A new study reports that the ACT and SAT are useless and unnecessary:
Bob Schaeffer (239) 395-6773
mobile (239) 699-0468
for release with “Defining Access” report Thurs. April 26, 2018
TEST-OPTIONAL ADMISSIONS LEADER APPLAUDS NEW STUDY:
“DEFINING ACCESS” SHOWS ELIMINATING ACT/SAT SCORE REQUIREMENTS
PROMOTES EQUITY AND ACADEMIC QUALITY
A major study released today provides strong evidence that ACT/SAT-optional schools increase campus diversity without harming classroom performance. Defining Access: How Test-Optional Works analyzes records from nearly one million students at 28 undergraduate institutions.
The data show that test-optional policies promote both academic quality and equity,” said Bob Schaeffer, Public Education Director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest). “This report should encourage even more colleges and universities to drop their ACT/SAT requirements.”
FairTest has led the movement to de-emphasize admissions test scores for three decades. The group’s website currently lists more than 1,000 test-optional four-year colleges and universities (http://fairtest.org/university/optional). The database includes more than 300 institutions ranked in the top tiers of their respective categories. There are now test-optional schools in 49 states, the District of Columbia, and most U.S. possessions
Among the key findings of today’s report, according to FairTest:
– Test-optional policies perform well at a wide range of undergraduate institutions..
– Larger percentages of African American, Latino, first-generation, Pell recipient, and female students choose not to submit scores than whites and male applicants.
– Eliminating ACT/SAT requirements Increases the enrollment of historically underrepresented groups in almost all case
– Applicants admitted without consideration of test scores graduated at equal or higher rates than those who submitted ACT/SAT results.
The new study is available online at https://www.nacacnet.org/HowTest-OptionalWorks
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– A timeline of schools de-emphasizing ACT/SAT scores over the fifteen years and the list of 300+ top-tier, test-optional institutions are available on request.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
lol…
Lies, big lies, and research papers. I know that I am not going to abandon SAT/ACT if only for they force students to learn something, anything: grit, perseverance, tricks to pass a multiple choice test. 60% of Berkeley freshmen require remedial algebra. Without SAT/ACT, this number will only get higher because present-day middle- and high curriculum is too watered down to prepare students for college. But, in a world where colleges became what high school was half a century ago, which is merely a pass to better job, the colleges will be happy to accept more students. Not for free, of course.
Do you take the SAT/ACT test every year? (You said you’re not going to abandon them).
They are addictive like crack cocaine.
Hey Gruff, the research is clear, and has been for quite a while. The SAT is a fraud, and the ACT is only marginally better.
A question for Fair Test:
What is a fair test?
Deciding between the fried butter, funnel cakes, or corndog.
What is fried butter?
Love the other two and the fried butter sounds intriguing.
It’s a deep fried battered stick of butter that was first available at the Texas State Fair, but I believe it’s now making its way to other state fairs.
Fried butter?! I love butter, but… Now fried pickles are another thing. I had my first and only taste of them at the Minnesota state fair. I can tast them now….
cx: taste
I got carried away by sweet (and sour) memories.
I would love the list of schools of test optional schools!
Thank you for sharing this!!!
>
http://www.fairtest.org/university/optional
Many of the schools have caveats like: “SAT/ACT may be required but considered only when minimum GPA and/or class rank is not met.” It’s easy to admit a valedictorian with a 4.0. As with so many educational “experiments” the big question is: will it scale?
“Will it scale?”
Ummm, No!
The SAT/ACT results are COMPLETELY INVALID due to the inherent onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods and psychometric fudgings as proven by Noel Wilson, therefore why would one want to “scale up” those invalid malpractices?
I’ve been saying on this blog for a while now that the SAT is a fraud, and the ACT is only marginally better. As one college enrollment company executive said in summarizing his company’s research on the SAT, “I may as well use shoe size.”
The thing the SAT measures best is family income.
The College Board sells the PSAT, the SAT, Advanced Placement, and other tests, and it sells all kinds of software to help colleges pick the best entry classes that money can buy.
Let me repeat, the College Board sells – on a massive scale – fraudulent products to the public.
And yet, educators keep buying. So do parents and students. And colleges and universities, for their own nefarious – and not educational – reasons.
