About that NY Times article...

Restarting this blog, because, hey, why not?

Anyway, there’s been a LOT of talk online about this NY Times article by David Leonhardt. Basically, it states that the “Ivy Plus” schools (the Ivies plus Duke, MIT, Stanford, & UChicago) are not totally satisfied with test-optional admissions, mainly due to suspected grade inflation. Hoo boy.

Now, I’m obviously biased, so I am just going to say this- for the kind of students who are “expected” to apply to the Ivy Plus schools, and by that I mean high-scoring kids at wealthy public schools and expensive private schools, there probably IS a fair amount of grade inflation. Parents and students are all over the teachers when anybody scores below a B (or heck, below an A!), and kids have tutors to help with tough classes (shouts out, AP Calc tutors). And yes, I can speak from experience on this in my roles as father, teacher, and tutor. Students at underfunded public schools probably don’t have nearly the same grade support systems, and that’s just a cold, hard fact. So making all of these kids take the same test before they apply does deliver some degree of equalization, at least within groups.

But what about all those studies showing that test scores are mostly driven by parents’ incomes/Zip code? Totally true! Students from higher income families tend to score higher. No doubt about it. African-American and Latino students historically score lower than their white and Asian counterparts. Students from poorer areas tend to score lower than students from wealthier areas, no matter their race or gender. But highly selective schools never based admissions decisions solely on numbers and always applied a different set of numbers to kids from different situations. Basically, a student from an underserved high school who got a score that was 200-300 points higher than the average score at their high school was more impressive than a wealthier student from a wealthy school who scored lower than their peers, even if that score was higher than the poorer kid’s score. So, a 1250 SAT score from a kid at a school where the average student got a 950 was more impressive to admissions than a 1350 SAT score at a private school where the average student got a 1400.

So, should test-optional become test-required again? Probably not, at least not for big state institutions. They exist to educate tens of thousands of students a year. They can and should stay TO or even test-blind, like the UC’s and Cal States. And the tiny liberal arts schools? They’ll stay TO because they get a lot fewer applicants and they probably always hated the tests, anyway. But the “highly selectives”? I think they should return to requiring tests, because trust me when I tell you that grade inflation is REAL. If these schools want more tools to sift through all these sterling GPA’s, they’re gonna need the tests again.