Dartmouth reinstated their standardized testing requirement Monday, announcing that all applicants to the class of 2029 will have to submit ACT or SAT scores.
The school should be applauded for restoring a meritocratic measure to the admissions process.
Across the country, schools are indulging in an experiment in promoting diversity and “equity,” like Columbia which eliminated test requirements to “[respect] varied backgrounds, voices and experiences.”
Ibram X Kendi, author and head of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, even went as far as to call standardized tests “the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools.”
But test-optional policies prioritize activism over evidence, and Dartmouth researchers have proven as much.
Dartmouth first went test-optional in June of 2020 due to COVID-19, when masses of kids in an enclosed space filling in bubbles with number 2 pencils would most certainly have become a superspreader event.
But what was meant to be a temporary pandemic-era relief devolved into an indefinite experiment, which some openly described as being about promoting racial equity at many schools — including Harvard which has already announced that applicants for the class of 2030 don’t need testing.
“For all the immensely challenging disruptions the Covid pandemic brought to American education, colleges’ decreased dependence on standardized test scores offers a glimmer of hope for a fairer, more inclusive system,” Georgetown law professor Sheryl Cashin wrote in Politico in 2021.
“Now it is up to schools to accelerate this progress, rather than returning to the old norms of exclusion.”
In fact, this year, nearly 2,000 colleges across the country will still be test-optional.
Anti-testing activists have taken aim at the SAT and ACT as agents of inequality, like Wake Forest professor Joseph A. Soares, who argued in 2020 that “dismantling white supremacy includes ending racist tests like the SAT and ACT,” which he argues are tainted by an “original ugly eugenic racist intention.”
Even though there are racial disparities in standardized test scores, tossing them out entirely is a massive mistake according to Dartmouth researchers who analyzed their test-optional admissions cycles.
The university’s new president, cognitive scientist Sian Beilock, tapped campus economists and sociologists to produce a report on whether the policy actually achieved its goals.
Their conclusion: it was harder to analyze a student’s academic aptitude without their standardized test scores.
It’s no surprise, considering that high school grade inflation is on the rise, with the average graduating GPA swelling from 3.22 to 3.39 at public high schools just between 2016 and 2021. If everyone gets an A, then nobody gets an A.
Not to mention, admissions essays are questionable measures of writing ability, considering a parent could easily have written them. And extracurricular resumes can be padded by “passions” curated by an admissions consultant.
Standardized test scores — administered in a controlled environment — are really the only objective statistics an admissions officer has to work with.
When looked at holistically, they can actually help disadvantaged kids shine by showing admissions officers their raw cognitive potential.
In fact, the Dartmouth researchers actually found it was less-privileged applicants who were hurt the most by “test optional policies.”
Dartmouth’s analysis revealed that if less well-resourced students had disclosed their test scores, they would actually have increased their odds of getting in.
Students from tough backgrounds with scores in the 1400s, lower than the average 1500 out of a possible 1600, would have been considered excellent in the context of their upbringing by Dartmouth.
But, since they were slightly below average, many such students decided to withhold their scores, wrongly thinking they would harm their admission prospects.
Without their test scores, admissions officers were less able to quantify their qualifications — and some students who would have gotten in with scores were rejected without them.
So, test-optional policies not only robbed admissions officers of a key success indicator, but also hurt the exact students they were intended to help.
“For Dartmouth, the evidence supporting our reactivation of a required testing policy is clear,” the school announced on Monday. “Our bottom line is simple: we believe a standardized testing requirement will improve — not detract from — our ability to bring the most promising and diverse students to our campus.”
Priscilla Rodriguez, senior vice president of College Readiness Assessments at College Board told The Post told The Post: “In its own analysis, Dartmouth has found what other researchers have also found: The SAT is objective, reliable, and valuable for institutions and for students.”
Of course, we should constantly be looking to modernize our institutions, and the SAT and ACT should certainly not be immune to scrutiny. But overthrowing a major component of the admissions process in the absence of evidence — often at the behest of activists — is no solution.
As other colleges trudge forth with test-optional policies in the name of equity, Dartmouth, to its credit, used its resources and scientific inquiry in pursuit of truth.
It’s a victory for merit over equity — now it’s time for the rest of academia to do the same.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
