The Weakening Signal of Merit?

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This past Friday, students who took the SAT on November 5th received their scores. That moment when teenagers open their score report has long been one full of anxiety. Now, it seems to torment them even more. That’s because when so many campuses are test-optional, the score has lost a lot of its former meaning.

“SAT and ACT scores have long commanded an enormous amount of signaling power for students in the admissions process,”?I wrote in a?lengthy feature for?New York?magazine , which also arrived on Friday. “The pandemic, and the mass pivot to test optional, has made that test score’s signal much weaker. And even when a student does have a test score, there is much more noise in interpreting it.”

The piece—which I’ve been working on since the spring with several drafts in-between then and now—was pegged to MIT’s decision last March to require the SAT/ACT for admissions this cycle.?

The pandemic, and the mass pivot to test optional, has made that test score’s signal much weaker. And even when a student does have a test score, there is much more noise in interpreting it.

My three takeaways from the story:

1?? MIT is indeed an outlier.?Who knows if other highly selective colleges will follow and require the test again at some point in the coming years. (My take: I doubt it. As one dean at a highly selective university told me, test-optional?“gives you more degrees of freedom in selection.”)

For now, MIT is mostly alone in requiring the test in part because of?how?the campus decided to return to the policy. Instead of taking a few years to study current undergrads who enrolled without test scores—as most other colleges are now doing—MIT looked backwards at 20 years of its own data, when the institution used to enroll students with a wider range of math scores in particular. And what they found is that too many students with lower scores—at least by MIT standards—didn’t make it to graduation.

—"MIT remains in the minority in its claims about the predictive power of the SAT.” As Stu Schmill, MIT’s admissions dean “pointed out to me repeatedly, MIT’s undergraduate curriculum — its focus on mathematics especially — is unique even among its elite peers.”

2?? Test-optional is rewriting the old rules of admissions.?This is particularly true for edge-case students and at less selective colleges and universities, which seem to want to use this moment to bolster the average test scores they report to the public.?

—“In the spring, Hannah Wolff, a former college counselor at Langley High School, a top-ranked high school in the wealthy suburbs of Washington, D.C., heard from admissions counselors at several public universities that a few Langley seniors who were rejected might have been admitted if they had not submitted their SAT scores, which were in the 1350 range. While a 1350 would have been considered a good score in the past at those schools, now, when the only applicants submitting scores are mostly those well above the average, the expectations of admissions officers have risen with the scores —?especially for applicants from wealthy academic powerhouses like Langley.”

3?? As a result, there is no good advice—even from counselors and admissions deans.?“Two years in, counselors have no idea: What is a?good?score? Do I submit a score or not? And if so, should all colleges on my list get my score?"

—"Even Schmill told me he gets those same questions from friends whose children are applying to other colleges. ‘I never had a good answer,” he said. “Like, I have no idea.’”

?—As Jeff Makris, director of college counseling at Stuyvesant High School in New York, told me, "'the?more we tell [students] what to do, the more we become scapegoats when they don’t get in.’”

By the numbers:?"While we spoke, Makris pulled up the admissions results for his students going back to 2016. He rattled off a bunch of college names. About the same number of his students get accepted at the usual suspects in the Ivy League now as six years ago, though many more apply too. What might surprise students and parents from a few years ago, however, is the next set of colleges Makris mentioned: Northeastern, Case Western, Boston University, and Binghamton University. In 2016, 298 students applied to Northeastern, and 91 were admitted; last year, applications to the Boston school jumped to 422, but only 49 were admitted. Last year, 129 Stuy students applied to Case Western, about the same number as in 2017, but admits were almost cut in half to 36. In 2016, the acceptance rate for Stuy’s students who applied to Boston University was 43 percent; last year, it was 14 percent."

—"Normally, Makris said, about 50 to 75 graduates enroll at Binghamton University,?one of the state’s top public universities but a safety school among many Stuy students. This fall, 124 students went there."

I knew the use of standardized tests in admissions was a polarizing issue from covering higher ed for twenty-five years and writing a book on admissions;?but I didn’t realize just how polarizing until I started reporting this story.?

There is little middle ground: you’re either pro-test or anti-test. And both sides can cite legions of research to back up their cause.

Here's a bit of background, much of which ended up on the cutting room floor during editing:

The movement against the tests had been accelerating even before the pandemic. The year before, nearly 50 campuses adopted test-optional polices, the?“fastest growth spurt ever,” ?according to the?testing-watchdog group?FairTest.

The pandemic supercharged the test-optional movement, as did the killing of George Floyd in the spring of 2020, which unleashed a racial reckoning on college campuses nationwide. “If you are in anyway concerned about any type of equity, the SAT isn’t providing you that,”?Akil Bello, FairTests’s director of advocacy, told me.?“It’s actually moving counter to that.”

Bello arrived at this debate from decades of experience inside the test-prep industry. He got his start in 1990, as a proctor for the Princeton Review, watching over teenagers taking practice SAT exams. Since then, he has worked at nearly every level of the multi-billion-dollar industry. Bello told me he’s not anti-testing, per se; he’s just against how ingrained the tests have become in our larger society—the gaming of the exams by test-prep providers; the family court judge in New Jersey refusing to try a 16-year-old accused rapist as an adult in part because had?“very high” test scores ; Florida providing bonuses to its teachers who themselves had high SAT/ACT scores.

