As life continues on in this weird and anxiety-inducing state, the routine things we would not have second thoughts about have become much more difficult to do. Standardized tests are one of those things.
Many juniors in high school right now were registered for an SAT in the coming months. Typically, they need to send their scores over to colleges by their senior year. Now, all SATs and ACTs are canceled through May, according to the College Board.
This has prompted many colleges to announce that students applying for the 2021 academic school year will not have to send in an ACT or SAT score. Many of the schools announcing this change previously required standardized testing scores from all applicants, so this will be a big change in the application process for the rising seniors as compared to past years.
All of this adaptation comes at a time of change for the College Board, as they were just about to start implementing their Environmental Context Dashboard outside of the testing they had been doing. This tool gives each SAT test taker an overall “disadvantage score” available to the admissions officer reviewing their application on a score from 1-100.
Standardized testing has consistently benefited more privileged students who’ve had private tutoring, and therefore have more opportunities as a result of their higher scores. This new tool would allow college admissions officers to understand more about where a student comes from and how they may be at a disadvantage. There are huge disparities in schools and their resources across the U.S.
Researchers Ezekiel J. Dixon-Roman from the University of Pennsylvania and John J. Mcardle from the University of Southern California studied how wealthy and low-income students differ in the college admissions process. They found “that wealthy students earn higher SAT scores compared to their low-income peers and that the difference in SAT scores between high- and low-income students was twice as large among black students compared to white students,” according to a CNBC article.
The Environmental Context score would take into account the school environment they are in including past SAT scores for that school, class sizes and poverty levels. The score also considers aspects such as the neighborhood they are located in, their family income, their parents’ education levels and the crime rate in their area.
At first, this seems like a really good idea to level the playing field and give students in low-income homes a better shot at being admitted to colleges that place emphasis on SAT scores.
Unfortunately, the College Board is beating a dead horse. Instead of creating all of these tools to try and make standardized testing fair, we should get rid of standardized testing altogether.
Many schools were already making it optional to send in test scores before this pandemic hit because they felt the tests were not measuring anything of significance. As schools are forced to be test-optional from the coronavirus, it may become clear that there are better ways to measure a student’s merit and skills rather than referring to a number.
It has been repeatedly questioned what these tests actually measure. When I was in high school, I felt as though I was studying how to take the test as opposed to actually learning. Of course, the College Board wants the SAT and ACT to continue being required as they are a corporation making a lot of money off of these tests. The future of young adults should not be determined by a test though.
The Provost of Wake Forest University put it well in 2007: “Standardized tests were never intended to measure the complexities of intelligence, and over time they have drawn the center of gravity in college admissions away from things we value. Because scores generally improve with guidance and repetition, the tests have encouraged an industry of test training that takes advantage of the ambitions of students and families.”
As colleges temporarily stop requiring these standardized test scores, I hope that the new admissions process shows them that the scores should not be required at all. These colleges can measure intelligence and merit in many other ways that a number does not properly represent.
