Free Republic

The New York Times dropped a bombshell last weekend by admitting the leftists’ war on standardized tests such as the SAT was “misguided” after the paper has cheered for it for years (see here and here). For decades, leftists have waged war against standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT as part of college admissions, claiming these tests are racially, economically, and even gender “biased” against black and brown children and girls, have little predictability for a student’s future success, and are the root cause of persistent academic performance gaps among students of various ethnic groups. One of the...

A record number of students are failing to reach college-readiness benchmarks. The data, from testing giant ACT, come as scores fall for the sixth straight year. ACT’s college-readiness benchmarks aim to predict student preparedness by setting scoring standards commensurate with a reasonable degree of success in college courses. ACT claims that students meeting the benchmark for a particular subject on its flagship test have a 50-percent chance of attaining a B and a 75-percent chance of attaining a C in the corresponding college class. However, a record number of students are failing to meet any of the ACT’s benchmarks. 43...

Suppose you’re a poor teenager in a dysfunctional environment. You have to work a part time job to help make ends meet. Your parents are absent or completely checked out. So you have to help take care of your younger siblings. You’re smart, but you’re not in a position to devote much time to homework; to getting top grades in every class. But you set a few hours aside in an afternoon, and receive an outstanding score on the SAT. Suddenly, options become available to you. Our ruling class is doing all they can to prevent this possibility. Remember: If...

In the midst of the Covid pandemic, the UNC Board of Governors made the decision to take some pressure off potential applicants by implementing an emergency waiver for the System’s standardized testing requirement. Voting in July of 2020, the UNC Board of Governors temporarily waived the testing requirement for 2021’s spring, summer, and fall terms at all UNC-System schools. Neatly disguised as necessary (since testing centers were closed or canceling tests) and practical (since no at-home testing option was available at the time), this waiver opened the door for future “emergencies” to further diminish standards. As many expected, in May...

Standardized tests have been attacked for being biased against some groups of students. Is that true? Should we stop using them? Exams like the American College Test (ACT) are supposed to assess how much information students learned in high school and, by implication, their preparedness for college. However, they’ve been criticized as being biased against female, minority, and low-income students. As a biological psychologist, I’ve taught mostly in the fields of neuroscience, brain function, learning theory, cognition, and the like. But I also spent 12 years teaching high-school science, math, and ACT prep courses for a large, nonprofit tutoring center...

Standardized educational tests do not perfectly measure student aptitude or achievement, and no one argues that they do. But they can differ from all other available measures in two respects: their standardization and their independence of education insider control. To be truly standardized, the same content must be administered in the same manner to all students. To be independent of educator influence, they must be “externally” administered—that is test materials must be managed and tests administered by non-school personnel. External administration of a test systemwide to just one grade level of students requires both intensive and extensive logistical management. That...

The University of California has slammed the door shut on using any standardized test for admissions decisions, announcing Thursday that faculty could find no alternative exam that would avoid the biased results that led leaders to scrap the SAT last year. UC Provost Michael Brown declared the end of testing for admissions decisions at a Board of Regents meeting, putting a conclusive end to more than three years of research and debate in the nation’s premier public university system on whether standardized testing does more harm than good when assessing applicants for admission. “UC will continue to practice test-free admissions...

When standardized tests take up the latest political fad, the credibility of the test suffers, doing a disservice to those who desire a true education.Across America, it’s becoming increasingly common for school districts to advance alternative versions of American history that focus almost exclusively on the nation’s faults rather than its exceptionalism. Even elite preparatory academies like Manhattan’s Brearley and Dalton schools are instituting “critical race theory” curricula that define people by race rather than character. At the same time, schools have forgone the study of great authors like Homer, Horace, Dante Alighieri, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky — luminaries whose ideas...

No excerpt from Bloomberg allowed, story here, archived here. The article says that in 2020, 49% of students who had a parent with a bachelor's degree submitted test scores, compared to 30% of first-generation applicants, down from 79% and 71% in 2019. Here are the percentages of students submitting test scores by race: 58 Asian 48 White 33 "Latinx" 33 American Indian 31 Black

In the latest sign of trouble for the standardized testing empire that has played a major role in college applications for millions of students, the organization that produces the SAT said on Tuesday that it would scrap subject tests and the optional essay section, further scrambling the admissions process. The move comes as the testing industry has been battered by questions about equity and troubled by logistical and financial challenges during the coronavirus pandemic. Critics saw the changes not as an attempt to streamline the test-taking process for students, as the College Board portrayed the decision, but as a way...

