A major new study by the National Association of College Admission Counseling (NACAC) looked at the college performance of eight cohorts of students from 33 colleges and universities. These 33 institutions do not require students to submit standardized test scores for admission. Like many previous studies, this one found that high school grades are better predictors of college success than scores on college entry examinations like the SAT or ACT.

The bottom line: Colleges and universities can learn more about future students by reviewing their four-year record of persistence and achievement rather than the results of an arbitrary test offered on one day, particularly one where some students have the means to pay for tutors to boost their scores. Colleges and universities do not need admission test scores to know which students are likely to succeed. The entry exams tend to have a disparate and negative impact on the neediest students. They are an unworthy gatekeeper. They waste the time, effort, and money of students. They benefit the testing corporations and the test prep industry, not students who hope to gain entrance to of institutions of higher education.

Here is the abstract of that study:

“This study examines the outcomes of optional standardized testing policies in the Admissions offices at 33 public and private colleges and universities, based on cumulative GPA and graduation rates. The study also examines which students are more likely to make use of an optional testing policy, and how optional testing policies can offer important enrollment and financial planning benefits. Four cohorts of institutions are examined: twenty private colleges and universities, six public universities, five minority- serving institutions and two arts institutions, with a total of just under 123,000 student and alumni records. Few significant differences between submitters and non-submitters of testing were observed in Cumulative GPAs and graduation rates, despite significant differences in SAT/ACT scores. Optional testing policies also help build broader access to higher education: non-submitters are more likely to be first-generation-to-college students, minorities, Pell Grant recipients, women and students with Learning Differences.”

Here is the summary:

“Previous research on standardized testing in admissions has examined the predictive value of testing and its fairness across widely differing pools of students. For over thirty years but increasingly in the last decade, hundreds of institutions have made admissions testing optional. This three-year study is the first major published research to evaluate optional testing policies in depth and across institutional types.

“With various forms of optional testing policies, the thirty-three colleges and universities in this study make admissions decisions without standardized testing as a credential for all students. Deliberately, the study reaches beyond the various “top 25” or “most competitive” lists. We include institutions in four categories: twenty private colleges and universities, six public universities, five minority-serving institutions, and two arts institutions, a total of approximately 123,000 student records at institutions with enrollments from 50,000 students to 350, located in twenty-two US states and territories. They vary widely, from a large scientific and technical university to a Native American college, from traditional liberal arts colleges and universities to fine arts/design institutions to urban and rural minority-serving institutions. We tried to ask, “Who is doing the heavy lifting, serving broad constituencies? Who is exploring the breadth of human intellect and promise in imaginative ways? Who is reaching out to serve students most desperately in need of access to higher education?”

“A fundamental question is: “Are college admissions decisions reliable for students who are admitted without SAT or ACT scores?” Many national educational research and philanthropic organizations such as the Lumina Foundation have presented findings to demonstrate that America will need to find successful paths to higher education for hundreds of thousands of additional first-generation-to-college, minority, immigrant and rural students, in order to grow America’s economy and social stability. This study provides the research support for optional testing as at least one route by which that can happen.

“Test scores contribute to college guidebook rankings. Perhaps equally important is self- selection by students who do not apply to colleges based on perceptions of testing or on advice from their high schools or parents. The National Association of College Admission Counseling (NACAC) “Report on the Commission on the Standardized Tests in Undergraduate Admissions” urged colleges and universities to “take back the conversation” about testing from the various groups for whom testing was either a profession or a cause. i This study is a contribution to that discussion.

“Does standardized testing produce valuable predictive results, or does it artificially truncate the pools of applicants who would succeed if they could be encouraged to apply? At least based on this study, it is far more the latter. In a wide variety of settings, non- submitters are out-performing their standardized testing. Others may raise the more complex issues of test bias, but we are asking a much simpler and more direct question: if students have an option to have their admissions decisions made without test scores, how well do these students succeed, as measured by cumulative GPAs and graduation rates?”

Here is a summary of the findings:

“With approximately 30% of the students admitted as non-submitters over a maximum of eight cohort years, there are no significant differences in either Cumulative GPA or graduation rates between submitters and non-submitters. Across the study, non-submitters (not including the public university students with above-average testing, to focus on the students with below-average testing who are beneficiaries of an optional testing policy) earned Cumulative GPAs that were only .05 lower than submitters, 2.83 versus 2.88. The difference in their graduation rates was .6%. With almost 123,00 students at 33 widely differing institutions, the differences between submitters and non-submitters are five one-hundredths of a GPA point, and six-tenths of one percent in graduation rates. By any standard, these are trivial differences.

