Fairtest.org, to adopt a temporary, pilot or permanent test-blind admissions policy.

Test-blind schools will now serve roughly 10 percent of all four-year undergraduates in the U.S. This is just the beginning. A March 2021 ACT study found that more than 20 percent of universities with test-optional policies prior to Covid and 10 percent of those who waived score requirements during Covid are likely to adopt test-blind policies in the next three to five years. Perhaps most telling was the response from the small number of schools still requiring test scores during the pandemic: About 20 percent reported that they are likely to eliminate consideration of SAT and ACT scores.

The pandemic’s impact on testing and test policy has created an opportunity for universities across the country to have honest and necessary discussions on what these tests measure, what they don’t, the limited value they provide admissions counselors and the inequities they reinforce in admissions and financial aid processes.

If universities care about all students, they must better align admissions processes with their distinctive missions, values and goals while also eliminating the inequities that standardized test scores reinforce. We owe it to all of our students and our broader community to evolve beyond the SAT and ACT.

Higher education moves slowly, and these changes won’t be made overnight, but the discussions can be started today.

Andrew Palumbo is dean of admissions and financial aid at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

This story about test-blind admissions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post OPINION: The power of unfair standardized tests is finally, thankfully diminishing appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Last month, Worcester Polytechnic Institute confirmed to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation that we would end our participation in the National Merit Scholarship program and ceased offering scholarships to recipients of the College Board’s National Hispanic Recognition Program.

Weeks earlier, when we had discussed this move with the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, a representative of the organization suggested we reconsider. She said that this decision could negatively impact WPI’s ability to recruit students who are eligible for other universities’ National Merit Scholarship awards.

Ultimately, this was a consequence that we were willing to accept in order to better align our scholarship offerings with WPI’s institutional goals and values.

Each year, approximately 1.5 million U.S. high school students take part in the National Merit Scholarship Program competition in the fall of their junior year. All but 1 percent of these students will be eliminated from scholarship eligibility in the first two rounds of the competition. Students’ scores on a single high-stakes standardized test, the College Board’s PSAT, are the only factor considered in their dismissal from the competition.

Related: Policies to help students pay for college continue to shift toward favoring the rich

While the National Merit Scholarship program may be well-intentioned, it perpetuates an ultra-competitive college admissions and scholarship environment that impacts millions of college-bound high schoolers every year and supports an antiquated American fixation on flawed high-stakes testing as some type of mythical “great equalizer.”

There is an undeniable value in striving for more equitable policies and philosophies in the college admissions process. When WPI adopted a test-optional admission policy ten years ago, our intent was to send a clear message to students, their families, and our colleagues in college counseling: Admissions decisions at Worcester Polytechnic Institute are based on how students perform academically in four years of high school; they are not based on how they scored one Saturday morning on a four-hour test.

We wanted to make this point especially clear to women and students of color as they are historically underrepresented at science and engineering institutions and are among those most disenfranchised by standardized testing.

Related: Financial aid “arms war” continues to drain cash from colleges

The College Board’s National Hispanic Reconition recepients must meet at least a 3.5 GPA and be one-quarter Hispanic/Latino; beyond this barrier the selection criteria is solely based on a student’s score on the PSAT. This extreme reliance on PSAT scores led to WPI’s decision to eliminate our National Hispanic Recognition scholarships.

Most of the students who would have been eligible for either of these two scholarships in previous years will still qualify for generous scholarships and need-based aid at WPI. The difference is that they will be earning scholarships that everyone is eligible for rather than those that reward only high-stakes test scores.

Ten years later, we are proud to say that eliminating the standardized testing requirement was a great catalyst in improving equity in our admissions process and broadening access to WPI. While overall student enrollment has grown 41 percent, the enrollment of females has grown 88 percent, and underrepresented students of color have increased by 172 percent. Female underrepresented students of color – WPI’s fastest growing population during the past decade – have increased by 274 percent.

The majority of my college counseling colleagues at high schools and colleges would find it difficult to argue that standardized testing is a fair measure of achievement or capability. Far too many of us have worked with bright high-achieving students who don’t perform well on high-stakes tests.

Related: Tangled process of applying for financial aid deepens college affordability crisis

We are also well-aware of the research that has gone into the predictive value of these tests as well as the inherent bias that is inevitable in a test designed by human beings. When designing a high-stakes test, decisions are made which inevitably affect what will be measured, how it will be measured, and what constraints will be placed upon test takers. Naturally these decisions will benefit some students while disenfranchising others. Specifically, the College Board’s own reporting on national SAT scores indicates biases based on a student’s family income, race/ethnicity, and gender.

We know that a student’s performance in the academic classroom and co-curricular settings provide far better indicators for success at the majority of our institutions. The major testing corporations argue that standardized tests are required because there is no way to have a fair and direct comparison of students in different academic settings because schools, courses, and grades can differ. While this is true, it also is an attempt to prop up a false assumption that such tests are fair. They are not.

The truth is that there is no way to equitably compare all students applying to our nation’s colleges and universities. This is one of the biggest weaknesses of our college admissions process, yet one of the strengths of our nation’s education system.

According to a 2008 report issued by the National Association for College Admission Counseling identifying major misuses of standardized tests for all universities to avoid, one inappropriate application is “the use of test score cut off points as a sole screening factor for awarding scholarship money.”

Despite the establishment of clear guidelines against this unacceptable use of standardized test scores — and regardless of evidence of inherent bias — the National Merit Scholarship Corporation continues to employ such cutoffs to eliminate 99 percent of all students participating in their competition for scholarship dollars.

WPI will not continue to support scholarship programs that ignore our industry’s professional guidelines and are out of sync with our institutional ideals of access and equity. By no means does our university — or any higher education institution — claim to be perfect in how we support these ideals. We should be committed, however, to providing more equity and access to all students.

Andrew Palumbo is the dean of admissions and financial aid at Worcester Polytechnic Institute

The post OPINION: We can’t base our kids’ futures on a few hours one random Saturday morning. That’s just one reason to drop the National Merit Scholarship Program appeared first on The Hechinger Report.