NAEP's changes might cause better test results, but they fundamentally alter the meaning of reading comprehension, which would hurt students. Much like the SAT adding an adversity score and the ACT allowing specific subject retakes, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the “nation’s report card,” is easing its standards to improve its numbers. As with the SAT and ACT, these changes carry significant implications for the way English is taught in American schools. This year, the NAEP’s governing board plans to change testing to “optimize the performance of the widest possible population of students in the...

While cultural debates have roiled primary and secondary education, the National Assessment of Educational Progress has been largely free of ideological conflict. Known as the “nation’s report card,” NAEP tests students in math and reading and, less often, in civics, U.S. history, and science. These tests are not high-stakes student assessments because the NAEP does not calculate individual scores; rather, it measures school-system performance by state and large districts, and, as such, it is the nation’s best indicator of trends in student learning. The NAEP’s current framework defines reading comprehension as “a dynamic cognitive process,” involving “Understanding written text”; “Developing...

Memo to high-school seniors applying to selective colleges: A high score on your SAT is out. A Covid-19 epiphany is in. Hundreds of colleges dropped their mandate for a standardized test score this year as a result of the pandemic, but the replacement criterion at many schools may be just as daunting for would-be college freshmen: a new understanding of themselves and their place in the world as a result of the pandemic. “This wasn’t something you could study for or plan for, but it offers a great opportunity for students to show us what they were able to do...

In the struggle to achieve racial equality are two closely related controversies about “equal treatment” and “merit.” Does equal treatment mean treating individuals without regard to race, as critics of affirmative action assert, or with regard to race, as demanded by advocates of race-based diversity? And what is merit, and how should it be rewarded? Developments in California over the past several months brought both those issues boiling to the surface. On May 5, black and Hispanic Democratic legislators introduced Assembly Constitutional Amendment 5, the latest attempt to repeal Proposition 209, which added a provision to the state constitution prohibiting...

ACT, college sports, discrimination, A proposal recently released by The National Association of Basketball Coaches requests the NCAA remove an eligibility requirement to submit SAT or ACT scores. In the proposal, put forth by the Committee on Racial Reconciliation, the NABC decries the two tests as wicked forces of institutional racism that should be “jettisoned for that reason alone.” The committee was formed last month, and the proposal shows it.Their argument runs like this: the SAT was created in 1926 by the eugenicist Carl Brigham. Brigham intended the test to demonstrate the racial superiority of white blood. His project, of...

A number of colleges around the country are temporarily loosening their standardized testing requirements amid the coronavirus pandemic. All eight Ivy League schools will be test-optional for the coming admissions cycle. Initially, this applied only to SAT and ACT exams. But more and more graduate schools have started accepting students without GMAT and GRE scores, as well. U.S. schools reconsidered their application processes for the upcoming academic year because of the unfavorable consequences of COVID-19 coupled with stricter immigration policies toward foreign students, which adversely affected application rates. Within the last month, several MBA programs, including the University of Virginia’s...

The COVID-19 pandemic probably won’t kill the SAT, but will no doubt leave it in a badly weakened condition. Both the SAT (and its close competitor, the ACT) have had to cancel administration of their tests for the last few months and, according to this Washington Post story, universities have decided that they will make their admission decisions without those test scores. Before COVID-19, support for standardized testing was already eroding and recent developments are sure to cause further slippage. Undoubtedly, the greatest blow was the decision by the University of California (UC) system to stop relying on standardized tests...

... [A] task force of the faculty senate at the University of California, of all places, is resisting the movement to ban test scores in admissions. The 227-page report, completed in late January, recommends that the UC system keep standardized tests like the ACT and SAT as admissions requirements, and it demolishes the logic of the politically motivated anti-testing movement. The report dispatches the myth that standardized math and reading tests are useless for predicting college performance. Based on data from tens of thousands of students in the UC system, the report concludes that “test scores are currently better predictors...

The Educational Testing Service (ETS), which administers the SAT for The College Board, on Tuesday announced the launch of a new institute that will conduct research on creating and maintaining more equitable testing programs. Based on the institute’s research findings and recommendations, ETS will, down the road, incorporate changes in its tests to make them fairer, by accounting for test-takers’ socioeconomic backgrounds and the attendant inequities in educational resources, said Dr. Michael Walker, director of the new Fairness and Equity Research Methodologies Institute. Standardized tests like the SAT have for decades gotten a bad rap, with critics saying they have...

Making college admissions “test-optional” has been steadily gaining steam among elite and liberal arts American colleges. In late September, Colby College and Rosemont College joined the hundreds of other institutions that do not require their applicants to submit standardized test scores to be admitted to the school. Other schools that have “test-optional” policies include Bowdoin College, Bryn Mawr College, George Washington University, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Chicago, and Wake Forest University. And now, the University of California system has announced plans to study whether including standardized tests adds value to the admissions process. Many observers, including students, scholars,...