Posted on 04/08/2025 9:41:43 AM PDT by george76
According to The Harvard Crimson, Harvard will offer high-school-level math courses to its students. The remedial assistance has rekindled criticism over Harvard’s move away from standardized tests in making admissions decisions.
For years, Harvard has been accused of lowering admissions standards to achieve “equity” goals in its classes. The school opposed efforts to uncover its admissions data. When that data was ultimately revealed, sharp differences emerged based on race. The differences led to the historic decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023) barring the use of race in college admissions.
As court decisions made it clear that the period of race-based criteria was coming to an end, systems like the University of California dumped standardized testing, while others decreased the reliance on such scores. Without standardized testing as an objective measure of comparison, challenges based on race would be more difficult to establish.
Critics have raised that history in light of the recent announcement. It would have been unthinkable in prior years for Harvard to offer remedial high-school-level courses for admitted students.
Nevertheless, Harvard’s director of introductory math, Brendan Kelly, told The Harvard Crimson that the cause was the pandemic. He said that Harvard students “don’t have the skills that we had intended downstream in the curriculum. We want to make sure that students are on a path to success starting from their first day.”
It is an odd explanation since most students deemed competitive for the top schools have excelled on standardized tests. The school was obviously selecting on other criteria than proven excellence in basic areas of study.
Since 1636, Harvard long insisted on the very top scores from students for admission. The result was that it became one of the world’s premier and most exclusive universities. Yet, in one generation, the current faculty and administrators have reduced its standards to the point that students must retake basic high school courses.
While the university’s standards have obviously declined, faculty and administrators have substituted their own priorities — and interests — for those of the institution.
Many agreed with Ibram X. Kendi that standardized testing was based on racism and perpetuated racial inequality. He insisted in 2020 that “standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade black and brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools.”
Ironically, standardized tests have been found to be the most predictive measure of success in college.
As noted by the New York Times, studies at Ivy League schools show that GPAs hold limited value as predictors of success while test scores are highly indicative of success.
It does not matter in today’s academic environment. Then University of California President Janet Napolitano caved to this movement.
Notably, academics in the California system came to the same conclusion as Dartmouth years ago. Napolitano, however, overrode those conclusions.
Napolitano responded to the claims of racism in the use of SAT scores with a Standardized Testing Task Force in 2019. Many people expected the task force to recommend the cessation of standardized testing. The task force did find that 59 percent of high school graduates were Latino, African-American or Native American but only 37 percent were admitted as UC freshman students. The Task Force did not find standardized testing to be unreliable or call for its abandonment, however.
Instead, its final report concluded that “At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average (HSGPA), and about as good at predicting first-year retention, [University] GPA, and graduation.”
Not only that, it found: “Further, the amount of variance in student outcomes explained by test scores has increased since 2007 … Test scores are predictive for all demographic groups and disciplines … In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority Students (URMs), who are first generation, or whose families are low-income.” In other words, test scores remain the best indicator for continued performance in college.
That clearly was not the result Napolitano or some others wanted. So, she simply announced a cessation of the use of such scores in admissions. The system will go to a “test-blind” system until or unless it develops its own test.
Even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) yielded to this movement during the pandemic by dropping the use of standardized testing requirements. However, MIT later reversed that decision and reinstated the use of the tests as key to preserving its elite status as an educational institution.
Of course, this controversy cannot ignore that our high schools are cranking out students who cannot do high-school level math. Indeed, many have moved away from standardized tests to achieve equity. Others have lowered standards or dropped proficiency standards for graduation. Others have eliminated gifted and talented programs to avoid inequitable results.
The combination of such equity policies has finally reached Harvard which is now compelled to reduce classes to high-school levels to meet minimal standards for students.
Sounds like pre-calculus. As far back as I remember, Harvard has had pre-calculus. If passing calculus were an admissions REQUIREMENT, the freshman class would be quite different.
Do a google image search for “accepted into all the ivies”. All will be revealed.
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I just did. Omigoodness!
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