The application does not define you – you define the application.

June 18, 2018 8:56 AM

The University of Chicago announced that it would no longer require the ACT/SAT for admission, becoming the most-selective institution ever to adopt a test-optional policy.

This new policy is part of an initiative to enhance the accessibility of its undergraduate College for first-generation and low-income students.
In lieu of standardized scores, students can submit an optional two-minute video and non-standard materials and accomplishments as supplements to their applications.

The University of Chicago joins a growing number of U.S. universities and colleges that are deliberating over how much weight should be given to standardized test scores for college admission, and is sending waves through the higher education community.

Does a test optional policy enhance diversity? Some say yes. One study says no.

Previously. Related.

posted by WedgedPiano (23 comments total)

I have mixed feelings about this, like I have about all admissions criteria. I would like to see a proposal that gave everyone a fair shake, but I can't think of any criteria that do. Even flexible criteria are problematic - because it gives more leeway for bias to influence judgments about who is a good fit.

I was a white girl and privileged in many ways, but I was raised by a single parent without family support. I didn't do extracurriculars and I never did test prep. I sometimes had a problematic relationship with school authorities because I wasn't normal. I didn't have "accomplishments" because those are in large part dependent on a support structure that guides you toward those opportunities.

But I tested well and I wrote well.

So I'm wary that a focus on "extracurriculars" is going to grow to fill in the gap left by test scores, and you'll end up disadvantaging groups that on average test well - like the concerns about the NYC schools' no-testing policy change hurting Asian Americans. And then you'll still not help students who don't test well, because it's going to be rich white kids who have the time and money for extracurriculars and who are "impressive" on video (because we know there is still a lot of bias there).

I'm interested to see where this goes, I guess.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:20 AM on June 18, 2018 [23 favorites]

My partner asked me what I thought about this last week and I was also sorta mixed on it. On one hand the biggest connection to higher test scores is family income. And another big factor is parental education. But then look at that news about Harvard getting sued for discrimination reasons. It feels that unless you try very hard, you could make the system worse (more discriminatory and less welcoming to the non-white and non-wealthy) and then not have the hard numbers to back up what's going wrong or where the disconnect is coming from. I don't exactly trust UofC or Zimmer here to do the right thing anymore.

Essentially while the SAT and the tests are super problematic, perhaps there was value in providing a rubric? And without that it'll stay the same or get worse without having as easy of a tool to point to. Of course this is easy for me to say, and I'm not sure it's the correct take, but it's why I'm not 100% on-board with this as an un-alloyed good thing, and as mentioned, I'm not sure I trust the administration here at all.
posted by Carillon at 9:33 AM on June 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

Hmm, well, I went to a selective college where grades were optional—but, it being a school of high achievers, most people opted for grades because those things are still meaningful in the real world. So, how many privileged kids who have done all that SAT prep and gotten their good scores are going to omit that information and give up that accolade?

I guess what I’m saying is, it would be a way more meaningful policy if they stopped looking at SAT/ACT scores, period.
posted by the_blizz at 10:18 AM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

During high school testing the SAT was really the best part of my application: My Asian immigrant parents didn't really understand the requirements for accomplishments and sports a lot of elite colleges have, but everyone knew what the SAT was. You could take a free test every year and we downloaded a bunch of practice tests off the internet for me to self-study.

I know the SAT isn't meritocratic at all and is mostly bullshit. However, the fact that the system is standardized to the extent that it is has always been very appealing to Asian-Americans, who are used to being screwed by subjective considerations and desperately cling to anything that can be learned and gestured to that does not rest on white interpretation. There are rules to it that you can learn and game and get better at and at no point will someone say "mm, you're not likable enough" and get that taken away.

What else do we have? STEM and music accomplishments are dismissed because they're stereotypical. We're marked down in creative pursuits anyway because we're stereotyped as being robots/referencing cultural markers that are foreign to white audiences/expected but also punished for producing within a very narrow range of immigrant narratives, which can be either sad and self-hating or grateful and self-hating.

