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University of Chicago To Stop Requiring ACT and SAT Scores For Prospective Undergraduates (chicagotribune.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: For years, a debate has simmered at the nation's universities and colleges over how much weight should be given to standardized tests as officials consider students for admission -- and whether they should be required at all. A growing number, including DePaul University, have opted to stop requiring the SAT and ACT in their admissions process, saying the tests place an unfair cost and burden on low-income and minority students, and ultimately hinder efforts to broaden diversity on campus. But the trend has escaped the nation's most selective universities. Until now. The University of Chicago announced Thursday that it would no longer require applicants for the undergraduate college to submit standardized test scores. While it will still allow applicants to submit their SAT or ACT scores, university officials said they would let prospective undergraduates send transcripts on their own and submit video introductions and nontraditional materials to supplement their applications.
Taking and passing a ln SAT test sure does cost a lotbof money /s
....we cater to the lowest common denominator......
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
As long as those student loan bills get paid
When we eliminate objective means of measuring performance, we increase our control of the process. We increase our power.
In the pursuit of skin color (but not ideological) diversity, they've throw out the baby with the bathwater.
With writing skills like that you might get accepted now!
Since most kids/parents have gamed the standardized tests so well, this will probably relieve some pressure on admissions folk to focus on the truly curious and motivated applicants regardless of score. Akin to showing your Gitlab projects to a prospective employer instead of a resume bragging about your umpteen MCSE certs but not knowing how to actually do anything.
Yes, a video from the applicant will be helpful ... we wouldn't want to accidentally accept a white guy who goes by "D'Andre".
If anything, that's yet another damning indictment of the US education system.
Here in Denmark, your standardized scores coming out of secondary education (high school, et al) mean everything, and can be relied upon to do so. There are no entrance tests for universities, no essays to write, no customized applications. Your test scores represent you - and it works, because the whole (free!) public education system is good enough, from the ground up.
(Universities here do have non-standard application options for people who want to go that route, or don't qualify for first priority for any reason.)
An educational institution's goal is — or ought to be — education.
Whether SAT and other scores help that or not, "diversity" certainly does not. It is a completely bogus goal to pursue.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I don't see the problem with this. I got a 23 on my ACT (an acceptable but not great score). I graduated from university Magna Cum Laude. I've always done terrible on standardized tests but I do very well on regular tests. That's been true all the way back to the fun Iowa Basics tests.
While it will still allow applicants to submit their SAT or ACT scores, university officials said they would let prospective undergraduates send transcripts on their own and submit video introductions and nontraditional materials to supplement their applications.
It may not be required, but I suspect that most students will provide them anyway. Students apply to multiple universities so they will have the test scores. The students who don't provide them may be at a disadvantage compared to the students that do. These tests exist because it is hard to screen every possible application by watching their personalized video. Objective measures are useful and they won't go away.
I don't understand how they're going to evaluate students.
In the US, we have no national education standards. In many states, we have no state standards. The quality of schools and what is taught in schools varies wildly from district to district, and even school to school, due to wildly unequal funding. With no standards, how are they going to compare students?
I don't respond to AC's.
In his book "Friday", Robert Heinlein predicted (in 1982) The California Confederacy voting to grant a Bachelor degree to every citizen graduating high school.
Because someone observed "that Californians with college degrees earned more than those with high school diplomas alone".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I wouldn't advertise a 498 score on the SAT, even if it was just for one of the sections. An overall score ranges from 400 to 1600 and it looks like even a section score of 498 puts you below average. An ACT score ranges from 1 to 36 so it is clear that you aren't using that number. Maybe you were thinking that was a credit score but those top out at 850 with the average being well above the number you provided.
Time to offend someone
I've been a high school teacher (math, physics), and I've been a research assistant, teaching assistant, and teacher at the college level while completing my grad work. I've seen students with an 19 ACT score do as well as a student with a 32. I've watched 36 ACT students flunk the first semester. I've seen valedictorian students drop out. It's been my experience that students with > 30 ACT score generally do better than those with scores 30 have often had at least one semester, or even two of "ACT prep" in high school, compared to those with lower scores. It's not as if those student's aren't capable, it's just that they've been thrown into the game much earlier than those who haven't prepped.
will do more to weed people out than anything else. I'm paying $11k/yr for the 1st 2 and $16/k for the last two for my kid. If her grade were poor I could risk that. She'd be off to a life in Walmart.
