Stanford, Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, Penn, Brown, CalTech, JHU, and UT-Austin to Require Standardized Testing for Admissions

[BKSquared]

I found this to be an interesting quote from Quinlan that many of us who support testing as a relevant data point have argued as a problem with TO and particularly TB systems and contrary to the argument that test scores hurt lower SES candidates:

“Our research and experience with tens of thousands of applications over the past four years have demonstrated that when an application lacks testing, admissions officers place greater emphasis on other elements of the file. For students attending well-resourced high schools, substitutes for standardized tests are relatively easy to find: transcripts brim with advanced courses, teachers are accustomed to praising students’ unique classroom contributions, and activities lists are full of enrichment opportunities. A policy that results in increased emphasis on these elements, we found, has the effect of advantaging the advantaged.”

[Hawkspeak]

The other side of this coin, of course, is that the schools are implicitly saying that they admitted some students they probably shouldn’t have due to no-test policies… or, at least, students that they thought would perform, really didn’t. As a result, they’re rolling it back.

I wonder how many other schools follow? It’s interesting to see these schools admit to prior mistakes.

[TonyGrace]

I don’t disagree that there are optics involved in word choice. Without the test they failed to identify the “right” students. But like you said, its all the same thing.

[Aimlesscat1]

@NiceUnparticularMan

We’ll see how this shakes out, but I am already thinking of the difference between schools where things like taking Calc BC as a sophomore or junior are common for top STEM students, and schools which may not offer it at all, and how if applicants from the latter then only have the ACT/SAT to fall back on, will that REALLY be just as good?

Similar thoughts popped into my mind as well.

Will this drive changes in behavior at some competitive HS regarding course policies? My D’s school has a no APs freshman year policy along with generally no more than 2 in sophomore year for most students. I can foresee increasing pressure for more classes earlier to ensure that more kids have scores from the ‘right’ classes at application time.

[Yonkers6thBoro]

@NiceUnparticularMan

Indeed, Quinlan explains for most of their applicants/admits, they were actually happy with the recent results. But there are specific groups they thought they were underadmitting relative to highly-resourced students, because they were not submitting what would have been helpful scores (SAT/ACT and AP), and they are now convinced they cannot communicate the right message to those people within a test optional policy.

And as was the case with Dartmouth, this rationale is laughable when you look at how few low-resourced students Yale admitted prior to test-optional.

[bluebayou]

@Aimlesscat1

Will this drive changes in behavior at some competitive HS regarding course policies?

Why would it? SAT/ACT are still readily accessible.

@Aimlesscat1

My D’s school has a no APs freshman year policy along with generally no more than 2 in sophomore year for most students.

Our HS curriculum is even more restrictive. Only 1 available Soph year (Art Hist), 1 or 2 avail Jr year (Stats and Calc BC for advanced math students)…Eng Lit and AP Sciences are generally limited to Seniors.

[DroidsLookingFor]

@Yonkers6thBoro

this rationale is laughable when you look at how few low-resourced students Yale admitted prior to test-optional.

I think criticizing these schools for their pre-2020 behavior is fair and valid. However, I think it’s very wide of the mark to believe that these schools couldn’t now be trying (quite hard) in fact to change, and taking all sorts of steps to do so. Just look at the increase in Pell acceptances at these schools since then.

[Thorsmom66]

I always took the argument to be that due to testing requirements few lower SES kids bothered to apply to places like Yale in the first place - not that their scores, in and of themselves (especially given the fact they are evaluated in context) disadvantaged them. Given the dearth of lower income kids taking the SAT/ACT, I’m hard pressed to imagine that a test required strategy will somehow result in an increase in applications from these students - in fact, the likely result will be a decrease. For the record, I think Yale is making the right decision for them - especially if they don’t think they are admitting the right kind of students. I just don’t buy into the narrative regarding somehow finding diamonds in the rough through testing.

[Aimlesscat1]

@bluebayou

Why would it? SAT/ACT are still readily accessible.

Just off the top of my head at my D’s school I can think of far more kids with 5s for APUSH, CalcAB, English Lit than I can with 1500+ SAT scores. Also, if the policy doesn’t require submission of all AP scores but rather something like “pick one from each column” you get far more leeway than with the SAT.

[RWatterson]

@Hawkspeak

I wonder how many other schools follow? It’s interesting to see these schools admit to prior mistakes.

I don’t think they’re calling it a mistake, just a reaction to pandemic times that they are returning from.

As to other schools, the Opportunity Insights research shows testing predicting success at Ivy+ schools (and they strongly state the domain of their results is for those 12 schools only). So I’d think a return to test required will be limited to those schools at least at first. Even there, there are schools like Columbia who are choosing TO at this time. Brown will probably be next in returning to test required

TO has advantages that other school tiers may not want to give up regardless of their internal research wrt testing

[NiceUnparticularMan]

@Hawkspeak

I’m not familiar with the Podcast you reference.

https://admissions.yale.edu/podcast

@Hawkspeak

So, what happened to the students that didn’t submit test scores vs. those that did?

So at a high level, a much higher percentage of people who submitted test scores got admitted than test optional applicants (6% to 2% apparently at Yale).

What was happening was basically that Yale was looking for additional markers of academic qualifications for the test optional applicants, and only finding them in some cases. And those cases skewed toward applicants from highly-resourced secondary schools.

