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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.
Unless they are one of the top tier where their reputations depend on their alumnis having glittering careers, many colleges just want to have many students - as the fees will pay the bills. So accepting anyone who's father can afford to pay or who can raise a student loan is good: more students.
GW tuition is over $53,000 a year. They will take anyone's money. These institutions are now just money making empires.
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.
The colleges want to limit Asian Americans to less than 1% of admissions. Finding the right legal way to do that is the long term project.
I'd love to see one shred of objective evidence to support that -- if you have one.
First, there is no such thing as a "non-profit" college. They ALL profit. Some are just more honest about where the money goes.
Second, Not relying on tests means relying on transcripts. Setting aside the stupid Pass/No Pass thing, relying on letter grades, however they are derived, is questionable since the grades are so variable. An A in one school could be equivalent to a C in another. Or, in the case of AP classes, an A in a regular class could be a C in an AP class.
Lastly, excluding any kind of objective or semi-objective measurements leaves only one criteria, the completely subjective measurement derived from essays, interviews, etc. That is how you get mostly illiterate morons accepted over potential geniuses because they interviewed better or expressed some form of SJW sentiments that impresses the interviewer.
What we have here is the gradual degradation of the US higher Education system due to the lessor of its graduates gravitating towards education where they implement their lessor standards.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
To be a doctor, you need to do well on the MCAT, get into med school, take the USMLE, and get a residency. Or get into a combined medical program out of high school and still pass the USMLE and get a residency.
Engineering in life-critical fields involves passing the FE and PE exams. Not trivial.
There will still be standard exams as gatekeepers for both fields.
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.
I've listened to admissions people, since my own kids are in high school now. The reason admissions offices are dropping the test requirement is that it no longer has a strong correlation with college success. That's it. The colleges are not dumbing anything down; to the contrary, admissions offices are widening the scope of their criteria in an effort to find the things that DO correlate with success.
The SAT is broken and doesn't serve anyone but the College Board. Good by and good riddance to it.
Honestly, how can someone be said to be ready for college if they haven't even bothered to take the standard test? What is so amazing about them? Obviously not their work ethic or intelligence... or they would have taken the test.
My kids, for some reason I can't quite figure out, flat out can't bring themselves to do homework. They'll always ace tests though. Something to do with their particular flavor of ADHD, I'm told. Most "solutions" to this problem involve extreme parental intervention, which aren't practical when you have more than one of them at once, and flat out doesn't work when the young person goes off to college in another state.
So what I really need are colleges that do the opposite - Test-only policies.