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From the High School I graduated from, most students came out with at least two or three AP classes under their belt. I completely passed out of my college's chemistry and English requirements. Most of us got decent SAT/ACT grades and were accepted into decent universities.
My wife is getting interns from another local "magnet" high school for kids who show aptitude in science and math (my wife's an engineer.) These are seniors in a magnet school, and they can barely use a desktop computer, nor form cogent sentences describing what they have done in a day's work via email. She gave one kid a day to put a couple pages of data into an Excel spreadsheet (should have taken an hour) and he did roughly 5% of the task.
Educational standards are pretty friggin' varied.
Undergraduates sometimes surprise you - some of the brightest may have no creative imagination, some of the dullest may have great entreprenurial instincts. An interview can sus that in minutes, but if it's not PC to 'select', then hey, up the intake and note the 'survival of the fittest' in the first year. Waste of time for those unsuited, who could have been told ab initio, were it not for PC
Using test scores meant they had to admit too many Asians and whites. Getting rid of test scores makes it easier to discriminate against Asians and whites.
But because it's done to hurt whites, that makes racial discrimination OK!
I like what some CUNY schools do. You can take up to a certain number of credits as a high school grad who either:
(1) passed the CUNY entrance exam
(2) passed the Regents (an exam that everyone in NY state has to take to graduate high school)
The bar for this kind of non-degreee/probationary admission is fairly low, and but you "prove yourself", you can apply for regular admission.
The UofC initiates yet another race to the bottom.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
No, it was 498. My father gifted me a Rolex Yacht Master II watch up attainment of that score as it was the highest amongst my class at Choad.
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that SAT scores have no bearing on graduation rates.
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Reading the comments, I can assume many of my fellow engineering-types are dismayed and think this is some kind of lowering-of-the-bar.
I applaud this shift away from standardized tests, for completely personal reasons. I got a middling SAT score and a bad ACT score (the same score, twice!), didn't get into any of my top choice schools, ended up at a ginormous state school ... where I proceeded to double major in literature, a foreign language, plus a minor in poetry, got 4.0's in all of them, I published a paper around age 20 in an academic journal, and ran my own student newspaper. (I know none of that liberal arts trash impresses most /. readers, but I later got into CS, and I've been a back-end engineer for years.)
The SAT and ACT were terrible gauges of my ability to succeed in an academic setting. Full stop.
... enrollment is declining, revenue is down, so lower the barriers.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Not everyone who's made for college is made for a standardized test.
True but for some of us (like me) the standardized test gave us a way to prove we were smarter than our grades would otherwise indicate. I wasn't a great student. Partly because I'm easily bored especially by subjects I don't care about. But mostly because primary school tends to heavily reward the ability to memorize and regurgitate random facts and my brain isn't optimally wired for doing that. But I could do rather well (generally 90-95th percentile) on standardized tests so even though my grades were mediocre I was still able to get into a very good college.
So some people who are college material don't have good test scores but conversely some people without exceptional grades actually are rather bright and do fine in college. I was the later.
Some people can afford to give their kids extra resources. Technology, books, tutors, free time. That all helps pass the SAT test.
You need to look at this from a university's perspective though. When I am teaching a first year physics course if the students in the lecture do not have a sufficient background in maths and physics to understand the material then they are wasting their time and money being there. That is the point of having standardized tests: they ensure all students have a sufficient background to be able to cope with the program they want to enrol in.
If society fails to support those from disadvantaged backgrounds enough so that they too can also reach the standards required for university then there is not a lot the university can do without lowering its academic standards and then you end up with a second rate institute whose qualifications are far less useful and whose value to society is far less than it was. If the university intake is not diverse enough for society then, provided the university is applying its intake requirements in an unbiased fashion, that same society needs to fix the problem at the school level.
Looks like part of the explanation could be artificial score inflation.