Then most of the test optional admits did well, but there was still a positive correlation between higher test scores and GPAs. Yale has not released specific data yet, but it sounds very similar to what Dartmouth found. And long story short, there was actually a lot of individual variation, and the reported correlation was pretty weak, which is consistent with Dartmouth and Yale successfully using other markers to heavily filter the test optional applicant pool. But it was not entirely eliminated, which is consistent with their detailed explanations of what sorts of information they actually get from tests (see the baseball analogy podcast).

@Baltmom23

both explicitly said that test scores were the most predicative factor for college academic performance

This may sound like nitpicking, but it really isn’t: they both said it was the best SINGLE factor, and specifically contrasted it with raw unnormalized HS GPAs.

But they don’t evaluate applicants with one or two single factors, they are using complex, contextual models with many factors, including factors that allow them to extract a lot more information out of grades with the help of full transcripts, school reports, demographic information, and so on.

OK, so then again they reported there was still a positive correlation between higher test scores and observed GPAs, but they did NOT say that meant test optional had forced them to admit a bunch of unqualified students. Instead, what actually happened is it was a lot easier for certain otherwise similar students to get admitted with high test scores, because they were essentially requiring all these other factors to make up for the lack of high test scores, and that was not working out for certain applicant populations.

So, no big crisis in terms of actual test optional admits being unprepared, but a problem in terms of who was being advantaged by their actual test optional admittance process.

And again, this isn’t just a line or two in a news article, this has been discussed at great length now by both Dartmouth and Yale.

So really, it would have to be an incredibly elaborate fiction with all sorts of faked data in order for the hidden crisis caused by TO narrative to actually be true.

[ToneDef]

One of the schools actually stated the opposite. Said the students without test scores that were admitted performed well to expectations, but that as a group more students without test scores were left out that would have been accepted if they had provided their scores, especially when lower scores are combined with other indicators.

Test scores being the “best” single indicator they have doesn’t mean it is necessarily very good, or that other indicators are necessarily very bad. Just that the other indicators have worse p-values.

[Yonkers6thBoro]

@DroidsLookingFor

Just look at the increase in Pell acceptances at these schools since then.

The increase that occurred during test-optional?

What Dartmouth and Yale are saying could be taken seriously if it was accompanied by an admission that in the past they hardly ever made the contextual SAT/ACT score adjustments for poor kids that they are insinuating they did, and detailed specifics on how they will do so in the future. Otherwise don’t pretend that this has anything at all to do with helping the disadvantaged.

[Zrt42]

@Yonkers6thBoro

And as was the case with Dartmouth, this rationale is laughable when you look at how few low-resourced students Yale admitted prior to test-optional.

Just because the situation was bad before doesn’t mean Test Optional didn’t make it worse.

[1dadinNC]

@preppywannabe

This isn’t surprising. I’ve heard that professors are rioting behind the scenes because the quality of admitted classes has sharply dropped since the implementation of test-optional admissions.

@NiceUnparticularMan

That is not something either Yale or Dartmouth has suggested, and indeed they have specifically contradicted that narrative by explaining their test optional admits have been doing well.

Actually, this was alluded to by Lee Coffin in one of the podcasts I listened to. He said that professors are noting differences in the classroom. They are polite enough to not state exactly what was being discussed but I suggest since you are active on Reddit @NiceUnparticularMan paying a visit to the Professors subreddit to read some of the posts about the abysmal situation in the classrooms.

[Mwfan1921]

Hope everyone took the under!

Jon Boeckenstedt de la Azure Cheque

[DroidsLookingFor]

@RWatterson

TO has advantages that other school tiers may not want to give up regardless of their internal research wrt testing

Especially with the looming demographic cliff, most schools will continue to do everything they can to keep application numbers, and enrollment, high.

@Yonkers6thBoro

What Dartmouth and Yale are saying could be taken seriously if it was accompanied by an admission that in the past they hardly ever made the contextual SAT/ACT score adjustments for poor kids that they are insinuating they did, and detailed specifics on how they will do so in the future. Otherwise don’t pretend that this has anything at all to do with helping the disadvantaged.

You’re certainly entitled to your opinions and demands.

[NiceUnparticularMan]

@ToneDef

Test scores being the “best” single indicator they have doesn’t mean it is necessarily very good, or that other indicators are necessarily very bad. Just that the other indicators have worse p-values.

In fact, if I was actually inclined to conspiratorial reasoning, I would point out that all this is happening in the context of certain people being very, very critical of standardized tests, and specifically believing they are systematically disadvantaging low SES students.

Obviously part of what Dartmouth and Yale are trying to explain is that they actually don’t think test optional was really helping address that problem, meaning it wasn’t really in practice leading to more admits like that.

But still, it would make sense they would want a rather forceful statement about these tests actually having predictive value. Such a statement could be seen as trying to get ahead of what they see as inevitable lines of criticism.

And then we discussed before whether those statements are actually too forceful, including things like Dartmouth using binned charts that could be seen as potentially misleading. I don’t have strong feelings about that myself, but I definitely think the context is such that it would make sense to speculate that they had such an incentive.

[1dadinNC]

I would argue that there are many highly selective schools that have figured out how to admit students minus standardized test scores. It is never apples to apples. One could argue while Bates or U Chicago are fine schools, they are not Dartmouth or Yale or MIT. The point is, those that want to be test optional have many choices and they can choose not to play the game. Also, perhaps Yale and Dartmouth are not very good at picking students minus test scores. Whatever the reason might be, it is their choice.

[GPS]

@Aimlesscat1

1500+ SAT

This is because 1500 corresponds to 95th percentile whereas 5 on AP ranges from Physics 1 ( top7 %) to AP Calculus BC ( 44 %)