“• College and university Cumulative GPAs closely track high school GPAs, despite wide variations in testing. Students with strong HSGPAs generally perform well in college, despite modest or low testing. In contrast, students with weak HSGPAs earn lower college Cum GPAs and graduate at lower rates, even with markedly stronger testing. A clear message: hard work and good grades in high school matter, and they matter a lot.

“• Non-submitters are more likely to be first-generation-to-college enrollees, all categories of minority students, women, Pell Grant recipients, and students with Learning Differences (LD). But across institutional types, white students also use optional testing policies at rates within low single digits of the averages, so the policies have broad appeal across ethnic groups.

“• Non-submitters support successful enrollment planning in a broad range of ways. They apply Early Decision at higher rates, increase enrollments by minority students, expand geographic appeal by enrolling at colleges far from their homes, and allow for success by Learning Difference students.

“• In a surprise finding, non-submitters display a distinct two-tail or bimodal curve of family financial capacity. First-generation, minority and Pell-recipient students will need financial aid support, but large pools of students not qualifying for or not requesting financial aid help balance institutional budgets.

“• Non-submitters may commonly be missed in consideration for no-need merit financial awards, despite better Cum GPAs and markedly higher graduation rates than the submitters who receive merit awards. Institutions may want to examine their criteria for merit awards, especially the use of standardized testing to qualify students for no-need merit funding.”

In a scathing essay in TIME magazine, Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, lacerates the SAT.

The recently announced changes, he writes, are “too little, too late,” and are motivated mainly by the competition between the SAT and the ACT, which now tests more students than the SAT.

What Botstein makes clear is that the hoops and hurdles of the SAT are archaic and have little, if anything, to do with being well prepared for college.

He writes:

The SAT needs to be abandoned and replaced. The SAT has a status as a reliable measure of college readiness it does not deserve. The College Board has successfully marketed its exams to parents, students, colleges and universities as arbiters of educational standards. The nation actually needs fewer such exam schemes; they damage the high school curriculum and terrify both students and parents.

The blunt fact is that the SAT has never been a good predictor of academic achievement in college. High school grades adjusted to account for the curriculum and academic programs in the high school from which a student graduates are. The essential mechanism of the SAT, the multiple choice test question, is a bizarre relic of long outdated twentieth century social scientific assumptions and strategies. As every adult recognizes, knowing something or how to do something in real life is never defined by being able to choose a “right” answer from a set of possible answers (some of them intentionally misleading) put forward by faceless test designers who are rarely eminent experts. No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician—and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member—pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity.

The testing “experts” who write questions for the College Board or for Pearson or for McGraw Hill or for any of the other testing giants are seldom (if ever) scholars. The review process for the questions and answers is highly bureaucratic. And the scoring of the essays–which will now be abandoned on the SAT–are often done by people hired from Craig’s List and working for $11 an hour (or less). To learn more about the unsavory practices of the testing industry, read Todd Farley’s Making the Grades, which tells the sad story of the fifteen years he spent in that particular line of work.

Botstein goes on to criticize the value of the SAT:

First, despite the changes, these tests remain divorced from what is taught in high school and what ought to be taught in high school. Second, the test taker never really finds out whether he or she got any answer right or wrong and why. No baseball coach would train a team by accumulating an aggregate comparative numerical score of errors and well executed plays by each player, rating them, and then send them the results weeks later. When an error is committed it is immediately noted; the reasons are explained and the coach, at a moment in time close to the event, seeks to train the player how not to do it again.

What purpose is served by putting young people through an ordeal from which they learn nothing?

He ends on a hopeful note:

The time has come for colleges and universities to join together with the most innovative software designers to fundamentally reinvent a college entrance examination system.

I do not share his optimism. Since everyone, including David Coleman, the president of the College Board, agrees that high school grades say more about a student’s readiness for college than a one-shot college entrance examination, I doubt that even our most innovative software designers can come up with an examination that will mean more than reviewing students’ transcripts and other evidence of what they studied and how they showed their interests and commitments during their time in high school.

Competition to get into a prestigious college has grown incredibly fierce; going to the “right” college is seen as the key to a high-status occupation; the SAT and the ACT are not likely to give up their role as gatekeepers for these institutions; and as we know from ample research, the students who lose in this competition are those whose families lack the income, the connections, and the social status to compete. We are indeed in a testing quagmire. The best way to end it is if more and more colleges and universities go “test-optional,” that is, abandon the SAT and ACT as requirements for admission. This is one instance where the market might actually work, if the institutions are wise enough to take heed of the research on what matters most in picking their freshman class.