1. Allow applicants to omit SAT/ACT scores
2. Applicants with lower scores omit
3. Your average applicant score goes up
4. ???
5. Profit!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/s...
A highly competitive university that gets applicants almost exclusively from the top 1% of ACT/SAT scoring students says that ACT/SAT scores don't predict success in their institution.
Would the correlation perhaps be higher if they accepted students randomly from every quartile of ACT/SAT scoring students?
https://abcnews.go.com/Technol...
I have to wonder if the Universities considering this path actually CARE about how capable / incapable their prospective student body is.
My guess is they've done the math on the amount of money they're missing out on due to setting the bar too high via SAT / ACT scores.
They will all happily take your money regardless if you can handle the curriculum or not.
You finishing your degree is relevant to them only as long as you continue to pay.
Of course, this is short sighted thinking on the Universities part.
In the short term, you have a larger influx of cash as the bar for entrance requirements is taken down a few notches and more students attend.
In the long term, bringing in students who may not be able to handle the curriculum ultimately tarnishes the reputation of the University.
( As the drop out rate increases, reputation plummets and fewer students will want to attend. )
Keep the entrance standards high and come to the realization that college is not in the cards for everyone.
AC Re "able to pay for expensive test prep courses so they can pass the tests."
having the ability to learn is what the test can find.
Having the wealth to pay for expensive test prep courses is great. That student can take in information.
Recall such information and use the skills learned on different questions during an exam in the time given.
The people who created the test prep courses had skills. The students who took the test prep courses had skills.
The people who passed the exams showed they had the skills needed in the set time.
People who did not have test prep courses also sat the same exam under the same conditions.
The free information needed to pass exams and understand what type of questions existed for decades.
They could have studied for free and taking in the same information. Passed the same tests to the needed standard.
An expensive test prep course does not pass the exam, the student has to have the actual ability to learn and sit the exam. They understand the questions and use the skills learned to pass the exam to the needed standard.
The same exam everyone gets.
An expensive test prep course is not a way around the same exam. Its just a way people use their time to study. The same amount of study can be done for free.
The exam is set to find out who in that part of the USA can study. Who could take in new information, remember facts and then had the ability to think in a set time.
A university then knows its new students can study. They all passed the same exam to some set standard. Further education can go on from that same academic level.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
So what are the alternatives:
1. Recommendations: Well off students know a lot more lawyers, doctors, business leaders... than poor kids so will get a preference here.
2. Interviews: well off kids are much better dressed, much more polished, much more similar to the people doing the interviewing so will get a preference here.
Kerry told it like it is, unfortunately. Also, don't assume that your daughter will be safe just because she joined the Air Farce. She could be exposed to a lot of interesting chemicals -- imagine having a grandchild with trisomy. She could be a munitions loader: accidents happen. She could be a mechanic in a dangerous part of the world.
"Stop requiring" and "stop considering" are two different things. Will they do the latter? If not, then students still have to take the test, but they opt not to submit their scores if their not very impressive. It also means admissions officers will most likely assume students who don't submit scores had substandard scores and that will color their evaluation of those students. If they were serious they'd prevent students from even submitting scores.
Here's an idea: make the freshman class approximately twice the size of the other years, and set a fixed curriculum for all first-year students. Front-load all the non-major-specific "core" classes or something. Stipulate that first-year classes must be graded on a curve. Then, after the first year, decline to invite back approximately half the freshman class. Keep the highest-performing half.
yes lower the requirements to can you get a loan? the banks will love that.
These tests are just data points, and no single data point should be the determining factor in admission. For Univ of Chicago, there's no down side. Their grads won't see fewer job offers unless the school starts to pump out lower quality grads for a few years. And, they'll probably get a lot more applications from kids who just don't want all the stress of taking the exams.
Just another day in Paradise
teach the test is bad for the US education system!
The bottom line here is they can admit dumb legacy and rich kids without having to sacrifice their average SAT score.
Unless you have secure funding lined up, you're probably not getting in without SAT/ACT scores.
the whole "wealth inequality" thing. When it comes to quality of life America isn't even in the top 10.
