Standardized Tests Help Admissions Departments, but May Filter Out Talented Students
By Sean-Michael Pigeon, Student, Harvard Law School, and Mark Kantrowitz, Board Member, Center for Excellence in Education
Standardized Tests Are Useful
Sean-Michael Pigeon – Student, Harvard Law School
If you’ve applied to college, chances are you’ve taken the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or the American College Test (ACT). These tests attempt to assess an applicant’s college preparedness. While test-taking isn’t fun for the students, it is an essential service that we should value. Students learn best in environments tailored to them, and standardized tests help match students to their ideal learning environment, boosting outcomes for all.
Standardized tests are neither new nor uniquely American. Many ancient societies required youths to pass physical games or tests. Around 200 BCE, Imperial China formally implemented widespread testing and had practiced a rudimentary form of standardized testing for centuries prior. Currently, standardized tests are administered across the world.
Standardized Tests Help Admissions Departments
Today, universities are flooded with applicants. UCLA received nearly 150,000 applications for a class of 6,500. Many schools wish to select the most competitive applicants and, to do so, must differentiate between students based on relevant academic skills in a cost-effective way. The SAT and ACT test for relevant academic skills. Even from an early age, reading, writing, and math abilities all predict future academic and professional success. These skills are critical in nearly every discipline.
Standardized tests differentiate candidates more precisely than other available methods. While Grade Point Average (GPA) predicts academic success, grade inflation has resulted in 47 percent of all high schoolers graduating with an A average. The average Ivy League admittee has a nearly perfect GPA. In addition, GPAs aren’t standardized making them imperfect indicators of relative aptitude.
Letters of recommendation can attest to an applicant’s character but yield little comparative information. With the rise of college consulting services and generative AI, personal essays may not reveal much about an applicant’s true strengths and weaknesses.
The current testing system gives colleges useful information. Admittedly, the correlation between students who excel on standardized tests and future academic performance is not perfect. However, for each applicant, testing provides a valuable opportunity to showcase one’s ability.
Tests Foster a More Equitable Admissions Process
Some argue that testing exacerbates educational inequality and reinforces negative biases. However, blaming the tests for reflecting deeper social problems is entirely backward. We should take steps to remedy educational inequality, but these problems must be addressed earlier than college.
Standardized tests provide the closest equivalent to a “level playing field.” While the wealthy can afford test preparation, test makers offer free materials to examinees, and public libraries often have free exam materials. But, none of these remedies wholly solve educational inequality.
Removing testing would only exacerbate the existing problems. Without firm metrics, colleges might look at the prestige of a student’s high school and their extra-curricular activities, both of which disproportionately favor wealthy applicants. Conversely, universities might sort students through a socio-economic and racial quota system, which is both unconstitutional and socially divisive.
As college admissions become increasingly competitive, fairer testing processes would benefit everyone. Nevertheless, we should recognize and protect the immense value standardized tests currently provide. Abandoning useful test information will worsen inequalities, increase the opacity of the admission process, and impede both students and universities.
GPA Is a Better Predictor of Graduation Rates
By Mark Kantrowitz – Board Member, Center for Excellence in Education
Standardized admissions tests, like the SAT and ACT, have their uses, but they also have flaws. Although grade inflation has eroded the predictive power of high school GPA at a rate of 0.2 points per decade according to the ACT, high school GPA continues to be a better predictor of college graduation rates than admissions test scores. One study from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research found that high school GPA was a better predictor of college graduation than the ACT. Another study found that high school GPA is a better predictor of grades in college English and math classes than SAT, ACT, or ACCUPLACER test scores. Indeed, The College Board acknowledges that “the combination of high school GPA and SAT scores is a better predictor of college success than high school GPA alone.”
My book, “Who Graduates from College? Who Doesn’t?“, shows that both high school GPA and admissions test scores are predictive of bachelor’s degree attainment:
- 81% of students with a 3.5 or higher high school GPA graduate with a bachelor’s degree within six years, compared with 73% of students with a 3.0 or higher high school GPA, 49% of students with a 2.0 to 2.9 high school GPA and 24% of students with less than a 2.0 high school GPA.
- 91% of students with a 1400 or higher SAT score graduate with a bachelor’s degree within six years, compared with 83% of students with a 1200 to 1400 SAT score, 74% of students with a 1000 to 1200 SAT score, and 58% of students with a below-average SAT score under 1000.
Standardized Tests Can Contribute to Disparities Between Groups
Yet, some artifacts of the distribution of standardized test scores magnify differences among demographic groups at the extremes much more so than at the mean. In effect, this causes SAT scores of 1400 or more to discriminate against female, minority, and low-income students.
- Male students are 42% more likely than female students to have SAT scores of 1400 or more.
- White students are three times more likely than black students and twice as likely as hispanic students to have SAT scores of 1400 or more.
- Students with family income of $100,000 or more are more than twice as likely as students with family income under $50,000 to have SAT scores of 1400 or more.
The most selective colleges agree that the wealthy do not have a monopoly on intelligence. Yet only 15% of their students are Pell Grant recipients, compared with 35% of the ~3,000 four-year colleges. After adopting test-optional admissions policies during the pandemic, some of the most selective colleges—Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, University of Texas at Austin, and Yale—are reinstating standardized test requirements. These colleges receive significantly more applications than they have space available, so standardized tests can reduce the number of applications that must be reviewed.
