The University of Puget Sound has joined some 800 other colleges and universities by dropping the SAT
“Put away your study guides, college applicants — the University of Puget Sound doesn’t care how you do on the SAT or ACT.
“The Tacoma university has joined a small number of Washington colleges, and a growing list of colleges nationally, that don’t require undergraduate applicants to submit standardized test scores when submitting an application for admission.
“The reason? UPS has found that grade-point averages are much more predictive of how a student will do in college than a score on a test.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Praise God. I’ll be VERY happy for this trend to continue.
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Good for the University of Puget Sound!
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Captain (David) Coleman is madly (and I mean madly in 3 different ways) trying to tie the Common Core to SAT to keep afloat a sinking ship (The HMS SAT)
Unfortunately, the HMS common Core is also going down …to the bottom of the…Duncan’s a Rhees, Pearson testing lost their fees, it was sad when the Common Core went down.
but of course, Coleman won’t go down with the ship. He’d boot some poor kid or old grandmother out of the lifeboat before he did that.
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…because, you know, “Granny, no one gives @$&* what you feel and think! so give me your $#!@*$! spot in the lifeboat!”
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I think you are wrong. David Colemen is trying to keep the meme of “college and career readines” but dump the Common Core and associated tests in favor of PSAT8/9 and PSAT 10 then the SAT–three tests with test prep offered by KahnAcademy.
First state to sign on is Michigan, free SATs for everyone with accedd to KahnAcademy test prep and some other perks from the College Board.
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Laura
That could be (and you know far more about this stuff than I do) but my question is why is he aligning SAT with Common Core if he intends to dump CC?
or maybe I am being too logical trying to second guess Captain Coleman since much of what he does makes no sense at all. 🙂
artseagal
That’s a great idea, but if I am not mistaken, someone else here already did a version of the Gilligans island song
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SomeDam Poet… I think this “occasion” calls for a poem to the theme song from Gilligan’s Island perhaps :}!!!! Coleman would be the captain, Duncan would clearly be Gilligan and Rhee would be the vapid Tina Louise…
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As a boy watching Gilligan’s Island wouldn’t have called Tina Louise “vapid”. Now Rhee and vapid in the same sentence makes sense.
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This is good news for minorities and women, two groups that might not get a chance at admission, due to scores which tend to favor white males and Asians.
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Please note that females represent 56% of all students in 4 year colleges compared to 44% males. Females are dominating college admissions at this time. There is no good news for women because the colleges are attempting to get more males into the system to balance it.
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Raj,
That gender imbalance favoring women in college admissions has been the case for many years.
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I would like to see the data UPS is using. The data I’ve seen shows that GPA is only slightly better at predicting college success than SAT. Data shows that used together, GPA and SAT are the best at making these predictions. Additionally, if GPA is all that is considered, it is conceivable that it is likely to hinder those who are trapped in subpar school systems. Colleges look at which high school students are coming out of when considering GPA’s. It is likely that they aren’t going to give as much credence to a 4.0 at intercity school GPA as a suburban 4.0 in the northeast. The SAT may be the only way for that urban youth to show they can do it. Just like so many things in education, I hope they don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Is the SAT the be all and end all? No. Is it helpful to make 1st cut sorts of decisions, absolutely.
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It (GPA) is still, in your own words, slightly better. The students you worry about may still take the exam and submit it to bolster their chances. Also, many state universities are like those in Montana when I was young. If you graduate from an accredited high school, they must accept you. They will send you packing if you do not keep a 2.0 average, but you get your chance. If you are pinning your hopes to the new Coleman designed SAT you might as well take your college loan and go to Las Vegas.
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I agree with you. there is a working paper on the impact of high school quality on the predictive power of HS GPA that strongly supports what common sense would tell you: not all HS GPAs or high schools are created equal.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/27/study-finds-impact-attending-poor-high-school-follows-one-college
What would be truly revolutionary is if Fair Test colleges treated a 3.5 from New Trier the same as a 3.5 from East St. Louis Sr. as a 3.5 from a rural/blue collar school that hardly ever sends graduates to selective colleges.
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“. . . a 3.5 from New Trier the same as a 3.5 from East St. Louis Sr. as a 3.5 from a rural/blue collar school that hardly ever sends graduates to selective colleges.”
Your perception of these various types of schools is, well, let’s just say less than what reality dictates.
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I am not picking up what you’re putting down here, DS.
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What I am saying is that those three supposed different types of high schools may not be as different as you imply.
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” Is it helpful to make 1st cut sorts of decisions, absolutely.”
Ha, ha, ha, heh, heh, eh, eh, ha, ha, ha!! Thanks for the laugh.
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On the other hand, look at this
State University of New York Chancellor Nancy Zimpher hasn’t been shy in supporting the Common Core and opposing opt outs from testing.
Now she’s pushing for what she calls a “universal diagnostic test” to stop the need for college remedial work. At the Clinton Global Initiative in Denver (2015) she announced a “pilot effort” to assess “college readiness among high school sophomores and juniors in New York.”
