SAT Drops Essays and Subject Tests

[namazu]

From the NY Times: "Retooling During Pandemic, the SAT Will Drop Essay and Subject Tests"

Was your school using these tests in its undergrad admissions or placement processes?

Has your school gone fully SAT- (or ACT-) optional, and if so, is it a permanent move, or just for the duration of the pandemic-associated disruption?

Thoughts?

[financeguy]

One school system I'm affiliated with basically has to. If the scores don't give the group distribution they want and the state has repeatedly voted down affirmative action, you have to get rid of any objective measurement and replace it with "holistic" (i.e. political and subjective) criteria.

[ergative]

I remember being very struck by an article about the SAT writing portion, whose takeaway message was basically that the score on the essay was almost perfectly predicted by length. So given that this measure of academic ability is no more 'objective' than a measure of how quickly they write/type, I have no problem doing away with it. I suspect that the cramming students no longer do in prep courses to learn how to write an essay will be more of a loss than the removal of the essay score itself.

[Ruralguy]

If graded holistically, the worst essays would suffer from under development. Over development is more rare, but would generally lead to repetitive feel and mediocre score. The longest essays would likely be adequate but choppy up to superlative.

I could see how typing speed could matter, but I doubt that's the determining factor.

Lest you think I'm a science guy trying to essay splain..the same effect is often seen in science problem sets...the shortest always suck. Most of the longest are at least ok, with the best almost always being one of the longest.

[Caracal]

If graded holistically, the worst essays would suffer from under development. Over development is more rare, but would generally lead to repetitive feel and mediocre score. The longest essays would likely be adequate but choppy up to superlative.

I could see how typing speed could matter, but I doubt that's the determining factor.

Lest you think I'm a science guy trying to essay splain..the same effect is often seen in science problem sets...the shortest always suck. Most of the longest are at least ok, with the best almost always being one of the longest.

Yeah, I grade a lot of in class essays and that's pretty accurate. If you have an hour to write an essay and you end up with four sentences, that probably means you don't know anything about the material, or lack the ability to make connections and develop the most rudimentary sort of synthesis. Every once in a while, I get something long that is just total BS filler that has nothing to do with the question and gets a failing grade, but usually even if you are just regurgitating notes on the topic, that's at least showing you know what the question is asking and what class material might be relevant.

It is also closely tied to how long students spend on their essays, which in my classes anyway, is really closely correlated with the grade. A timed essay is artificial by its nature. You get some big question and you're supposed to answer it in a very small amount of time. The better a student you are, the more you understand that you really need more time to do this well. My best students are always frantically scribbling at the end. Sometimes they come up to me afterwards, worried that they didn't really have enough time to develop their ideas or left something incomplete. They are right, but just the fact that they know that usually indicates they probably did well.

[marshwiggle]

If graded holistically, the worst essays would suffer from under development. Over development is more rare, but would generally lead to repetitive feel and mediocre score. The longest essays would likely be adequate but choppy up to superlative.

I could see how typing speed could matter, but I doubt that's the determining factor.

Lest you think I'm a science guy trying to essay splain..the same effect is often seen in science problem sets...the shortest always suck. Most of the longest are at least ok, with the best almost always being one of the longest.

Yeah, I grade a lot of in class essays and that's pretty accurate. If you have an hour to write an essay and you end up with four sentences, that probably means you don't know anything about the material, or lack the ability to make connections and develop the most rudimentary sort of synthesis. Every once in a while, I get something long that is just total BS filler that has nothing to do with the question and gets a failing grade, but usually even if you are just regurgitating notes on the topic, that's at least showing you know what the question is asking and what class material might be relevant.

I observed the same thing when I had students do project presentations. The ones who knew their topic inside out had to work to fit their talk to whatever the limit was; the only people who ran short were those who had clearly done very little and thus didn't really know much about their own project.

[wareagle]

From the NY Times:

Has your school gone fully SAT- (or ACT-) optional, and if so, is it a permanent move, or just for the duration of the pandemic-associated disruption?

Thoughts?

We're test-optional for pandemic disruption, but I would not be surprised if it became permanent.  For my institution, the ACT is almost as good a predictor of college success as the high-school GPA.  Both are strongly correlated with retention and completion.  Dumping the test, though, means we need to look at other instruments for placement in math or English classes.

[Parasaurolophus]

I remember being very struck by an article about the SAT writing portion, whose takeaway message was basically that the score on the essay was almost perfectly predicted by length. So given that this measure of academic ability is no more 'objective' than a measure of how quickly they write/type, I have no problem doing away with it. I suspect that the cramming students no longer do in prep courses to learn how to write an essay will be more of a loss than the removal of the essay score itself.

I remember this as being true of the GRE. The SATs too, eh?

[Ruralguy]

I wonder if any undergrad programs "outperform" on the GRE? Say, some tiny physics department in an unheard of SLAC in the American south or mid-west  doing better on this than , say, some Ivy or what have you. That is, can the GRE be, in some ways, an assessment of what and how you learned , rather than a stand in for "intelligence test" as applied to a specific field for which you may only be partly familiar.

[Parasaurolophus]

I wonder if any undergrad programs "outperform" on the GRE? Say, some tiny physics department in an unheard of SLAC in the American south or mid-west  doing better on this than , say, some Ivy or what have you. That is, can the GRE be, in some ways, an assessment of what and how you learned , rather than a stand in for "intelligence test" as applied to a specific field for which you may only be partly familiar.

Hmm. I know there's data on how individual majors perform on the GRE, but I don't think I've heard of a school-based breakdown. It sure would be interesting to see, though!