When will people wake up to the fact that they’ve been badly duped?
The product may be fraudulent, but it requires genuine effort. Meaning, by simply attempting to complete one of these tests one shows dedication and grit.
Sheer nonsense. A monkey could complete the SAT with enough coaching.
@ Gruff…grit? Please.
@ Diane: good one..
“A monkey could complete the SAT with enough coaching.” — Are you blaming me for sneering? Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi. Anyway, monkey may complete the test, but will it get decent score? Um, maybe, with the new scoring system that does not penalize for wrong answers…
Please, Diane. You’re taking the rhetoric too far. Implicitly, you are identifying the millions of students who have found the SAT difficult, even after wasting hundreds of dollars on test coaching, as less capable than monkeys.
Training to take a standardized test is not education. It degrades education. Tutoring raises SAT scores. The wealthiest parents hire the most expensive tutors. This is a corruption of education.
“The thing the SAT measures best is family income.”
Ummm, no. . . !
The SAT doesn’t measure anything. The SAT correlates well with family income, more specifically it correlates best with the mother’s education level.
Be that as it may, a statistical correlation is not a “measure” by the definition of the word “measures” as you use it here.
We need to quit confusing and conflating the term “measure” into something, some meaning that it doesn’t have. The edudeformers and privateers love to misuse and abuse measure in order to accuse and condemn what goes on in public education. We help them out in normalizing that misuse every time that we misuse measure.
Duane, whatever.
If the SAT “measures” anything, it’s family income.
High school GPA is also highly correlated with family income, even more so than SAT scores, according to a study by Rebecca Zwick. Other measures commonly used in college admissions, such as volunteer activity and admission essay, are probably yet more so. SAT scores are correlated with lots of things, but may have the lowest correlation with family income among the measures most commonly used for college admission.
High school GPA is highly correlated with family income??? That doesn’t make much sense to me at all. One might contend then that there is massive grade inflation or that the parents in upper SES districts demand that their snowflake children all get A’s. Can you please link to that study?
Be that as it is. Probably a more accurate word to use instead of “measures” is criteria. Criteria most accurately describes what the volunteer activity, admission essay, SAT score and various other things that the admissions officers take into account are. Those things aren’t any kind of measures at all.
I believe the term measures is purposely used to obfuscate, especially in using standardized test scores, the pseudo-scientific, false and invalid nature of those scores, to make the admissions process, and other processes-job hirings, etc. . ., appear more objective than they actually are. Why else use the misleading “measures” and not the more neutral criteria?
Duane, I am not your servant. You are an adult who obviously knows how to use the Internet. If you were genuinely interested, you would have no difficulty finding the relevant links on your own.
It’s common courtesy to provide links.
No, it is not. For you, with your mind unchangeable, it would be make-work. Which, I assume is exactly as you intend it to be. Besides, you ramble on and on, positing alleged truths without any evidence. I do not post here for your sake, and I am not going to spend one second doing your bidding. Again, if you were really interested, you would know where to find the studies. My guess is that you already know, and you are just trying to be annoying. And, if I am wrong, and you do not already where where to find the studies, it would show that you do not care to expose yourself to evidence that runs counter to your already made-up mind.
My mind unchangeable? In the face of no reasonable evidence to the contrary of what I have believe, you are correct. You have not shown me anything that refutes or rebuts the arguments that I have presented over the years here and in other venues. You have never said a peep, other than, I believe, and I may be mistaken this comment for yours-if so forgive me, a couple of years ago of something to the effect that Wilson’s work is “nothing more than a postmodern diatribe”. But other than that nothing, zilch, nada. So how could I change my mind when you have given me absolutely nothing to work with???
I have read your two books that defend standardized testing and find them to be nothing more than weak apologetics (yes, used in the faith belief sense of the word) that don’t address any of the real substantive fundamental conceptual issues such as the onto-epistemological errors and psychometric fudgings, and construct invalidities involved in the standardized testing process.
The reason I ask for your sources is because, no, I don’t know those sources. Otherwise I wouldn’t ask. I don’t pretend to know everything. And no, it doesn’t mean that I “don’t care to expose myself to evidence that runs counter to my already made-up mind.” I’ve been asking for 20 years now for refutations and/or rebuttals to Wilson’s work and have not received a single response. Please, Richard, point me to some.