Put another way, what the hell do I care if there's 100 billionaires in driving distance of me if I'm living in a slum?
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and as excuse to bring in H1-Bs instead of hiring perfectly qualified Americans for jobs that don't need a degree then I see no problem with that solution.
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Here in Canada we simply rely on your efforts in grade 12. So we dont have any SAT style approach and it works out very well. The same is true for many other first world countries. It's nice to see USA finally catching up with the rest of the world in common sense. Now if we can just get you guys to start using the elegant (and simple) Metric system and not that mess called Imperial.
.. and have a ton of grade inflation in high school.
Well anyway, they'll have their diversity good and hard, as no self-respecting academic would want to go to a school that lets in just anyone.
right wing think tanks use to keep their billionaire sponsor's taxes low. By every single metric European countries beat the United States with the exception of most Millionaires. Europe is doing a much, much better job of regulating income equality.
The US, thanks to our dumb as dirt "Protestant Work Ethic" and a healthy dose of classism and racism dividing the working class into easily manageable chunks (google "Southern Strategy", no it's not a myth, it's depressingly well documented) works harder for less. We call it "Trickle Down Economics" and it doesn't work and it never did, but we keep Chasing that Dragon.
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and the work and tests there in. Basically it appears that SAT scores have little impact on grades except at the very, very top end (e.g. you score a perfect, in which case you're probably not going to your local public Uni). Let the kids in and see how they do. A lot of the high SAT guys and gals drop out while a lot of the lower ones graduate. Humans are more complex than a test score.
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Have you ever checked out the test score differences between owls and larks when both are forced into the "discipline" of waking up early? It's about a full letter grade to the disadvantage of the owls, when the test is taken early in the day (the effect lessons as the day continues, because the owls do finally stop yawning in mid-afternoon).
Owl performance recovers in full when allowed to sleep until their natural wake time. Check out Why We Sleep (2017) by Matthew P. Walker. It's the most authoritative general account of sleep presently available.
In most high schools (those which have stuck with traditional start times), because of age-related changes in circadian rhythm, almost all the students are owls, but some are more owls than others, and their grades all suffer (but the owl owls suffer more than the lark owls).
But sure, make rise time your go-to proxy for having the right stuff.
Why did they use ceramic pillows in Ancient China and as recently as the Ming Dynasty? — August 2017
she took it twice. Once there was profit to be had you could take it as many times as you want as long as your money's good. It felt like a scam to me and I'm happy to see it go.
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they're a by product of massive federal funding cuts. Thanks to that schools have cut back and they're getting more qualified applicants than they have places. They predicted this when I was in college 20 years ago but everybody scoffed at it because they wanted those sweet, sweet tax cuts (jokes on them, those only went to the top 1%). You'd know this if you had a kid in college (I do).
And it's been shown that people with black sounding names are much less likely to have applications reviewed. Mr D'Andre's name is likely to hurt him. If anything the video will be to his advantage. You're parroting a false talking point that comes out of right wing think tanks whose primary goal is to distract you from real economic issues with a persecution complex. Time to get woke my friend.
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Obama isn't president anymore. We aren't starting new wars every other month to distract from blatant government corruption. (IRS / DOJ / FBI / State Dept / etc)
We now have a president not creating corruption and ending things like the 60 year Korean war.
The sky must be a lovely shade of purple in the world you live in.
We now have a president who doesn't give a fuck if his own corruption is visible to the world because he doesn't think it's corruption. Giving jobs in the Whitehouse to your adult children is perfectly normal, right?
Meanwhile the rest of the Executive Branch is just as corrupt as its always been, because all the same people are still there (minus the heads of the departments, who never know what's actually happening anyway because they're political appointees) and because all the laws under which they operate are the same.
And the 60 year Korean war has not ended. The agreement between North and South Korea (Trump's "agreement" is totally irrelevant) says they will seek an agreement to establish permanent and solid peace, including promises to pursue arms reduction, cease hostile acts, and make unspecified changes to the fortified border. And that's all it says. "We're gonna agree to do a bunch of stuff." It doesn't say exactly what or when or how or who, and not one single land mine is being removed from the border, not one single artillery piece is being moved away from the north side of the border, and not one single US service member is coming home one minute sooner than scheduled.
