Reinstate Standardized Testing

I am very surprised to find myself writing a blog post with this title, but everyone should always be open to changing their mind when they are presented with new information. The reality is that standardized testing, problematic and racist as it is, ends up doing a better job than any other politically acceptable mechanism to measure high school students’ capacity for success precisely because it is less racist than all the other measures. Dartmouth for one is reinstating the SAT.

Last summer, Sian Beilock — a cognitive scientist who had previously run Barnard College in New York — became the president of Dartmouth. After arriving, she asked a few Dartmouth professors to do an internal study on standardized tests. Like many other colleges during the Covid pandemic, Dartmouth dropped its requirement that applicants submit an SAT or ACT score. With the pandemic over and students again able to take the tests, Dartmouth’s admissions team was thinking about reinstating the requirement. Beilock wanted to know what the evidence showed.

“Our business is looking at data and research and understanding the implications it has,” she told me.

Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades — or student essays and teacher recommendations — of how well students would fare at Dartmouth. The evidence of this relationship is large and growing, as I explained in a recent Times article.

A second finding was more surprising. During the pandemic, Dartmouth switched to a test-optional policy, in which applicants could choose whether to submit their SAT and ACT scores. And this policy was harming lower-income applicants in a specific way.

The researchers were able to analyze the test scores even of students who had not submitted them to Dartmouth. (Colleges can see the scores after the admissions process is finished.) Many lower-income students, it turned out, had made a strategic mistake.

They withheld test scores that would have helped them get into Dartmouth. They wrongly believed that their scores were too low, when in truth the admissions office would have judged the scores to be a sign that students had overcome a difficult environment and could thrive at Dartmouth.

As the four professors — Elizabeth Cascio, Bruce Sacerdote, Doug Staiger and Michele Tine — wrote in a memo, referring to the SAT’s 1,600-point scale, “There are hundreds of less-advantaged applicants with scores in the 1,400 range who should be submitting scores to identify themselves to admissions, but do not under test-optional policies.” Some of these applicants were rejected because the admissions office could not be confident about their academic qualifications. The students would have probably been accepted had they submitted their test scores, Lee Coffin, Dartmouth’s dean of admissions, told me.

Here’s the thing–standardized tests are bad. But they are less bad than everything else. Take the college essay. Who actually believes this determines anything? Say this about standardized testing, you can’t cheat it, at least not easily. But the college essay? You can get anyone to write those things. You can pay someone. Your parents might do it for you. I happen to know people who have written college essays for their kids’ friends to help them get into more elite schools and successfully too. This obviously happens all the time. These things are a joke, and that’s even outside the “let’s train the kids to write the exact kind of language the colleges want to read” bit. You know who doesn’t have the wherewithal to pay someone to do it or have parents or friends who know what to say? Poor kids, who in this nation are largely kids of color.

Standardized testing may indeed be racist. But this is the United States. Every institution is racist, very much including the entire world in which white liberal parents (not to mention other white parents) make education choices for their kids. If you are moving Maddie and Connor to the “right” schools because “they are my kids and I only have one shot and they deserve all I can give them,” then why wouldn’t you write their college essays for them, especially if they are struggling a bit? Obviously the same logic applies. The logic applies without boundaries as far as I can tell. What won’t parents do that hurts other kids if it helps their kids?

Now, there is one actual way to do a lot better job of college admissions. That is quotas. We know the Supreme Court ruled against them and politically it’s a dead letter. But if you really wanted our elite or non-elite colleges for that matter to look like America or the world, racial and class and gender quotas is the way to do it. I would 100% support this, as I would in university hiring and around society generally. Who gets to buy the house? Yes, I think your race should have something to do with this is the neighborhood is usually white, for example.

Do I know that this is a political dead letter? Of course I do. But let’s not pretend there aren’t something that looks like solutions here. We just don’t really want them. So given everything else, I guess the standardized tests are slightly less racist than all other politically acceptable forms of deciding who gets into what college.