You may have noticed public discourse and scholarly literature discussions about standardized tests in college admissions have followed the lead of the last couple presidential elections: they’ve become highly polarized and tendentious. Standardized tests, say the partisans, are great equalizers… OR…the primary cause of today’s socioeconomic privilege. You’re either for ’em or against ’em. Evil empire or freedom fighters. Frankly, if it gets much worse, we may need to send reinforcements to the Capitol.
What’s the truth about standardized tests in college admissions in 2021 insofar as they touch social justice and bottom-line admissions? Good question—two questions, really—glad you asked.
First thing to say is that accusing standardized tests of being the or even a CAUSE of U.S. socioeconomic privilege or class bias is to conflate CAUSATION and CORRELATION. Don’t worry, you’re in very good company: many have pursued this logical fallacy to the gates of inanity. Many feel this is the primary reason so many colleges are going (mostly temporarily) “test optional”—doh!, it’s not! COVID-19 quarantines and test cancellations are the overwhelming culprit there (see our blog post, “Are You Helping or Hurting Your Kids’ Chances? Common Myths About How to Get into Selective Colleges in 2020“).
Yes, it’s true that high SAT/ACT scores strongly correlate with household income and other measures of privilege, but so do high school students’ Activities lists. Think it helps to have skating or music lessons from the time you can walk, or go to baseball or drama camps every summer, or attend leadership training programs, or have options to offer meaningful community service, and are such opportunities equally distributed among all college applicants? Pretty sure it does and pretty sure they’re not. Should committees disallow or make optional student Activities lists in the name of equality and social justice?
What about AP and college credit classes that admissions committees love so well as indicators of college readiness? They also correlate with measures that suggests class bias, but do they CAUSE it? Should committees stop looking at high school transcripts because that’s just not fair?
How about sophisticated conversations at the dinner table with two parents who received college educations or read their way to erudition? Clearly, that’s a big, fat, unearned advantage. Maybe admissions committees should require applicants to indicate how many hours per week and weeks per year they spend around such dinner tables and precisely how many fifty-cent words their caretakers use on a regular basis, the way they currently do with Activities,—you know, to level the playing field by discounting them and keeping things fair.
If I told you even the open-ended essays—and by open-ended I mean with prompts so wide you can drive an 18-wheeler right through the middle of them, e.g., “Write an essay on a topic of your choice” and “Tell us something about yourself you’d like us to know”—correlate with measures of socioeconomic status, you’d tell me I’m taking this too far. You’d tell me personal essays are like individualized videos; why, they’re the anti-standardized test score! In fact, lots of committees are allowing video options these days in lieu of scores. That’s the fairest thing, not numbers, right? Wrong! Well, assuming we can believe research coming out of The Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA). Hey, I hear hear some of those folks are pretty bright and know how to design reliable studies: See “Essay Content is Strongly Related to Household Income and SAT Scores: Evidence from 60,000 Undergraduate Applications.”
Ahhh, but Dr. Yo, you may be thinking, you can’t tell me that kids who can afford SAT/ACT tutoring and classes and expensive methods and other resources don’t widen the educational and socioeconomic chasm between the have and have-nots when committees continue to count the results of those tests as important admissions criteria! I can’t and I won’t. But I will hasten to remind you that Khan academy, for years now, and other online resources (a good number of them on this very website :-)) present full and robust practice material to the entire world…at no charge. Moreover, if you’re in the market to go to college, and by that I mean pay for it, it’s likely you can find the ~$20 for tell-all books containing information that at ONE TIME was available only to the privileged. Test prep books like The Official SAT Study Guide and The Official ACT Prep Guide, and their companion websites, and the entire range of AP Exam prep books and sites, as well as how-to-get-into-college books like The CommonApp Handbook. All the high-level intel that used to be confined to the reach of privileged white males has for a good minute now been inexpensively available in the public domain. Just sayin’.
Second thing to say is that just because many colleges waived entrance exam requirements, mostly for a year or two, DOES NOT MEAN they care about standardized tests any less or value them any less, despite what the haters say. The main reason the vast majority of current “test optional” colleges adopted this temporary policy is NOT that the exams are no longer valid or perpetuate class bias but that COVID-19 quarantines and center cancellations threw a major, again temporary, curveball at equitable exam access. It wouldn’t be fair to count them, in other words, not because they’re biased toward the privileged but because so many students’ exams were cancelled during the pandemic. Plain and simple. Most admissions committee members would STILL PREFER to have them if they could; you would too, if your Hippocratic oath were, “At first admit no future flunk-outs.” I mean, as you’re evaluating thousands upon thousands of applicants, would you want one more or one fewer measure of academic preparedness, to count as much or as little as you wished? Admissions officers are people, too.
Tune in next week (or maybe later today ;-)) when I’ll reveal the third and fourth things to say about the false dichotomy in the world of standardized tests and college admissions. Until then, we’re here to help! 🙂