To get into Smith one of my classmates started her own charity (at age fifteen! and probably supported by parents with deep pockets) but honestly I don't doubt that even that accomplishment could be discounted by admissions officers looking for a reason. The rules for this are ever-changing, dependent on performing to the satisfaction of a white person's imagination and always meant to keep the circle narrow to the white elite. The SAT is bullshit, but every single other metric that can be used for college admissions is bullshit as well.
posted by storytam at 10:34 AM on June 18, 2018 [23 favorites]

>I don't exactly trust UofC or Zimmer here to do the right thing anymore.

Yeah I'm an alumni and I don't really trust them generally. I'm pretty ambivalent overall about Zimmer's project of changing the U of C from a rigorous and moderately selective school to the much more selective school it is today. I've heard good stuff about financial aid, which is great; I was only able to go to the U of C because I got a generous aid package. Financial aid is only part of the picture, though, in terms of making sure that, if you're going to be a school that admits 8% of applicants, you're not doing so in a way that reinforces existing power societal power structures. Dropping the SAT/ACT could be a great move in that direction, but it could also just be lip service.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:36 AM on June 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

Right at the moment it becomes inescapable that Asian applicant's SATs are blowing the doors off those of whites, U of C suddenly realizes SATs aren't such a good measure of applicant quality after all.
posted by jamjam at 10:45 AM on June 18, 2018 [8 favorites]

Right at the moment it becomes inescapable that Asian applicant's SATs are blowing the doors off those of whites

This has been the case for a long time, as I'm sure U of C has known.

The SAT and ACT have marginal predictive value, so I can't lament too much that U of C ditched them. But I don't like that there is now no dispassionate, quantitative measurement that can be compared across applicants. Class rank is the closest I can think of. It has the nice property that it judges applicants (coarsely) relative to their environment. Given that US high schools remain overwhelmingly segregated by race and income, class rank seems like a decent way to ensure a diverse and representative sample of the population.

I can't get too excited about shifting to a more subjective, less quantitative admissions process. Even if the near term effect is to increase diverse representation, it creates a perfect cover for discriminatory admission, not to mention general arbitrariness.

But I don't think admissions criteria is the main thing to be fretting about. Tuition remains the main impediment to less privileged people going to the best schools. This has improved markedly over the years—particularly at U of C—but there is a long way to go. I got my BS there in 2006, and without some well-heeled extended family, I would never have had that chance. Indeed, smarter, more diligent people from my high school went to significantly lower-ranked schools for this reason alone.
posted by andrewpcone at 11:14 AM on June 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

Class rank is the closest I can think of. It has the nice property that it judges applicants (coarsely) relative to their environment. Given that US high schools remain overwhelmingly segregated by race and income, class rank seems like a decent way to ensure a diverse and representative sample of the population.


What do you do when "top of the class" with one set of kids means: "AP math, socialized in privilege", and another set literally means "pushing them through so they can graduate - barely numerate/literate past a mean 9th grade level and socialized by the results of systematic racism for years"......and then expect them to do well on college math or writing at schools with rigorous curricula?

I've seen the results of this at elite and middle-level colleges, : remediation, "college prep", "learning to learn" etc. etc. and it aint pretty, for anyone.


“If we’ve been giving kids worksheets with simplistic answers for years and then get upset when they can’t write a five-paragraph essay or recognize subject-verb agreement, that’s not the kids. That’s us.”...... or to Paraphrase Jean Anyon

“Attempting to fix admissions to rigorous colleges without fixing the education students receive beforehand is like trying to clean the air on one side of a screen door.”
posted by lalochezia at 11:24 AM on June 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

What do you do when "top of the class" with one set of kids means: "AP math, socialized in privilege", and another set literally means "pushing them through so they can graduate - barely numerate/literate past a mean 9th grade level and socialized by the results of systematic racism for years"......and then expect them to do well on college math or writing at schools with rigorous curricula?