On the one hand she speaks of “creating” a new test, but then cites the PSAT for grade 8 as if that will be her “universal diagnostic.” http://www.suny.edu/about/leadership/chancellor-nancy-l-zimpher/speeches/2014-sou/
Nothing new in all of this hoopla and substantial failure to understand the Common Core and those aligned tests.
First, Nancy Zimpher seems to have forgotten (never realized?) that the Common Core and the associated tests that she loves and defends are supposed to eliminate the need for remedial work upon entering college. That is the premise of the standards and the tests and the marketing pitch. Where has she been? There is no real need to reinvent the wheel, and no need to speak on the matter at all at the Clinton Global Initiative… unless ( perhaps) there are political ambitions attached to her proposal, in that venue.
Second, her idea is already in motion in Michigan, and her plan is less developed that the plan in Michigan.
In Michigan, the state will provide free access to the PSAT 8/9 to ninth-grade students and the PSAT10 to 10th-grade students because ….“PSAT-related assessment results also are a predictor of a student’s likelihood to succeed in certain AP courses” and those courses can expand student access to more opportunities for scholarships. That is the reasoning.
In 2016 a redesigned SAT will be administered statewide. The Michigan Department of Education (MDE) has made a deal with the College Board. The College Board will give students “free, personalized SAT practice” at KhanAcademy.org. MDE and the College Board will also give districts some resources and services so they can interpret and use the test results to propel more students “college and career readiness.” MAybe those “resources” will include some data analytics from the data trolling operation at the KhanAcademy website, perhaps by-passing issues of privacy.
Zimpher implies that more, or new, or different tests are needed because “standard state assessments reflect where students stand at that stage in their education but don’t necessarily ‘unpack’ what parts of the assessment students didn’t do well in and what needs to be prescribed to address the shortcomings. Another challenge, she said, is that districts around the state are inconsistent in how they track and diagnose students’ remedial needs. She noted that about $70 million is spent annually by SUNY on remedial classes, and that the more remedial classes students take the less likely they are to graduate. “These problems are like a snowball going down the hill,” she said. “If you don’t fix it when it occurs, the problems get amplified.” Already, she said, the problem is at a crisis level.”
Sorry. The “crisis” rhetoric is really shopworn.
I think that Zimpher has not really looked at and understood the testing required in NY State, or the purposes of the Common Core and aligned tests (PARCC for her state), and the ugly, truly ugly history of David Coleman at the College Board who is now working to ignore the Common Core that he helped to usher into existence as “architect.” He cetainly wants to distance the SAT ffrom the PARCC and SBAC tests.
As a quick fact check on that observation, I just looked up the College Board discussion of the revised 2016 SAT tests. The phrase “Common Core” has all but vanished from that discussion, appearing only twice in a 240 page document.
On the other hand the meme of “college and career readiness” lives on with over 200 mentions.
Zimpher needs to do some homework about the Common Core, the proposed revisions of the SAT that she seems to find attractive and also may want to think again about ADDING tests to those already required in NY state.
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When I recently asked the AP listserv about the correlation between AP (just another set of tests in the College Board suite of tests) and the Common Core, I was told that there was no correlation, that AP was outside its scope. that’s funny, because plenty of AP teachers are being told by administrators that they need to align AP courses to Common Core. CB can’t even get that straight. As for Zimpher, her plan is madness. reformers forgot about the century old Regents exams in NYS when they sought to impose PARCC. people did not respond well to hat. Nor will they support Zimpher’s plan. Smells like SAT over various grade levels.
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That is Coleman’s plan SAT doen to grade 8 and the first state on board is Michigan. Free SATs for all, with PSAT8/9 and PSAT 10 and an alliance with the College Board and KahnAcademy for test prep online. Data gathering with an online privacy policy at KahnAcademy that is the equivilent of Swiss cheese.
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Actually if my memory is correct, there are better indicators of success in college than the SAT. USE THEM.
Especially when we find out that student information is confiscated.
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Dr. Ravitch,
I thought you might be interested in reading the following SAT essay prompts that the College Board posted on their website. While these essay prompts are written in typical SAT format, the subjects of these prompts seem to reveal David Coleman’s agenda.
http://professionals.collegeboard.com/testing/sat-reasoning/prep/essay-prompts
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Many colleges still use SAT to (allegedly) predict ‘success’ in college, but that does not mean it actually does/can.
The most important gauge of “success” –award of a 4-year degree — is simply not something that the SAT predicts.
At best, the SAT only accounts for a small fraction of the variability in grades for the freshman year, between effectively nil and about 20% depending on whom you believe –independent researchers or the maker/seller of the SAT (College Board).
Any way you look at it, that’s hardly a stellar recommendation for SAT.
And given the SAT’s well documented biases against minorities and the underprivileged, SAT presents more of the latter with an “opportunity” to show that they (supposedly) “can’t succeed in college” than to show that they (supposedly) “can“.
The belief — absent anything more than the flimsiest of evidence — that one can somehow ‘predict” from a 3 hour standardized test whether a person will “succeed” in college is actually quite ridiculous.
I would be willing to bet that those most likely to buy into this ‘faith based” belief — indeed, the ones selling it — are precisely those who got high SAT scores. “Hey it worked for me, why not everyone else?”
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