(WIth this past weekend’s SAT exam, the news originally reported in this post back in January is now official. The optional SAT Essay section and optional SAT Subject Tests—aka Subject Tests and Achievement Tests—are in the ground. Thought we’d run it again out of respect.)
Please note this post’s title doesn’t say bad, it says sad.
Bad is a normative term; it judges. And no one can say for sure whether the next 20 to 50 years will judge the overall impact of dropping Subject Tests as “good” or “bad.” Moreover, it may well prove a bad decision educationally (that’s my hunch), but a good one financially for the CollegeBoard, exposing the limitations of a reductive good/bad dichotomy.
But sad accurately expresses the pain I feel today for the loss of SAT Subject Tests, despite their 84-year lifespan: the College Board announced Tuesday that the June administration will be the last for Subject Tests. I mourn from the perspective of college applicants, and I mourn from the perspective of a career secondary school educator.
From the perspective of college applicants, not having Subject Tests deprives them of one of the the tools formerly at their disposal to help tell and substantiate their stories, should they choose to use them. The CollegeBoard claims the impetus for the change was an effort to “reduce and simplify demands on students,” but in the era of score choice (where students get to see their scores before deciding whether they count), what they’ve really done is reduce student choices.
At a minimum, doing away with Subject Tests removes several colors from the universal palette of possibilities with which students might choose to paint themselves. While it’s true that the demand for Subject Tests has been decreasing as almost every college has changed its admissions policy about them over the past generation from required to optional, for those whose candidacy can be bolstered by a Subject Test, around 10-20% of today’s applicants (which still translates to hundreds of thousands of college bound students), it’s sad. Imagine if the CollegeBoard announces tomorrow (this is only hypothetical, don’t worry, it doesn’t have THAT much power) that it will no longer allow students to send portfolios of artwork or writing samples to college. It wouldn’t hurt every college applicant’s chances, but it will hurt the artists’ and writers’ chances significantly.
The six figures of students who will be most adversely affected are strong academic students, with GPAs in the low- to mid-3’s. Such students aren’t typically quite strong enough to take more than one or two AP classes and have a reasonable shot a 4 or 5 on an AP Exam (the holy grail of academic achievement in high school), but they are solid across the board and often take a number of honors and other advanced classes. They also typically go on to form the backbone of the student body on many college campuses. Subject Tests have long been an excellent way to demonstrate such academic achievement.
Likewise, Subject Tests have been a great aid to admissions officers trying to compare your B+ in a given class to another’s B+ in a class with the same name at a different school with a different teacher in East Cupcake. Subject Tests have long served as a great equalizer, allowing students to corroborate honors grades with material considered primary in that subject.
Because of the Score Choice policy whereby students get to see scores on Subject Tests before deciding whether to send them, they have also provided a wonderful, authentic, no-stakes training ground for precocious underclassmen. But no more. After June 2021, students will likely only have the PSAT as their training camp before they sit for the still very important SAT or ACT.
Finally , Subject Tests have always offered students an insurance policy against a bad grade. We are all familiar with that teacher who won’t give you anything higher than a B—and who may not even be conscious of the reason why—because s/he was brutalized in her youth by someone with your name or haircut or pencil case. Life can be unfair, and Subject Tests made it a littler fairer. Sad.
It’s also sad from the perspective of high school education in general. One of the arguments the CollegeBoard is using to defend its icing the Subject Tests is that they’re largely redudant for AP students. Well, yes, in all but rare cases (though one of them may be YOUR kid), AP students need not take Subject Tests, because the AP exams are more comprehensive and carry more weight. But what about students who don’t take AP classes, that is, the fat majority? Students on the fence who historically often took an honors or other advanced class now have to choose an AP class if they want to corroborate their grade with a standardized test score. I predict the move will further polarize high school academics into two classes of haves and have-nots, er, I mean “smarties” and “not so much.” That, too makes me sad.
P.S. The CollegeBoard also deep-sixed the dreaded rhetorical analysis, the optional 50-min Essay part of the SAT, effective June 2021, in the same announcement. This is cause for jubilation across the board. No one liked the test, it was a horrible measure of writing ability, and it made a cruel and unusual, three-hour exam nearly FOUR hours. i.e., even crueler and more unusual. Cya bye.