The viability of interpreting outcomes will also depend on whether colleges return to the same grade standards as they used before Covid. Many standards were loosened, exams made open book etc. and many colleges decide they will give a certain percentage of As regardless. I wouldn’t hold your breath for this to change.
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In all fairness, grade inflation has been happening for a long time now - it started well before the pandemic and widespread TO policies. At some point you’d think there would be a backlash . . .
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I don’t think that we are going to learn anything of significance and that any differences between submitting students and TO admits will be minimal at least for the T20 universities and highly rejective SLACs which drive the conversation here on CC.
The vast majority of kids who apply to these schools can succeed and thrive at these schools once they arrive. Their hurdle is one of selection rather than ability. Whether admissions chooses test submitting or TO candidates doesn’t really matter. When they have a candidate pool that is 10x their class they can easily find what they want/need.
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I would be interested in seeing TO/test submitter grad rates and average GPA at places that are known for grade deflation (or at least not rampant inflation…) and rigor. I’m thinking places like Reed, Swat, Chicago, Carleton – I would want to see if there is a marked difference in results at those places.
At most of the Ivies, there is widespread grade inflation, and almost nobody flunks out… so there very likely will not be large discrepancies in GPA and grad rates between TO and submitting students.
ETA: I imagine some flagships might also be worth looking at (exempting the UCs of course, which are test blind… and Purdue, which is basically test-required now). More than one professor in intro lectures at UW-Madison told us: “Look to your left. Now look to your right. One of these classmates likely won’t be here next year.” I imagine that was an especially ominous prediction to those in seats bordered by a wall.
They did not inflate at UW, nor coddle anyone just to pass them, when I was there.
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That makes sense. I am less interested in average college GPAs than graduation rates. And even more than graduation rates, I am interested in the impact of covid on those students in the workforce and in their future scholarship (grad and professional schools). In other words, will covid follow those students into young adulthood? Will it end up impacting their functioning at work or the contributions that they are able to make in their professional/academic fields? Hopefully, in the long run, it will all even out, but in my observation, many students in the HS classes of 2022-2027 (at very least) have suffered from a ripple effect stemming from a weak(er) educational experience during their middle and high school years. Untangling those effects from the impact of any testing policies will be hard (I think).
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It is an interesting thought but I don’t think that college grade inflation is an issue in this case because the original pool sizes are so big. Long before TO became a thing the highly rejectives said that they could fill their classes several times over from their applicants with no drop in class quality. I would posit that all along there were plenty of kids who AOs knew would succeed but were rejected because of test scores. There was other confirmatory data in their package but the need to keep scores high for rankings and prestige made them candidates for rejection unless they were hooked. These kids are now selectable if they apply TO.
I think that HS grade inflation is a huge problem right now and that it is hard to trust a students GPA without confirmatory information such as Tests/APs. My conversation with the C5 liaison strengthened that belief.
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Channeling Miracle Max, I believe that stance is “mostly true”. 
Dartmouth/Brown/Yale recommending submitting scores even down to 25 percentile suggests to me that even with TO, whether the applicants are choosing the correct option or not will affect the measured success rate of admits.
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Test blind schools UCB UCLA, SLO Caltech, etc. are not less selective/non-selective schools. Same goes for the schools that are truly test optional.
We’ll have to disagree with this. There are plenty of excellent schools that seem to mean what they say regarding TO. To me the notion that TO isn’t really TO seems to be the latest iteration of some families insisting the tests are more important than they really are, despite what the college think, say, and do. This disconnect is another good reason for schools to move away from the tests, if they so choose.
(To avoid confusion, I agree TO can mean different things at different places, and I wish all colleges were more clear. But at many schools TO really means TO, and there are students from the middle and high SES who could write off the tests completely and still be admitted to a very good school. Now if you want to chase money at U of Alabama, obviously the tests matter, but that is up to the families.)
Didn’t assume that. It has made the process less stressful for those kids (especially California kids) who opt out of playing the testing game, though.
I don’t get this argument. How is using even more measures that skew toward high SES students better than using less such measures?
Assume rich parents pay for student A (with a high SAT score) to start a robotics club in a developing country, while student B (with a solid but lower SAT score) works at McDonalds. How does crediting Student A with both the boondoggle EC and the high SAT score help Student B in the admissions process? How is piling on and double counting multiple factors that correlate with higher SES help the lower SES student?
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Test blind is not the same as test optional. So I don’t see how that’s a counter example.
