Free Republic

In early 2020, the University of California set the tone for the rest of the country when its regents voted to drop SAT and ACT admissions requirements through 2024. That decision, initially framed as a pandemic necessity, quickly reshaped admissions nationwide. By late 2022, roughly 1,750 schools, or about 80 percent of U.S. universities, had adopted test-optional policies, according to Forbes.“It’s a sea change in terms of how admissions decisions are being made,” Robert Schaeffer, of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, told NBC News.“The pandemic created a natural experiment.”Five years later, the results of this “natural experiment”...

All 25,000 individuals who applied to the University of Liberia were forced to swallow their pride: none of them passed the entrance exam, forcing the admissions office to lower its selection standards. … Liberia is recovering from a violent civil war that came to an end a decade ago, but left its education system “in a mess”, as President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf recently said. … According to the news site allafrica.com, the University of Liberia had decided to raise its admission standards for the 2013-2014 academic year. Any student seeking a spot at the university needed to score higher than...