Bates College in Maine is one school where the SAT has been made optional:
Holding on to something "obsessively, perhaps neurotically" is what the debate over the usefulness of the SAT ought to be about, [vice president for external and alumni affairs at Bates College William] Hiss said.
When it comes to the SAT, Hiss...is no "wild and crazy guy." Twenty years ago, he persuaded the prestigious liberal arts college to make the submission of SAT scores optional for prospective students. Six years later, the Lewiston, Maine, school made all testing an optional part of the school's admissions process.
So what happened, besides a predictable increase in students clamoring to get into Bates? Between 1984 and 1990, when only the SAT was optional, a quarter of the school's students were admitted without submitting their SAT results to the admissions office. And since all testing was made optional in 1990, a third of Bates' students have been "nonsubmitters"...
The biggest beneficiary of the school's decision to make the submission of SAT scores optional turns out to be white students. By a ratio of 5 to 1, white students have outnumbered minority students who sought to enter Bates without submitting any college entrance test scores. A large percentage of these white students came from rural areas or low-income families.
The end result has been that there is no difference in graduation rates or cumulative GPAs between those who used the SAT for admission, and those who did not - which is being lauded as evidence that the tests are not useful and should not serve as hurdles. But there are many ways to interpret these results:
1. Students who choose to make the SAT optional may not necessarily be the ones who would score low on it, or who don't possess the necessary skills - there are plenty of test-phobic smart kids out there. It's not a given that the students who chose to avoid the SAT would have done poorly on it, so it may not be that odd that those who self-select to avoid submitting do as well as those who take the exam.
2. White students, even those from a poor background, might have enough of a educational drive that they would do well once admitted into college. I'd be very interested to see the breakdown of SAT/non-SAT results by race and sex, because I'm betting there are some subgroups differences, even if it's politically incorrect to say so. It's entirely possible that some groups will do well in college with a much wider range of SAT scores, or no score, than other groups.
3. I'd also be interested in seeing results for FYGPA - first year only - because that's the year for which the SAT is supposed to be most predictive.
4. Let's let some students with low SAT scores in the door, and compare them to the high- and no-SAT group. The results might be surprising.
5. If tests are optional, how does Bates choose students? Is it possible that their non-standardized admissions process approximates some of the selections that a standardized test would make? I'm betting that's the assumption here - that schools should get rid of tests and use their own personalized admissions process. And I'll be the first one to say that, for some schools, that's the best thing to do. But it's certainly not feasible, nor is it appropriate, for all schools. While the Bates results are interesting, it's premature to conclude - as does columnist DeWayne Wickham - that standardized tests may be useful only for maintaining the "status quo" in education across the board.
Posted by kswygert at November 16, 2004 12:23 PM