Yes there are plenty of excellent schools, but I was referring to the highly selective ones. Do you know any unhooked Asian or White kid who got into a T30 without tests? I don’t.
Yes, of course there are plenty of great less-selective schools that are truly TO for everyone. But I’m not referring to such schools.
Huh?? I’m saying it’s not.
(Also: let me clarify that I was responding to the point about TO reducing stress for everyone. I am not advocating for schools to go back up test required. I said in my earlier post that I’m fine with schools choosing to be TO)
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Absolutely! Both D22 and D24 have Asian-American and white friends from their boarding schools who got into T30 schools without tests including at least one REA, which seems to have surprised everyone including the admitted child. These are non-athletes and non-legacy kids. If they have any other hooks, my kids are not aware of them. I guess if hooked also includes attending a highly selective prep school, I don’t know any unhooked kids, but that may be because in general I don’t know that many teens besides my children’s classmates.
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Test blind options are a relevant counter-examples because they are schools where testing is not necessary for admissions. Testing causes stress, but there are plenty of TO and TB options for kids who would prefer to avoid such stress.
I know examples of both.
You wrote “I do worry though, that without tests there’s more emphasis on other factors (ECs, competitions, essays and LORs) that tilt even more in favor of higher SES students than the SAT/ACT.” I am trying to understand why this is a worry? It reads as of you believe that adding in the tests mitigates toward less correlation with wealth. I don’t think that is the case. What am I missing? .
My experience is similar, although not at a boarding school.
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Same here - definitely know (unhooked) white and Asian kids who have been accepted to T30 (and even Ivy) schools as TO candidates. Seems a weird assumption that this wouldn’t be possible.
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If tests are not considered at all, there’s no stress for anyone worried about testing. That’s different from a kid worrying if they need to submit a test to a test optional school. Not the same.
Good to know.
What I’m trying to say is: if an applicant doesn’t submit scores, the school will place more emphasis on other factors such as ECs, essays and LORs in evaluating their application. And IMO these factors skew more in favor of affluent kids, thereby disadvantaging lower SES kids.
(ETA: I’m not going to get into a drawn out debate, so I’m moving on)
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One wouldn’t know it reading CC, but one can apply to TO schools without ever taking the test. IMO, some of those kids understood the assignment.
That’s what I thought you were saying. Problem is, considering test scores in addition to the other factors disadvantages low SES students even more.
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From the Hechinger article above that supports test blind but shows the weaknesses of test optional:
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The ultimate solution may just be for colleges to state, in advance, that they will give preference to lower SES students. That should achieve the goal, right?
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Assuming there is a non-zero correlation between test scores and other aspects of the application, why would you expect the admit rate to be identical between test optional applicants and test submitter applicants? To evaluate whether one group is favored over the other, you need more information about the applicants than just admit rate. Also note that this is an opinion piece on a small, specialty website. There are some clear weaknesses in the reporting and conclusions.
Coming from a public school in MA I’m not aware of any TO applicants that have been successful at elite schools unless they are hooked in some way. I’m not surprised that prep school students would find greater success TO since colleges can be assured that they have been rigorously prepared for college work. For those kids a test isn’t really necessary (IMO). I think for UMC kids from public schools it is a different calculus.
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I’m under the impression that Massachusetts is a particularly competitive location. Furthermore I am not sure if any of my kids’ friends who are international students (non-citizens) had success applying test optional to highly selective colleges. Anyway, applying TO may have gotten tougher for some demographics as we’ve moved further away from the pandemic. Thus I am not sure whether D24’s classmates will have as much overall success with TO as D22’s, but at least so far, D24 says that there have been some ED and EA admits that were test optional in her grade along with the surprise REA one. Great kid and good friend, but I admit that I was pessimistic when my child told me her friend was applying.
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Of course the expectation is not “identical” but some of these deltas are large. In the era of grade inflation, there’s a higher risk for some of that correlation to fade. In addition, I thought one (not all) of the motivations was to capture the applicant whose the correlation was lower between testing and the rest of the app (namely the gpa).
Yes, the picture would be clearer with more info, but I find this enough at least to question full allegiance to the “TO is completely fair” camp. (and I’m not sure you need to give Hechinger a black eye due to their size… and almost every article is an opinion piece nowadays regardless of the publication or writer). Finally, I spent some time looking for some older articles crowing about how their TO and T-submitted admit rates were basically the same declaring the fairness in their process. I couldn’t find it, but I’ll keep looking so I can toss them in the circular file.
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