Obsession with tests, as you phrased it, may not be worse in a test optional environment, but obsession with everything else-ECs, sports, charitable activities, summer activities-is worse and is driving kids ragged. In the absence of transparency, many are pursuing all manner of activities in an effort to find admission to an affordable good quality college, including a state university. I do not know of anyone who thinks that high school students are better off today than they were 10 years ago in terms of stress or activity level.
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This is true only if they are applying to less selective/non-selective schools. The more/highly selective schools arenât really TO for unhooked applicants from middle class or higher SES. There are plenty of such kids around where I live and not one of them believes theyâll get into any selective school without a test score (and I think theyâre right).
If schools decide to be TO Iâm fine with that (thatâs their prerogative), but we shouldnât assume itâs made the process less stressful for everyone. I do worry though, that without tests thereâs more emphasis on other factors (ECs, competitions, essays and LORs) that tilt even more in favor of higher SES students than the SAT/ACT.
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We are giving a lot of leeway on this thread but letâs please move back to SAT in admission. Holistic admission,and recruiting, and auto admission have been debated on this site numerous times so please find those existing threads to continue the conversation. Thank you for understanding.
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Having clear criteria for admission ( such as minimum scores) does not completely eliminate stress, but it does help reduce it. There is still a threshold one must meet, but one should have an idea if it is even possible to do so and if so how to obtain it. The lack of clarity in how to meet the unknown current standards for admission both exacerbates the stress and encourages distrust in the process which many see as rigged.
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Note that McGill, similar to some other Canadian universities, does have supplemental applications for some of their programs, and UBCâs admissions model can be considered somewhat holistic. This is common for programs that are in such high demand that the number of even the most highly qualified applicants still exceeds available spots (and part of the problem in large part is the result of rampant high school grade inflation making it more difficult to truly differentiate between students).
Canadian universities are also for the most part public and are not trying to âcraft a classâ. All they care about is that the admitted students are capable of doing the work and graduating. They donât have missions beyond that. As a result they also arenât particularly prestigious as a whole (though some specific programs are more so).
McGill, UBC, and U Toronto are all in the top 50 in world university rankings, plenty prestigious.
âmany are pursuing all manner of activities in an effort to find admission to an affordable good quality college, including a state university.â
Again, I am really only familiar with California, but many (affordable and good quality) CSUs do not put much if any weight on ECs. They are far more stats-driven. So a student could absolutely forgo all the running around doing ECs they donât enjoy and have an excellent shot at any number of CSUs if their grades and rigor are very strong.
McGill and U of Toronto are globally high ranked and McGill is considered the âHarvard of the Northâ. And McGill most certainly does try to âcraft a classâ.
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Add university rankings, and really, anything not SAT/ACT related, to the list of things that needs to be discussed elsewhere
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Well this conversation has certainly wandered. Mostly, it just seems to be a lot of disagreement about who benefits from institutions requiring the SAT, who benefits from test optional policies, and who benefits from test blind policies.
- The discussion began with The NY Times editorial which suggested that requiring test scores would benefit low income and under-resourced students because of the whole diamond in the rough thing.
- Then there was a shift from considering the benefits of a required SAT policy in order to help campuses become more diverse to the worry that not requiring the SAT has resulted in hordes of unqualified students gaining admissions to selective institutions. The worry here is that those institutions are now wasting resources on remedial education for all the unqualified kids they admitted because admissions didnât have standardized test scores as a sorting mechanism. Some people also expressed the fear that the overall educational experience for very strong students is plummeting because of those unqualified students and that eventually the universitiesâ reputations will also plummet --and that the U.S. will become less competitive globally because our students attend those diminished institutions.
- Last night, much of the conversation centered on the impact of test optional and test blind policies on affluent students. As I understand it, some posters worry that making the test optional is more stressful for those students than the required test would be. The reasoning seems to be twofold --lack of transparency is stressful and also test optional and test blind policies increase the number of frivolous (and perhaps unqualified) applications to some schools thus making it more difficult for the admissions officers to separate the wheat from the chaff.
