Oh, NO! Not Caltech!
Not with their self-selected applicants and yada-yada!..
…Could we indeed be witnessing a rare sight: a collective return to partial sanity?
I, for one, would welcome such a return.
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It must have been an interesting committee meeting!
Also note that this is another school that is backing out of a multi year commitment to TO / TB, as you noted about Harvard. Their web site (at least as of a few minutes ago) still says Fall 2025 will be test free.
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Do NOT send it.! 
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Stealing a sentiment I read in another venue, but the anti-standardized test crowd are as difficult to convince as flat earthers at this point.
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Stealing a sentiment I read in another venue, but the anti-standardized test crowd are as difficult to convince as flat earthers at this point.
There were ~1000 test optional colleges prior to COVID, including a good number of highly selective private colleges, such as Chicago and Bowdoin. To my knowledge, none of those ~1000 that chose to go test optional later changed their mind and went to test required. All ~1000 of them seem to have been satisfied with the results of their test optional admission system. Several of these colleges posted reviews showing similar GPAs and graduation rates between test optional and test submitter admits, in spite of better SES and racial diversity among the test optional pool
In the past month or so, a small handful of Ivy+ colleges that were forced to go test optional due to COVID switched back to test required. Therefore we should conclude that the test required is right, and all the colleges that were test optional prior to COVID are flat earthers?
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I will guess that by “the anti-standardized test crowd,” @yeahright74 may be referring to people posting on internet discussion boards like CC, rather than college admissions offices.
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I also don’t think many schools are going to go back to test required. Maybe a dozen or two more. But…HS grade inflation does give me some pause, especially for a school like Chicago. Today’s environment is not like it was in 2018. Regardless, time will tell.
IMO, some HS counselors and some groups of URMs may be unlikely to ever support standardized tests.
Right, but that isn’t necessarily the argument (at least from my perspective). Schools can do as they wish: do a bingo lottery drawing, have a juggling competition, perhaps a simple 50 yard dash to grant admission. Point is, standardized tests are meaningful and do offer a strong correlation to college success (won’t get into the weeds about how to define “success”, however I think it’s pretty commonsensical).
Tell it to caltech and harvard
Even though I am personally amused by Caltech and Harvard backing out of their stated commitment to TO / TB that was supposed to last a bit longer… I also think it’s great that they looked into it and went ahead and made the changes they think will work better for their own universities.
I think it’s important for each college and university to make this determination based on its own process and what it finds most helpful.
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Specific stats have been posted in this thread, and I wouldn’t call the posted correlations “strong.” For example, the UC task force found test scores explained 4% of variance in graduation rate, and math SAT explained 7% of variance in engineering course grades.
The highest correlations tend to occur for first year courses, but even then less than 20% of variation is often explained. Then this becomes a question of how much of that variation that is explained by SAT/ACT is duplicated by other aspects of the application that are considered among test optional applicants. For example, when the specific HS courses, rigor of HS courses, relevance of HS courses with non-A grade to major, grade distribution at specific HS… are considered rather than just look at HS GPA in isolation, then the improvement in prediction of first year grades added by SAT/ACT drops dramatically. Test scores add something, but often not much beyond these other metrics that are used to evaluate test optional applicants. Some studies have found the additional benefit beyond other metrics was negligible. The specific numbers depends on a variety of factors including the specific college’s admission system.
One also should consider what the college’s primary goals are in selecting an admitted class. The primary goal is generally not trying to admit the class with the highest possible first year GPA prior to effects of a curve.
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CalTech and Harvard faculty and admissions presumably weren’t amused by their recent matriculants, although that’s just a guess.
Agreed that schools can do whatever they see fit with regards to admissions, to their benefit or detriment!
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Don’t other studies come to a different conclusion, re: Dartmouth and Yale (Brown?). Vaguely remember them saying standardized scores were the SINGLE greatest informer of success (there’s that word again) at college. Maybe I read it wrong.
In any case, I may not know how to build a clock, but CalTech and Harvard just told us what time it is.
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I think the problem was that in the past couple of cycles, TO/T-blind supporters were leveraging that “forced action” amongst these few select schools as proof that TO/T-blind was right and were pushing the idea that test supporters (many who merely supported keeping it in the suite of application collateral, along a few were fine with it being a filter in isolation) were flat-earthers.
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"a group of professorial faculty submitted a petition to President Rosenbaum alleging that there has been a decline in student readiness for and performance in classes… The petition questioned the decision to continue test-blind admissions. "
This was discussed upthread a couple months ago.
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Well there you go
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I was working on the idea that Ivy+ would want testing and that the need for it would decline as one descended the “rigor” ladder (yea, let me go on this, I don’t want to revisit evaluating rigor at institutions based on grading, peers, etc. My upcoming point makes that digression moot). But the admissions dean from Conn College was very upfront in talking about the usefulness of testing in their admissions (and that they had data to back it up), despite their selectivity being middle or so of the NESCAC pack. So, if there is just middling correlation between predictive nature of testing and school rigor… the old adage of “it depends per school” seems the best descriptor.
The role of testing for STEM majors does seem more substantiated by multiple entities, with Caltech being the noteworthy exception… and so their about face clarifies the message that for STEM, testing seems to have higher value in admissions. I think it isn’t tremendously hard for us to agree that the case for testing in STEM scenarios got stronger.
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