As far as being annoying, yeah, I can be a prick (and I left out the f. . .ing adjective because it’s Diane’s blog)! I do so only when people repeatedly refuse polite requests for information such as you have done multiple times. Yes, then I become a tad testy to put it nicely.
Hey, I’ll gladly debate the pros and cons of standardized testing with you anytime. Your blog? No problem. Anywhere. Let me know. Feel free to contact me at duaneswacker@gmail.com
And the next time you get to St. Louis, I’d be happy to meet you at Ted Drewes and buy you a frozen custard.
Duane, I don’t care what you think.
Typical horseshit reply Richard.
Also, yes, I do have problems “finding the relevant links on my own” as any search will bring up thousands of links. How am I to know which one is the one to which you are referring. Hence the need for the original poster of whatever to provide the link. You know like when I provide the link to Wilson’s work on standards and standardized testing which you seem to have totally ignored even though you are so strongly support standardized testing: “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Don’t forget, colleges can raise their average ACT/SAT scores in the US News rankings when the students with the lowest scores do not count in the calculation, because the students do not submit the scores (despite, in most cases, taking the tests). Recommend reading Howard Wainer’s work on this, in papers and in Uneducated Guesses.
The people who benefit the most from aptitude admission tests are the bright, energetic kids who, through no fault of their own, ended up at a high school with weak academics.
Are the ACT/SAT considered again as “aptitude” tests? I thought that the College Board and American College Testing claimed that the tests were not aptitude tests. Have they gone back to claiming that they are?
And do you have any links for Wainer’s work? Thanks!
An aptitude test is simply one with scores highly correlated with future outcomes.
I would find links to Wainer’s work through web searching, which you can do directly.
If that is the definition of what an aptitude test is then there are no aptitude tests.
By the way; What is the lowest correlation coefficient that you consider to be “highly correlated”?
Just to clarify, wasn’t Wainer a long-time Education Testing Service employee>
And isn’t Wainer pretty much wedded to the SAT?
And didn’t his research on SAT opt-out students at Bowdoin College include a pretty small sample?
And didn’t he find that the first-year SAT opt-out students had about a 2.9 GPA while the SAT-takers had about a 3.1 GPA?
A fairly recent study of pay on Wall Street found that an analyst with three years experience made about $65,000 if college GPA was 2.8 or less, but received about $77,000 if GPA was between 2.9 and 3.1.
A first year investment banker made about $100,000 if GPA was between 2.9 and 3.1.
Isn’t Wainer’s research on the SAT an awful lot of a distinction without much of a difference?
Just curious. Didn’t you work in the DC public schools at the same time that Michelle Rhee was there? And didn’t you exit the DC schools at about the same time as Rhee?
Didn’t you also work for the ETS and for ACT? And for Pearson?
And didn’t you work for The Association of Boarding Schools, which included – among others The Hotchkiss school $60,000 a year), the Cate School ($60,400 a year), Woodberry Forest School ($55,600),
the Fay school ($68.560 for 7-day boarding $62,000 if you go home on weekends), Chatham Hall ($50,500), Choate Rosemary ($59,110), and Miss Porter’s School ($62,300)?
And don’t these schools rely heavily on standardized tests, like the Secondary School Admission Test and the PSAT and SAT?
And can’t these tests be coached?
Don’t you believe that “without standardized tests, there would be no means for members of the public to reliably gauge learning in their schools?”
And don’t you like the Common Sore State Standards, and the tests that go with them?
Don’t you think that standardized tests are not really problematic, but that teacher cheating is, and that “the problem” associated with standardized testing “is easy to fix, however, only if educators genuinely desire to stop the cheating?”
Given that you are virtually stalking me, it is only fair that you reveal your real name.
Thanks for that info, democracy!
Phelps is a diehard apologist for standardized testing and not a very good one at that in my reading of his books. He constructs a lot of strawmen and proceeds to knock them down. He never once addresses the onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods and psychometric fudgings that Wilson has shown. And Wilson’s work precedes Phelps’ work by ten years. He refuses my requests for sources and citations like above. He hasn’t addressed any of my concerns when I’ve asked him on this blog. But then again, what can I expect from a DuBurger??