Tests Are Not Perfect, but They Are Still Needed
Sean-Michael Pigeon – Student, Harvard Law School
I readily concede that standardized tests may have flaws, but nevertheless have utility that outweighs their drawbacks. Both Mr. Kantrowitz and I agree that an applicant cannot be reduced to a single number. However, adding standardized tests to an applicant’s profile increases the number of data points for admissions officers. Those skeptical of standardized testing are, in effect, seeking to reduce a candidate’s entire profile to a single number: their GPA.
I also agree with Mr. Kantrowitz that high school GPAs are important. However, the conversation is not about replacing GPAs; tests supplement an applicant’s profile and give the GPA context. We need not address whether one is “better” than the other. It is only necessary to show that standardized tests contribute something useful to the admissions process. Social scientists, the College Board, and universities have all found they do.
Standardized Tests Help Overburdened College Admissions Departments
This makes intuitive sense. Standardized tests measure skills in a different setting, with a different style of questioning, and against a different pool of students than one’s high school does. As Mr. Kantrowitz notes, grade inflation is chipping away at the predictive power of high school GPAs. The Common Application allows students to easily apply to dozens of schools, which benefits the applicants at the expense of administrators who need standardized measures of college preparedness.
Mr. Kantrowitz’s data indicates that both SAT scores and GPAs correlate with bachelor’s degree attainment. This discussion is useful but imprecise. Colleges want to know more about applicants than whether a student will merely pass their classes; they want students who will thrive. There is good evidence that standardized tests help predict student success in college beyond graduation rates.
Tests Are Not to Blame for Educational Inequality
Mr. Kantrowitz brings up a genuine concern: standardized tests appear to have disparate outcomes. Historical, cultural, and socio-economic factors have affected and created inequalities, which can result in disparate outcomes. However, this is not a problem with the tests; it is a problem with what they are measuring: educational inequality.
Educational differences are a deep problem, but removing tests from the application process because they reveal an underlying issue is the quintessential example of “shooting the messenger.” Mr. Kantrowitz is right, of course, that no group is inherently more capable than another. Yet, there are real-world consequences to abandoning standardized testing: many underprivileged children who would do well on standardized exams would lose the opportunity to showcase their talents.
Standardized tests need not present an all-or-nothing proposition. We need to invest in education earlier, and our educational institutions should do more to promote a culture of learning. College administrators should have the flexibility to craft classes to meet a variety of criteria, not just standardized test performance. However, colleges still need a way to measure an individual’s aptitude: standardized tests.
Standardized Tests May Cause Talented, Low-Income Students To Be Passed Over
By Mark Kantrowitz – Board Member, Center for Excellence in Education
This is a debate about whether the an applicant’s potential can be reduced to a single number through standardized admissions tests. Mr. Pigeon argues that standardized admissions tests provide an additional data point for evaluating an applicant for admission, alongside high school GPA. I don’t necessarily disagree, but I urge caution. Like a car’s side mirrors, admissions tests can distort reality.
Standardized admissions tests trace their heritage to the first IQ tests, which are just as flawed. Both admissions tests and IQ tests find their origin in Charles Spearman’s G-factor, which purported to measure general intelligence. However, just because a standardized test yields a single number doesn’t mean that it measures anything real other than, perhaps, test-taking ability. The correlation with college completion is weak and of limited value.
Placing too much emphasis on admissions tests can cause colleges to overlook the excellence of otherwise talented students. Or worse, colleges may blame undermatching (when low-income students fail to enroll in selective colleges despite having similar grades and test scores as their high-income peers) for their failure to enroll the smartest low-income students.
Standardized Tests Are Not an Accurate Measure of Ability or Intelligence
As Stephen Jay Gould says in his book “The Mismeasure of Man”: “Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.” As Dr. Gould notes, intelligence tests have historically been used to “perpetuate discriminatory practices and unequal access to resources.” They were designed to demonstrate deceptive differences in academic ability and intelligence.
IQ and admissions tests are shaped by social and cultural biases. Despite being standardized and wielding a supposedly uniform yardstick, they are not objective or unbiased. Contrary to Mr. Pigeon’s assertions, they do not provide a level playing field. Social privilege is baked into admissions tests in ways that often go unnoticed by the beneficiaries of these advantages.
Average test scores increase as income increases. Students in wealthier school districts have higher average test scores. Differences in preparation, such as test preparation and practice, can lead to significant improvements in test scores. None of this has anything to do with innate ability. Test scores do not measure a student’s future potential as a leader in society, technology, or business, except to the extent to which privilege persists.
Nevertheless, admissions tests are useful in serving as arbitrary filters on the application pool. When an elite college receives 50,000 or more applications for 2,000 slots in the incoming class, it is not possible to read and compare these applications in a meaningful manner.
Colleges can hire more application readers, but one reader’s judgment is not necessarily comparable to another’s. A few selective colleges must use test scores and high school GPAs to cut down the number of applications that must be considered. But, they should never fool themselves into believing that they haven’t missed applicants who could one day change the world.
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Sean-Michael Pigeon
Sean-Michael is a JD candidate at Harvard Law School where he serves as a staff editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. His work has been published in USAToday, the Boston Herald, RealClearPolicy, the Washington Examiner, and more. Before entering law school, he worked for a public policy think tank and was an editorial fellow at National Review. He holds a B.A. in History and Political Science from Yale.
Mark Kantrowitz
Mark Kantrowitz helps students and their families make smarter, more informed decisions about planning and paying for college. An author of five bestselling books, Mark has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reuters, U.S. News & World Report and Forbes. Mark serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Student Financial Aid and the board of trustees of the Center for Excellence in Education.