The End of the SAT?
6th September 2015
Qualifications? We don’t need no steenkin’ qualifications.
First, dropping the SAT while handwaving about “diversity” is often simply a politically convenient way for colleges to serve their own narrow interests, without doing anything to actually admit more low-income or minority students. Stephen Burd has reported on two ways test-optional policies can boost a college’s selectivity profile: (1) by increasing the number of applications (and, incidentally, the number of hefty application fees) it receives each year, and (2) by increasing a the average SAT score for admitted students, because applicants with higher scores are more likely to send them in. It’s ironic, but not surprising, that colleges are still self-conscious about their students’ average scores on a test they claim is useless and discriminatory. It’s also not particularly surprising that, as Burd notes, a 2014 University of Georgia study “did not find any evidence that test-optional colleges had made ‘any progress in narrowing these diversity-related gaps after they adopted test-optional policies.’”