Slashdot Mirror
More Colleges Than Ever Have Test-Optional Admissions Policies (theconversation.com)
Back in the 1980s, Bates College and Bowdoin College were nearly the only liberal arts colleges not to require applicants to submit SAT or ACT test scores. On Jan. 10, FairTest, a Boston-based organization that has been pushing back against America's testing regime since 1985, announced that the number of colleges that are test-optional has now surpassed 1,000. From a report: This milestone means that more than one-third of America's four-year nonprofit colleges now reject the idea that a test score should strongly determine a student's future. The ranks of test-optional institutions include hundreds of prestigious private institutions, such as George Washington, New York University, Wesleyan University and Wake Forest University. The list also includes hundreds of public universities, such as George Mason, San Francisco State and Old Dominion.
It was not uncommon when I was applying to universities in Canada to expect them to do their own testing of prospective students, since they generally didn't trust high schools not to inflate marks, and didn't have faith in the relevance of what standard testing was available (not a lot - IIRC, standard testing did not continue through high school).
In my opinion, if an educational institution cares about its reputation it should have its own entrance tests.
I'm trying to remember the actual case, but I'm pretty sure it ran down like this. Person from India or Pakistan, came to Canada with a mechanical engineering degree. The requirements in Canada require that if you get a degree out-of-country you have to submit to reexamination. Went all the way to court, and the court said nope, you're just doing that because of his race. The examination rules were rewritten to get around that particular court case and still require reexamination.
If there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that in today's hypersensitivity of "you're only doing this because x, reason so I don't have to follow your rules!" bullshit, you can be sure that there's a judge somewhere that will agree with that "progressive agenda" and put people at risk.
Om, nomnomnom...
they measure how much money your parents have. If they can afford to send you to test prep classes you do well. If they can't you don't. SAT/ACT are multi-million dollar scams to make money for the ones running the tests.
On the math side of things, definitely not.
Our university went though years of trying to figure out the best way to place freshmen in the sequence of math courses, even designing our own math placement test. It's a hard problem. You don't want to set up someone to fail by tossing them in over their head. Likewise, you don't want to waste someone's time by putting them in a class full of stuff they already know.
Guess what? The single best predictor of success in the vital calculus series of classes (which are pre-reqs for lots of of ther STEM courses) was the student's math ACT score. Better than custom placement tests. Better than high school transcripts. Actual data over many years as analyzed by a department full of actual statisticians concerned about their own students' success.
Were "test prep" courses a factor? I don't know. But, if the test prep was inflating student math ACT scores, then it was also inflating their success in university calculus, so sounds like money well spent if that was the root cause. I'd also like to call "BS" on the raft of cynical posts in this thread claiming universities are only interested in scamming students out of tuition. While the US university system has plenty of faults, that's not one of them. Student success is a driving concern in academia. Maybe even to an extreme, as we are currently in the grips of an "assessment" frenzy that tries to quantify it in an overly bureaucratic way.