Inconvenient Facts for the War on Testing College admission based on personal essays helps affluent students.
Among the “emergency” progressive policy changes likely to persist after the Covid-19 pandemic is the abandonment of standardized testing in college admissions. Anti-testing activists had been winning the argument for years by claiming the tests favor privileged students. After social distancing disrupted test taking in 2020, the future scope of the SAT and ACT is uncertain.
But college admissions based on “soft” rather than numerical criteria won’t be more equitable or progressive. Privileged students are likely to gain the most. A new paper from Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis shows that “essay content”—that is, the quality of admissions essays—“is more strongly associated with household income than is SAT score.”
It’s true that high-income students, who are more likely to have highly educated parents, score better on the SAT, on average. But testing critics never explain what would be a fairer metric. That’s because the same resources and academic preparation that enable students to score well on the SAT also enable them to get better grades, pad their resumes, and write polished admissions essays.
The Stanford researchers ran nearly 60,000 student essays submitted to the University of California in 2016 through a computer program. The computer identified the essay topics and “linguistic, affective, perceptual, and other quantifiable components of essay content.” The essays predicted the student’s family income better than SAT scores.
This should not be a surprise to anyone paying attention to the admissions debate. The University of California last year set a timeline for abolishing standardized tests, against the advice of a faculty report it commissioned. The report included the insight that “the fuzzier the admissions criteria, the greater the disadvantage suffered by those not already steeped in the academic ethos.”
For those steeped in the academic ethos, who know what admissions officers want to hear, the progressive rush away from standardized admissions is a boon. The harm is to outstanding students with less coaching who will have a harder time proving their chops. An ideological movement impervious to evidence continues to degrade education.
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