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Low-income students face uneven testing field, critic says
While several colleges maintain test-optional policies, new data reveals a strong link between students’ performance on the SAT and ACT tests and their ability to complete a college degree, according to a recent report.
“Institutions where admitted students’ test scores are higher tend to have much stronger completion rates,” the report by American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Preston Cooper states.
“For example, an institution where entering students have a 25th percentile SAT score of 900 has a predicted completion rate of just 51 percent. But an institution with a 25th percentile score of 1300 has a predicted completion rate of over 90 percent,” it states.
Cooper’s report also shows that these tests don’t “drive inequity,” as critics often argue. Dartmouth College researchers found that they are effective at “identifying high-achieving students from disadvantaged backgrounds.”
“Disadvantaged students with an SAT score above 1400 (out of a possible 1600) were more than three times as likely to receive an admissions offer if they submitted their score than if they did not,” the report states.
Expanding on his report, Cooper told The College Fix via email that “Admissions standards are necessary to ensure colleges only admit students with a reasonable chance of completion.”
“Because enrolling and subsequently dropping out of college can be more costly for students than never enrolling at all, the return to standardized testing requirements should be welcomed,” he said.
He added that schools like the University of Kansas and George Mason University are able to “balance high standards with relatively high admissions rates,” demonstrating that colleges don’t have to reject vast numbers of qualified candidates to maintain academic rigor.
Cooper also told The Fix that standardized test scores are crucial for low-income students who lack access to resume-building extracurriculars.
“While more advantaged students can find things other than test scores to pad their resumes (such as extracurriculars), high-achieving students with fewer family resources need to rely more on test scores to demonstrate that they are qualified for admission to top colleges,” he said.
Despite these findings, critics of standardized test requirements assert that they often do more harm than good for the students who may benefit the most from attending high caliber institutions.
Harry Feder, a representative from the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, told The Fix in a phone interview that standardized tests don’t add any value to the admissions process when high school grades already serve as an indicator for how a student will perform when they enter college.
“The one thing the SAT and the ACT do correlate to is family income. How do we know that? The College Board’s own data,” he said.
Feder added that for underprivileged students, the playing field automatically becomes uneven when colleges compare their performance on the SAT and ACT to that of students from higher-income families, who often have access to more advanced preparation resources.
“Going on Kahn Academy isn’t the same as having a tutor for two months,” he said. “One might say that’s unfair if you want there to be broad opportunity for high level college attendance.”
This debate comes as a growing number of colleges reinstate standardized testing in their admissions process after ditching the requirement during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Following the move away from standardized testing, the number of incoming students with math skills below high school level surged nearly thirtyfold, The College Fix previously reported.
Further, 70 percent of these students are performing below middle school level.
Within the past four years, all the Ivy League schools have reinstated their standardized testing requirements, and faculty at other major universities have expressed their desire to follow suit.
“Obscuring preparation gaps harms both students individually and the University collectively,” University of California STEM faculty wrote in a letter opposing the school’s test optional policy. “It offers the appearance of access while undermining the chance of success,” they wrote.
