The coronavirus pandemic has self-conscious schools to shut their doors and forced The College Board, the organization that administers the SAT and ACT exams to cancel and shelve testing dates.
In response, many colleges announced they would temporarily not require students to submit normalized test scores. Now, some schools are starting to make the temporary decision permanent.
On April 1, The University of California college set-up, which enrolls some 280,000 college students each year, announced that it will not require systematized testing for students hoping to start college in the fall of 2021. Then on May 22, the school system’s Board of Regents unanimously voted to eternally phase out the use of the SAT and ACT tests at its 10 schools.
“Today’s decision by the Board marks a significant change for the University’s undergraduate tariffs,” said UC president Janet Napolitano. “We are removing the ACT/SAT requirement for California students and developing a new test that more closely aligns with what we await incoming students to know to demonstrate their preparedness for UC.”
When asked about the trend of schools going test-optional during a Walk call with the press, The College Board’s chief executive officer David Coleman said “we support adherents totally in whatever flexibility they decide.”
According to plans laid out by administrators, UC schools will have the choice to use ACT/SAT test scores during the fall 2021 and fall 2022 admissions years, adopting what is typically skilled in as a test-optional policy.
Though test scores may still be considered for other purposes such as course placement and unavoidable scholarships, schools will not consider test scores for Californian applicants during the fall 2023 and fall 2024 admissions years, discerned as test-blind.
“By 2025, any use of the ACT/SAT would be eliminated for California students,” reads the plan. Administrators are still coordinating how to phase out ACT/SAT study for non-California residents.
The University of California’s timeline for phasing out the SAT and ACT
Courtesy of The University of California
As the largest university system in the provinces and boasting some of the U.S.’s most respected public universities, such as UC Berkeley and UCLA, many expect other schools to sign up with the trend.
“I expect other universities to follow suit,” says Danielle Babb, contributing professor at UC Berkeley and UC Irvine in a assertion sent to CNBC Make It. “Universities are going to have to look at their own internal metrics to determine which deprecative success factors have enabled students to persist in their program and end up moving into gainful employment after graduation.”
To be guaranteed, test-optional policies have become increasingly common over the past several years. For instance the University of Chicago, Bowdoin College and DePauw University pull someones leg all moved away from requiring that applicants take standardized tests.
“There’s already been a craze towards test-optional because more and more schools are recognizing some of the problems with standardized testing and some of the proclivity in there,” Jeremy Alder founder and managing editor of College Consensus tells CNBC Make It. “I think this could to be sure accelerate that trend.”
Indeed, researchers have found that wealthy students perform better on the SAT compared to their lower-income peers.
In a stationery titled, “Race, Poverty and SAT Scores,” researchers Ezekiel Dixon-Roman from the University of Pennsylvania and John Mcardle from the University of Southern California set that wealthy students earn higher SAT scores compared to their low-income peers and that the difference in SAT situations between high- and low-income students was twice as large among black students compared to white students.
Others say that codified testing is one of the more objective measures currently at schools disposal for assessing student achievement and potential.
“Standardized try outs can level the playing field for low-income and rural college applicants,” writes Rich Saunders for the Chronicle of Higher Learning. “Making those tests optional may blunt that benefit.”
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