[Caracal]

I wonder if any undergrad programs "outperform" on the GRE? Say, some tiny physics department in an unheard of SLAC in the American south or mid-west  doing better on this than , say, some Ivy or what have you. That is, can the GRE be, in some ways, an assessment of what and how you learned , rather than a stand in for "intelligence test" as applied to a specific field for which you may only be partly familiar.

The problem is that the things the GRE tests for really don't actually relate very well to anything people study in college. The math portion doesn't include anything above algebra and other fairly basic stuff. The language section is just a harder version of the SAT. The essay portion is a weird kind of writing that didn't really relate well to anything I ever did in college. I don't know any departments that really care much about GRE scores in deciding admissions.

You could make some of the same arguments about the SAT, but it is actually difficult to assess the ability of high school students using metrics like grades and recommendations. That just isn't the case for most graduate programs. If you're trying to decide whether someone has the writing ability to succeed in a grad program, you would want to look a the senior thesis they submitted as their writing sample, not their score on an essay exam where they weighed in on the question of whether an imaginary town should use their gazebo for band practice.

[Puget]

I wonder if any undergrad programs "outperform" on the GRE? Say, some tiny physics department in an unheard of SLAC in the American south or mid-west  doing better on this than , say, some Ivy or what have you. That is, can the GRE be, in some ways, an assessment of what and how you learned , rather than a stand in for "intelligence test" as applied to a specific field for which you may only be partly familiar.

The problem is that the things the GRE tests for really don't actually relate very well to anything people study in college. The math portion doesn't include anything above algebra and other fairly basic stuff. The language section is just a harder version of the SAT. The essay portion is a weird kind of writing that didn't really relate well to anything I ever did in college. I don't know any departments that really care much about GRE scores in deciding admissions.

You could make some of the same arguments about the SAT, but it is actually difficult to assess the ability of high school students using metrics like grades and recommendations. That just isn't the case for most graduate programs. If you're trying to decide whether someone has the writing ability to succeed in a grad program, you would want to look a the senior thesis they submitted as their writing sample, not their score on an essay exam where they weighed in on the question of whether an imaginary town should use their gazebo for band practice.

I agree the GRE is not particularly good, but it is useful for screening-- that is, really low scores will keep you out, but high scores won't get you in. In our case we need some assurance that students have enough quantitative/computational ability to handle advanced statistics, so low GRE Q scores alarm us, barring other convincing evidence. The writing and verbal scores are also useful in particular for international applicants, since they are much tougher than the various ESL tests, and students with an undergraduate degree from an English-speaking university aren't required to submit the ESL tests but sometimes still lack really proficient English (surprising but true). The problem with the personal statement and writing samples as a way to evaluate that is you don't know how much help they had with them.

To the original question, we want test optional for both undergrad and grad admissions during the pandemic, and I'm guessing that is here to stay, at least at the undergrad level (where they do require some additional essays in that case). For graduate admissions, every department gets to control that, so we'll have to have a discussion after we see how they do in the program about how well test-optional worked.

[Caracal]

I agree the GRE is not particularly good, but it is useful for screening-- that is, really low scores will keep you out, but high scores won't get you in. In our case we need some assurance that students have enough quantitative/computational ability to handle advanced statistics, so low GRE Q scores alarm us, barring other convincing evidence. The writing and verbal scores are also useful in particular for international applicants, since they are much tougher than the various ESL tests, and students with an undergraduate degree from an English-speaking university aren't required to submit the ESL tests but sometimes still lack really proficient English (surprising but true). The problem with the personal statement and writing samples as a way to evaluate that is you don't know how much help they had with them.

Yeah, I'm sure this varies by field. I'm sure a lot of it is just about the kind of problems you're trying to screen for in applicants and a lot of that has to do with who is applying and what motivates them to apply. If you're talking about doctoral students in the humanities, most of them aren't really like to have an insufficient vocabulary or technical writing ability. If you have a student with good recs, writing samples, strong grades, a good personal statement, but mediocre GRE verbal or essay scores, it is very likely this is just someone who is bad at standardized tests. You don't really have many people who bought all their papers online as part of a scheme to get into a doctoral program in philosophy.

[Hibush]

With the pandemic, a lot of schools dropped the SAT requirement because of the logistical challenges with taking it. Others did so because it is trendy.

In a roundup of admissions stats today, the NY Times notes that it vastly increased applications to selective schools. The gist is that students who thought their SAT score might disqualify them now applied.

Ms. Rickard of the Common App said, "Without a test score, maybe they aren't sure exactly where to aim, or they think this is their opportunity to try to get into a more selective institution."

"We saw people that thought 'I would never get into Cornell' thinking, 'Oh, if they're not looking at a test score, maybe I've actually got a chance,'" said Jonathan Burdick, Cornell's vice provost for enrollment.

"The elimination of that barrier really did drive application increases," said Emily D. Engelschall, admissions at the University of California, Riverside.

The cynic in me says that this policy has not increased access for underrepresented students. For schools like Harvard and Cornell, which are featured in the article, the admissions rate is already below 10%. There might be a unicorn among the SAT-averse new applicants, but I suspect the 43% additional applicants at Harvard and the 17,000 at Cornell are mostly fooled into thinking that they have a chance and are actually among the 90% that won't get in.

Anybody have a more hopeful interpretation?

[writingprof]

Dumping the test, though, means we need to look at other instruments for placement in math or English classes.

This, and it's going to be a real problem at my place. Like many colleges, we have essentially outsourced our English and math placement decisions for so long that we no longer have a sorting mechanism in place. In the absence of standardized testing scores, we will conceivably have to assign actual humans to the task of making those decisions. (No, I will not serve on that committee, unless it comes with a course release. (Interthreadulity))