Sure, Bello said, a test score is predictive of who will succeed in college, more than simply using high school GPA alone (as the College Board has shown in its research). But the extra validation that a score provides is minimal, according to Bello, when compared to its ultimate cost.??

On the other side of the testing debate, I spent time with one of its biggest advocates: Charlie Deacon, Georgetown University’s admissions dean since the 1970s.

Deacon is unapologetic about his support for the tests. “It’s not politically correct,” he told me. He believes a test score is a necessary benchmark for evaluating applications from high schools with varying degrees of rigor. “It’s not a score cutoff we’re looking for but one that’s high enough that you think,?Well, maybe the student can do it,” Deacon said. “We don’t want people coming in for whom that is a real question. The really low test score is a warning signal.”

While reporting the piece, I visited Schmill, MIT’s dean of admission, in Cambridge.

Schmill graduated from MIT with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1986. After a year helping to design the Chevy Lumina and the Buick Regal, among other cars at General Motors in Detroit, he returned to MIT as the full-time crew coach. He moved to the admissions office in 2003, and like Deacon at Georgetown, his long tenure means he is rarely influenced by what his competitors do.?

Just like when he originally announced MIT’s decision in March, Schmill wouldn’t share with me any of the data that led to the decision to return to the test. It’s something that critics have seized on in taking aim at MIT.

“People are going to either want more or they’re going to draw their own interpretations to fit their narrative,” Schmill says. “I mean, honestly, sharing the data would not change anything.”

It's hard to overstate just how different MIT is from even selective universities that it competes with when it comes to test scores. Given the abundance of perfect scores among MIT freshman—especially on the all-important math portion of the tests—evaluating the differences between applicants at MIT is like measuring the speed of Olympic sprinters with just the second hand on your wristwatch.

Take, the fall of 2020,?the last one where test scores were required, as an example. The?middle 50 percent of MIT freshmen that fall scored between 780 and 800 (out of a possible 800) on the SAT’s math section. That means the top 25 percent of the class scored a perfect 800, and the bottom 25 percent scored a 780 or below. Yet none of them score below a 700. According to MIT’s admissions statistics, zero students in the entire 2020 freshman class had below a 700 on the math portion of the SAT.?Zero.

???Read the entire?New York?magazine feature on test-optional?here .?

???? Good Tuesday morning.?Thanks for reading Next. If someone forwarded this to you, get your own copy by signing up for?free here .

Mark Your Calendars

?? If you live in and around Chicago, I'll be there for two nights next week?to talk about college admissions with the Family Action Network. Both events are free and open to the public.

• On?Tuesday, November 29,?I'll be joining Ron Lieber, a personal finance columnist for?The New York Times?and author of?The Price You Pay for College ?in a conversation with Andrea Mondragón, co-director of college counseling at Francis W. Parker School in Chicago. We'll be in the Heller Auditorium there starting at 7 p.m. to talk admissions and financial aid.
• On?Wednesday, November 30, I'll be in conversation about my book and admissions with Andy Borst, director of undergraduate admissions at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That also starts at 7 p.m. We'll be at the Adlai E. Stevenson High School, Performing Arts Center.

?? More?details here . Hope you can come by to say hello.

???On Monday, December 12 ,?I'll be hosting a free webinar that will be simulcast on Facebook Live with?Grown & Flown?about the state of the college search right now.

• It's perfect timing for the high school Class of 2023 who are getting ready to hear back from their ED schools or finishing regular decision apps, as well as juniors and their families who are trying to make sense of the process.??

?? 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT. More details and register?here. (With support from?Corebridge Financial )?

College Athletics: Out of Control?

In September, Matt Brown, publisher of the?Extra Points?newsletter and Arizona State University sports historian Victoria Jackson?joined us on the?Future U.?podcast ?to break down why the college athletic conferences have so much power over the historical foundations of American higher education.

• Recently, they?returned to continue their conversation . Whether you like college sports or not, I urge you to listen to these episodes if you care at all about?student?well-being.

Money talks:?While universities keep getting more and more money for ever-richer TV contracts, that money isn’t going to college athletes. Yet as Jackson points out,?the?value in the rising TV deals "is athlete performance, and those athletes deserve a cut of that deal."

• The money is only going in one direction in future years ??, Jackson said, as live sports gets even more valuable with the end of appointment TV.

The wild west of sports:?One way college athletes can make money now is from NIL (Name, Image, Likeness), but as Brown told us, so much of this system is unregulated for now and most universities are still getting a handle on what it means for their athletes.

• There is the legitimate side that is enabling athletes, particular female athletes, to make some money, Brown said, but there is also a dark side of essentially money laundering.

Bottom line:?Listening to this episode and the previous one with these guests made me angry about how athletes are treated, especially since most participate in sports that don’t lead ESPN’s?SportsCenter,?rarely get full scholarships , and as the NCAA says in its own commercials, will go pro in something else besides sports.

• As I suggest in this episode, let's have a college president live the life of one of their athletes for a season—or even a week. Any takers?

Overtime:?As part of a package of stories in?The New York Times?yesterday,?one article ?highlighted how universities are reaping millions of dollars in fees by partnering with betting companies to introduce their students to online gambling.

?????For all my readers in the U.S., have a happy and healthy Thanksgiving.?

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff?

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