That is not something colleges fix. Regardless of the use of class rank, subjective factors, or anything else, it's irresponsible—I would say bordering on fraudulent—to take a student's money for the purpose of educating them if you have evidence they won't succeed.

What is on colleges to fix is that there are plenty of applicants who could easily do well at top-tier schools, but who are not admitted because they lack resources to ace the metrics that impress admissions committees, or do awesome things that are not culturally legible to the admitting caste.
posted by andrewpcone at 11:37 AM on June 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

Texas is experimenting with a top 10% automatic admissions rule, and it's had very mixed results.

Of course, that's for in-state students, so everyone's on a relatively equal 100 point scale. Suburban parents think it's unfair.
posted by WedgedPiano at 11:38 AM on June 18, 2018

In keeping with major shifts in standardized testing, a group of the most prominent private schools in the DC area just announced they are all planning to eliminate Advanced Placement classes within the next four years: “Moving away from AP courses,” the schools said, “will allow us to offer a wider variety of courses that are more rigorous and enriching, provide opportunities for authentic engagement with the world and demonstrate respect for students’ intellectual curiosity and interests.”

This may be a move based on the fact that the students graduating from these schools will keep getting into prestigious universities no matter what is on their transcripts, but it is still interesting that the schools are presenting the change as part of a united front-- and the College Board has already responded in a huff.

When schools with serious institutional power and prominent universities are undermining standardized testing from both sides, there has to be some real panic going on at the companies that sell these products.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 11:53 AM on June 18, 2018

...U of C suddenly realizes SATs aren't such a good measure of applicant quality after all.

Another quandary that every post-secondary program in America is seeing is that the national cohort of high school senior is shrinking, while costs are going up. The competition for students has gone from "sleepy" twenty years ago to "shrieking/white-hot" this year.

My kids range in age from finishing 4th grade to finishing freshman year of college; one of them starts the College Search next fall. I work in .edu, and we have been *ahem* acutely aware of this problem for some years. :7(

If U of C gets a more-diverse incoming class with the headcount that they need to keep running, then God bless them. If this is a shallow ploy to attract more rich students but it results in a diluted student body or one that's no more diverse than before (but who ask for less financial aid), then they will look cynical. No pressure, guys!
posted by wenestvedt at 12:04 PM on June 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

... it's irresponsible—I would say bordering on fraudulent—to take a student's money for the purpose of educating them if you have evidence they won't succeed.

My employer is a university with a campus in Miami. They piloted a program there the year before last that took the (forgive me, but...) lowest tranche of incoming students, in terms of predicted performance, and gave them extra tutoring and study-skills instructions. Almost every one of the students did well in the general population of students in the next term, which is exactly what the program was for.

So in the past those students would have either been denied a shot at college, or given a chance that was foredoomed -- but this way they were given extra help, and they are now succeeding.

Of course, the system can't scale to offering every single student as much intensive aid as they need: it would bend and then break under the strain. This is what keeps educators up at night, I think.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:13 PM on June 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

Also an alum.

My sense of this is this is kinda vintage UofC in that the ostensible rationale for a move like this is one thing in theory, but something altogether different in practice. Either by accident or design. Can't co-sign the lack of trust in the current administration any harder.

Wish I could point to another elite institution that was doing things differently, but they're really the same as corporations at this point, where the main thing they care about is their own growth and survival. Everything else is way down on the list.
posted by NoRelationToLea at 12:32 PM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Right at the moment it becomes inescapable that Asian applicant's SATs are blowing the doors off those of whites

This has been the case for a long time, as I'm sure U of C has known.

Of course they knew, and I'd like to think an attentive reader might have seen an awareness of that knowledge as implicit in "becomes inescapable", but to be perfectly clear, this is the moment that knowledge becomes inescapable because of the lawsuit against Harvard and the prospect of similar actions against other universities around the country.

