Test Optional Colleges/Universities

October has arrived all too quickly and many students are deep into the college application process. For many, that means October testing to try and improve scores to meet admission standards for their dream school, to raise the bar for their personal best, or to earn another $2000 in scholarship dollars. No matter the reason, it is hard to find a high school senior who does not have standardized testing on the brain. But this October also brings a new round of fervent discussion about the role of standardized testing in the college admission process. The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), instituted a year-long study, the Commission on the Use of Standardized Tests in Undergraduate Admission. The results were reported at the 2008 annual conference in Seattle. For your convenience, here is a link to that 56-page report in its entirety: http://www.nacacnet.org/NR/rdonlyres/FE4E1899-653F-4D92-8629-86986D42BF5C/0/TestingComissionReport.pdf In much clearer fashion, here are the bullet point items addressed by NACAC in this report, as made available by press release:

• Despite their prevalence in American high school culture, college admission exams—such as the SAT and ACT—may not be critical to making good admission decisions at many of the colleges and universities that use them. While the exams, used by a large majority of four-year colleges and universities to make admission decisions, provide useful information, colleges and universities may be better served by admission exams more closely linked to high school curriculum. There are tests that, at many institutions, are more predictive of first-year and overall grades in college and more closely linked to the high school curriculum, including the College Board’s AP exams and Subject Tests as well as the International Baccalaureate examinations.
• What these tests have in common is that they—to a much greater extent than the SAT and ACT—measure knowledge of subject matter covered in high school courses; that there is currently very little expensive private test preparation associated with them, partly because high school class curricula are meant to prepare students for them; and that they are much less widely required by colleges than are the SAT and ACT.
• A possible future direction for college admission tests is the development of curriculum-based achievement tests designed in consultation with colleges, secondary schools, and state and federal agencies. Such achievement tests have a number of attractive qualities. Their use in college admissions sends a message to students that studying their course material in high school, not taking extracurricular test prep courses that tend to focus on test-taking skills, is the way to do well on admission tests and succeed in a rigorous college curriculum.
• Regularly question and re-assess the foundations and implications of standardized test requirements and establish a NACAC Knowledge Center to share the results of research on the validity of tests.
• Understand test preparation and take into account disparities among students with differential access to information about admission testing and preparation; inform the public of all research about test prep and the current consensus that it produces only a 20-30 point gain (on the old 1600 point scale), not the 100 points or more that is conventional wisdom.
• Draw attention to possible misuses of admission test scores at such institutions as the National Merit Scholarship Program, U.S. News & World Report, and bond ratings agencies.
• Establish opportunities for colleges and secondary schools to educate themselves and their staff about the appropriate uses of standardized tests by instituting a NACAC training program for admission counseling professionals
• Understand differences in test scores among different groups of people and continually assess the use of standardized test scores relative to the broader social goals of higher education.

While this is currently being discussed at the national level and is a focused in many media outlets (NY Times article, as an example: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/education/22admissions.html?_r=4&ref=3D&oref=slogin), I hope my blog readers and my client families will also remember that there are many colleges and universities nationwide that have already made policy changes in their admission review allowing for standardized test scores to be an optional component of the application submission. In fact, according to Fair Test: The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, the current number of test optional campuses now numbers 775 strong. The following link provides a comprehensive list of these institutions that choose to lessen the importance of one Saturday morning test as a predicting indicator of the contributions a student will bring to a campus community, both inside and outside of the classroom: http://www.fairtest.org/university/optional At this hectic time of year, it is convenient to assign numbers (GPAs, test scores, social security numbers, student IDs) to define students. And it is just as easy for a student to feel like they are nothing but what those numbers represent. But this is a reminder about the necessity of finding the best fit campus community at which to apply for admission and hopefully to enroll. And or some students, having an opportunity to present themselves for consideration outside the confines of standardized test scores, is welcome. As an education professional, I look forward to continued discussions following NACAC's report on standardized testing in the admission process and how to best serve all types of students as they pursue higher education.