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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.........
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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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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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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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