I assume you're not referring to U of C in your comment, since about the 1930's they've basically had no intercollegiate sports programs of note. The only person I knew who got a scholarship related to sports when I was an undergrad there got a Rhodes Scholarship to go from there to Oxford.
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
4. Move to a state that heavily subsidizes college. Work at a shit job for a year so you get permanent residency. Go to college on the public dime, graduate with a small amount of debt, profit!
the article is about a University ending the practice of using SAT & ACT scores in admission criteria. The fact that they noticed some racial bias in the scores is one factor in that decision. The fact that those scores don't appear to be an accurate predictor of academic success is another.
Again, right wing talking points and wedge issues. We're all completely missing the point, which is that the 1% have cut funding to education so they can pocket the money as tax cuts while using cheap foreign labor to avoid paying for an educated workforce.
Every, and I mean everything, is always about the economy. If you and I weren't getting so screwed by wealth inequality you wouldn't give 2 shits about this. Because you wouldn't be at every other working stiff's throat for the scraps left by the billionaires. Face it, you've been had, again.
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But, being surrounded by a narrow ethnic set in college is NOT going to help you relate to the real world. I'm not bashing Asians, just saying that the work world is largely a social endeavor (except for narrow specialties), and without exposure to more ethnic groups, you'd be at a disadvantage.
Table-ized A.I.
I eventually found a place in an OK state school, but I didn't lose the C+ habit. I graduated the the minimum acceptable grade to achieve a diploma :/
There is an old joke that applies. "What do they call the person who graduates last in their class from medical school? Doctor." Unless you plan to go into academia the only time your grades really matter is if you are trying to get a competitive job right out of college with limited work experience. After that nobody gives a shit if you had mediocre grades. I haven't had anyone ask in a job interview what my grades were for 20 years across numerous jobs.
That is entirely incorrect. I can memorize things all day long and regurgitate them back at you for weeks and sometimes months. I could ace every test in every subject and still almost failed out of high school because I refused to do homework.
I'm afraid it's quite correct. Schools test memorization ability far more than they test analytical ability in general. Yes if you never do homework you still can fail classes. Nobody claimed otherwise. I was lazy about the homework too which is why my grades generally were poor. But the fact remains that someone who can memorize well (and can be bothered to do so) will generally outperform someone who doesn't memorize well even if they are good at figuring out problems.
"Diversity" is an indicator, not a tool. If our assumptions about the distribution of talent are correct, the primary-secondary education system is working, and society is sexually and ethnically unbiased, the demographics of universities should mirror that of society. Trying to artificially increase "diversity" will distort everything and can only damage the education system as a whole.
And now I am a parent... and I wonder what I am going to say to my daughter when she gets a C in a class she doesn't like in school.
My take on it generally is that I don't care so much what the grade is but I care very much how much effort was put forth. Sometimes you work really hard for a C and other times you get an A with barely any effort. I also plan to point out that grades don't define her but they do matter for some things. They matter for college admissions. They sometimes matter to employers. I can be very pleased with a C in a hard class where she put in a lot of effort especially if she doesn't like the class.
I hope I can keep it cool and tell her with a straight face that school performance doesn't matter, and all the useful learning she is ever going to do is going to be self led.
School performance does matter, just not in the way they pretend it does. Good grades tend to mean you worked hard. I would argue despite my previous comments that grades in subjects like math and science and writing and a few others really do matter even in the real world. If my child gets a C in a music class I'm only upset if they obviously didn't really try. If they get a C in math though I'm not going to be as forgiving though again effort matters most. They don't have to like it but not liking something isn't an excuse for not doing your best. I know I didn't have that reinforced adequately by my parents and I don't plan to make that mistake. (I'm sure I'll make plenty of my own mistakes...)
Would that be the John Kerry who went to Viet Nam, so that he could enhance his political career, before coming back to the US and, upon seeing that the wind was blowing from the other direction now, went on to support antiwar activities?
Yeah, I'd use him as a source.
Found a Californian...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.