My guess is that for most upper middle-class and wealthy parents, it is actually the third point that they find most frustrating, and the posts here reflect that demographic. I can certainly understand the stress though I think in many cases it is self-induced with from an elite or bust mentality. I could tell you horror stories that Iâve heard from my childrenâs BS friends and classmates due to the pressure that they have felt from their parents to score 1550+, get all As, and win many leadership positions at their schools. Maybe it is a fear of downward mobility that drives these parents, but if I can see that my non-affluent children will likely be just fine wherever they attend college, I think some parents are really over-reacting in their fear that their children will have poor outcomes in life if they donât have perfect high school records or attend the schools with the smallest acceptance rates. But I have definitely witnessed the pressure and pain that some affluent students feel. I do think that test optional allows students to submit their scores if they wish to and allows admissions officers to use those scores if they wish so I am still a little puzzled about why test optional is a lousy compromise. It may not be the perfect solution. It certainly doesnât give everyone exactly what they want, but it seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
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With GPA inflation at so many high schools, there are an awful lot of kids applying with a 3.8+ GPA and plenty of rigor. But since high GPAs seem to be a dime-a-dozen these days, doing well on the SAT or ACT is a way to show basic knowledge and reading reading comprehension/logic, and confirm that high GPA.
Or, if performed poorly, to call it into question. Either way, the test is a data point.
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I suggest posters consider @BKSquaredâs generous gift of the WSJ article on declining faith in and value of college education, separately posted.
If the numbers in them are even remotely accurate, the shocking level of illiteracy and innumeracy among college grads could be reduced by mininum test scores for admission ( or actual standards for college graduates).
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I think this is a good summation. I donât think people will ever fully agree on what role testing should have in college admissions. Personally, I fall somewhere in the middle. I think it will be interesting to see if data collected through this wave of TO is consistent with the findings among schools that have had long standing TO policies (that submitters/non-submitters had similar outcomes in college) - though I think weâll need to get beyond Covid learning loss to really evaluate that. As to parental frustration, that existed before TO, continues now and will still be an issue if tests are required once again.
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To your last point, this article opts to support test blind and then required testing ahead of test optional:
But the contingent statement about test blind is that âIf all universities were to follow suit, it would level the playing field by negating the expenses of tests, tutors and studying timeâ. The worst of all worlds is a situation where you need tests for some schools (so you still need to take them) and others are test blind, so you also need to excel in different ways (viz our UC discussion last night).
It seems to me that CA thought it could push other states and even private colleges to follow suit by going test blind (in the lead up to the decision there were political efforts and even lawsuits to characterize testing as discriminatory). But now they havenât done so and are moving in the opposite direction (or preferring test optional to give them the maximum ability to shape their class without risking lawsuits), CA is left out on its own as basically the only large state in this position.
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Yeah, the article supports test blind so it has that slant. Iâm not suggesting itâs persuasive. I did find it interesting that the authorâs next choice was test required over test optional.
If I was forced to choose one Iâd choose test optional but I think I agree with the article that it doesnât help stress. I prefer the idea that schools set their own policies so that applicants can vote with their feet
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I strongly agree with the above. I think it is probably hard to separate the impact of testing policies from the impact of the pandemic. Unfortunately, I think that the effects of COVID learning loss and COVID social/emotional struggles are going to continue to impact many students who were in middle school from 2019-2022. Thus the first class that will have experienced a more ânormalâ secondary school experience will be the HS class of '28 or '29. Many of those students will have been impacted by covid during their primary school years, but they will have had more time to recover and hopefully a semi-normal middle and high school experience in which they will have gotten a stronger foundation than the HS classes of '22 through '27
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Agree that better data lies ahead. I do hope they dig down more than Iâve seen in the past (at least make the info public). Iâve never been fully satisfied with using general grad rates as a measure of success. If they can track persistence in majors, average gpa of different cohorts within majors, and distribution across majors, I think Iâd find the data more satisfying.
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