At the last sign of trouble for the standardized testing empire, which played an important role in college enrollment for millions of students, the organization that produces the SAT said on Tuesday that it would discard subject tests and the optional test section, further scrambling the admissions process.
The change comes at a time when the testing industry has been hit by equity issues and issues by logistical and financial challenges during the coronavirus pandemic.
Critics saw the changes not as an attempt to streamline the test-taking process for students, as the College Board portrayed the decision, but as a way of giving greater importance to the Advanced Placement tests, which the board also produces, as form of organization to remain relevant and financially viable.
“SAT and discipline exams are scared to death, and I’m sure the costs of running them are substantial,” said Jon Boeckenstedt, the vice president for enrollment management at Oregon State University.
The main SAT, conducted by generations of high school students who enroll in college, consists of two sections, one for math and one for reading and writing. But, at least since the 1960s, students also have the option of taking subject tests to show their mastery of subjects such as history, languages and chemistry. Colleges often use tests to determine where to place students in first-year courses, especially in the areas of science and languages.
But the College Board said discipline tests were eclipsed by the rise in Advanced Placement exams. At one point, AP courses were seen as the province of elite schools, but the council said on Tuesday that “the expanded reach of the AP and its wide availability for low-income students and black students means that discipline tests are no longer needed. “
More than 22,000 schools offered AP courses in the 2019-20 academic year, compared with more than 13,000 two decades earlier, according to the College Board. There are about 24,000 public high schools in America.
The College Board said it would discontinue the writing section on the main SAT test because “there are other ways for students to demonstrate their mastery of writing dissertations”, including, he said, the reading and writing portion of the test. The testing section was introduced in 2005 and was considered one of the most drastic changes in SAT in decades. This occurred amid a broader review of the test, which included the elimination of verbal analogies that were the basis of the preparatory courses for the SAT.
Admission officers hoped that the essay would give them a way to look at original samples of students’ writing to better assess their skills. It came to be criticized, however, for promoting an overly stereotyped approach to writing, and it became optional in 2016 as part of another redesign.
In recent years, the SAT has come under increasing criticism from critics who say that standardized tests exacerbate inequalities between classes and races. Some studies have shown that high school grades are an equal or better indicator of college success.
More than 1,000 four-year colleges did not require applicants to submit standardized test results before the pandemic, and the number increased – at least temporarily – as the coronavirus forced test centers to close and made it difficult for many students to do the test. test safely.
Perhaps the greatest success came in May, when, after a lawsuit by a group of black and Hispanic students who said the tests discriminated against them, the influential University of California system decided to eliminate the SAT and ACT requirements for its 10 schools , which include some of the most popular campuses in the country.
The College Board acknowledged that the coronavirus played a role in the changes announced on Tuesday, saying in a statement that the pandemic “has accelerated an ongoing process on the College Board to simplify our work and reduce demands on students.”
But David Coleman, the chief executive of College Board, a nonprofit organization that in the past reported more than $ 1 billion a year in revenue, said that financial concerns were not behind the decisions, and that despite the growing number of schools that make the SAT optional, the demand for the test was still “stronger than some expected”.
He said the organization’s goal is not to get more students to take AP courses and tests, but to eliminate redundant exams and reduce the burden on high school students. “Anything that can reduce unnecessary anxiety and get out of the way is of great value to us,” he said.
Some experts, however, said that eliminating content tests could have the opposite effect, increasing pressure on students to take AP courses and exams, especially in the first year, so that credits can be sent in time to college admission decisions.
Saul Geiser, a senior associate at the Center for Higher Education Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said the move “would worsen the perverse emphasis on test preparation and skills at the expense of regular classroom learning.”
Mr. Geiser said that mastering writing skills and the subject “is the best indicator of how students are doing in college”.
College preparation experts said the announcement, while a major change, was only partly an acknowledgment of a changing environment for standardized testing. Jonathan Richard Burdick, vice president of enrollment at Cornell, said that “the handwriting was on the wall for both exams and the writing option long before the pandemic hit.”
Harris Zakarin, a co-owner of the test preparation company Regents Review, said that testing consideration has declined in recent years. “In my experience, in recent years, it has become extremely rare for a college to require a student to submit a dissertation with SAT,” he said.
Zakarin said he expected SAT’s rival, ACT, to follow suit and eliminate its writing component. ACT said in a statement that it continually assesses the demands for its products.
At the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, officials abandoned the 2016 SAT writing requirement because they saw it as an undue burden on students, including an additional fee, said Mike Drish, the university’s first-year admissions director.
Mr. Drish said the university assessed students ‘preparation for writing based on their grades in English classes, as well as teachers’ recommendations and essays submitted as part of the admission process.
Mark Rosenbaum, director of Public Counsel at the California-based pro bono law firm, which represented the plaintiffs who sued the University of California for standardized testing, said the College Board’s decision was a step in the right direction, but it did not. went far enough.
“Everyone knows that AP tests are also discriminatory in terms of students’ access to these tests and preparation for those tests,” said Rosenbaum. “It is not that it eliminates racial and class discrimination.”
In addition to dismissing the trial and subject tests, the College Board said it would continue to develop a version of the SAT test that could be administered digitally – something it tried and failed to do quickly with a domestic version last year after the pandemic closed test centers. The council did not give a deadline for when a digital version of the SAT could be introduced, but said it would be distributed in test centers by live monitors.
There were about 2.2 million enrollments for the SAT weekend tests in 2020 (some students do more than once), but because of the pandemic, only 900,000 of those tests were done.