And for years the UC System has been graduating a relatively high percentage of kids who were never required to submit a standardized test. Last I looked it up, almost half the STEM graduates at the UC’s were transfers from the Ca community college system.
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Prior to going test blind, my perception was that the UC’s were still more GPA focused than test (SAT/ACT) focused so that has not changed and they were still using the same 13 areas of application review criteria plus SAT/ACT. The UC’s opted out of the National Merit program in 2005 stating that wanted “a fairer evaluation of all students for other merit-based scholarships and a more level playing field on which underrepresented and low-income students can compete.” Leveling the playing field is also premise for them going test blind.
I think the CSU’s saw more of an impact in going test blind since they used to calculate an eligibility index which included SAT/ACT scores and the CSU GPA and then rank applicants based on the EI by major. Several campuses have adapted their index calculations to comply with being test blind.
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I’m sure they are to her parents.
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A couple of smarty pants you’ve got there!
Our D27 started test prep in 8th grade, then two weeks later she took the ACT and nailed a 36. What’s wrong with doing a few practice tests? That just seems sensible.
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You still accepting suitor applications? AMC/AIME/USAJMO scores shall be properly furnished. 
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A chilling probability is that global competitors are actively influencing decision makers in this country to adopt this and other insanely self-destructive policies in this country these days.
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Are test optional/blind policies at various colleges “insanely self-destructive?”
Are foreign competitors behind such policies?
@ mtmind “… to simply move college admissions to a lottery system …”
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Many people have suggested this over the years. Thresher talks about it in his book; Stanford spent 10 years considering it in the 1970s before abandoning it.
There are normative reasons to prefer a lottery, good small-d democratic ones. It becomes hard in a practice, though, because where do you draw the academic prep line (part of the thing you’d be running the lottery to test), and also, because you’d be drawing from a biased sample. It doesn’t solve the underlying equity issues, it just moves them around.
I go back to the Lewis Report from the 1940s, where MIT redesigned its education after WWII into the form we know today. What’s remarkable is that they take it as a given that there are well-funded public universities of more or less equivalent quality to MIT that are open to the people who wanted to go to them at the time, so why even have MIT? Their answer was that MIT would be a school for students with unusual interests and aptitudes, basically a weird little niche.
As a UMass undergrad alum, I often think about this. My take is that MIT should not be a model for anything but itself, and MIT should not be one of the top “most desired” schools in the country according to parent rankings. It should be a place that draws in students who want our unique and unusual education, and also, there should be hundreds of other well-funded, financially accessible, differentiated institutions that fit other students better. Meanwhile, the economic drivers based on a thin understand of meritocracy — like certain companies/jobs only recruiting, or predominantly recruiting, at only elite colleges — should be changed, as my classmate Chelsea Barabas argued in her thesis (Engineering the American dream : a study of bias and perceptions of merit in the high-tech labor market).
Charles Petersen (no relation) has a forthcoming book based on 75 years of study of the Stanford admissions archives. I’ve read some private excerpts and his public posts — I expect it to be breathtakingly good. Charles Petersen joins the Silicon Valley Archives as the inaugural Harold C. Hohbach Historian | Libraries
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Ah. Thanks for clarifying. My mistake.
If your friend comes from a disadvantaged household, realizes in 8th grade that the only way she could pay for college is through merit scholarships, uses free online test prep such as Khan academy to sharpen her fundamentals, and achieves relatively high test scores, then yes it is very impressive.
If she is privileged, is forced by parents and/or peer pressure to go to test prep centers, and achieves high test scores, then not so much. However, there is also no need to hate on her, which some are inclined to.
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But, aren’t we beginning to approach a lottery system without some type of standardized testing? It’s all well and good that MIT considers itself “different” enough to need the testing while other schools should feel comfortable without a test requirement? Or should that only apply for the schools where the primary driver is social mobility and not academic?
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This is gold! Thank you for making this very important point, that I hope a lot of people get to read.
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While social mobility is necessary, tomorrow our country will still need people who are capable of leading through real strengths and also can be counted on.
I think the tests are probably necessary at highly technical schools, like MIT, where insufficient math ability/preparation will cause kids to struggle mightily. At other elite schools there is enough diversity in terms of course work that most kids will be okay. As it is, these schools have been admitting some kids with lower grades/test scores for years (well in advance of TO) and they seem to manage just fine. Academic ability is only one criteria they look at -they want athletes and oboists and FGLI and a kid from Idaho etc. If they need to give up a little on the academic side to get that, they are willing to do it.
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The UCs admit kids from the Central Valley who wouldn’t be admitted if they were attending a Bay Area school and submitted the same application (because they have lower levels of preparation, less advanced classes, and in the past lower test scores than many Bay Area applicants). That is a worthwhile objective. But the question is how to find the high potential applicants in the Central Valley. Scoring hundreds of points higher on the SAT than anyone else in your high school used to be one good way of showing that, even if the result was a 1350 (like my S’s best friend).
Now that’s not considered and so in a school that offers few APs and has plenty of grade inflation, a higher weight ends up being given to non-academic factors (ie ECs and the PIQs) and the concern is that students will end up being admitted without the academic chops to cope with the much higher level of rigor at a UC.
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But wasn’t that part of the reason for UC Merced - to catch those talented Central Valley kids and give them a UC education? I imagine Merced AOs are very familiar with the high school context landscape and are able to interpret student performance within that landscape very well. Obviously not all ambitious Central Valley students will apply to Merced (or would want to attend) but I think the hope was that it would be able to catch a good number of them.
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The question is whether the right Central Valley applicants are identified at UCB or UCLA where they need to compete with the Bay Area students who have had much more advanced HS classes. It’s not acceptable to tell the Central Valley kids to just go to UCM.
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There are of course other schools to attend. But high performing kids from the area of UC Merced may wish to take advantage of Berkeley’s better reputation and career opportunities-if those kids can be identified.
Why playing basketball or being drama club president is a qualification but test scores are not remains a mystery to me ( and to the rest of the world).
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