U of C hopes to avoid having to deal with any such, and yet also to continue to prefer the usual white applicants.
posted by jamjam at 2:46 PM on June 18, 2018

Some schools are so dependent on SAT/ACT scores that they require them even when it's not necessarily appropriate*. I like this, even if their unspoken reasons are suspect.

_{*I'm lookin' at you, Pomona College, who wanted not only my 20-year old high school transcripts but for me to sit for the SAT, as a 30-something transfer student.}
posted by ApathyGirl at 3:16 PM on June 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

However, the fact that the system is standardized to the extent that it is has always been very appealing to Asian-Americans, who are used to being screwed by subjective considerations and desperately cling to anything that can be learned and gestured to that does not rest on white interpretation.

I've also heard mixed things about how standardized tests do in creating equal opportunities for women applicants, but I liked that there was something I could point to where I could conclusively beat male classmates and no one would assume that I must have done well because I'm very organized and conscientious.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 4:21 PM on June 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

I am worried about the signal it will send to not submit SATs. One early result of the ban the box law that passed (the box being: have you been convicted of any felonies) was that employers seemed to be using ethnicity as a proxy. This move may simply help white kids who are bad at testing.

To be clear: I think it is worth a try and if I had a vote I would vote yes, but I think they should track the outcome and see if it does what they hope.
posted by shothotbot at 4:38 PM on June 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

That's interesting. I look at a lot of admissions data (for advising, not admissions purposes: I don't have anything to do with admissions), and it seems to me that it would be really tough to compare students based just on GPAs. GPAs are pretty much meaningless at this point, because schools have such massively varying scales. A lot of schools weight GPAs, so that you'll see students with 5.12 GPAs because they took a ton of honors classes, but that could be fixed by requiring them to provide an unweighted GPA. A bigger problem is that some schools inflate wildly. I'll sometimes see students with like a 4.55 GPA, and they're in the 70th percentile of their class. Their GPA says "superstar," but their class rank says "solid but unexceptional student." And then a lot of schools are no longer providing class ranks, because they think that ranking students creates unhealthy competition, which I'm sure is true. So I think it's actually pretty tough to compare students across schools without some sort of standardized measure. But the SATs and ACTs are kind of fucked-up standardized measures. So I really don't know how I think college admissions should work.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:12 PM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

This seems like a system designed to reward the possession of cultural capital even more explicitly than before. You think first-generation college applicants are going to instinctively know how to produce "supplemental materials" that look appealing and well-produced to college admissions staff's eyes? That kids with budgets in the tens of thousands for their applications aren't going to have a serious edge over the ones who are only able to apply because of the fee waiver?

I admit, I'm a little extra-skeptical because it's Chicago.
posted by praemunire at 8:31 PM on June 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

I don't know if the metric is still accurate, but it used to be said that about 50% of applicants to most of the selective elite schools were academically "qualified"; with acceptance rates being roughly 5-10% that means 80-90% of these well qualified applicants, however good they really are, are not being accepted. The vast majority of people will think, correctly, that they are being screwed.

I do not to deny that there are racist overtones to some of the ways the selection is made, but it is much more about class than it is race. Class and race being deeply linked in the US means that there is a racial aspect to the process even when racism is not really the intended outcome. If elite universities work to subvert class, they will not remain elite, because their elite status is essentially defined by class. This is not necessarily true for smaller or specialist institutions like music conservatories, but for the U of C and Harvard and the like it is; that's what they're selling. This is from 2017, but I'm sure it's still true: Some Colleges Have More Students From the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60.*

There is no fair way to admit people to the most selective elite colleges this side of a lottery, and I suspect that a lottery would piss almost everybody off.



* Class and family income are not the same thing, though Americans usually act as though they are. That's the whole legacy thing: if Daddy was a Harvard man, then you are pretty much a member of the right class by definition. QED.
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 9:05 PM on June 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

"SAT/ACT optional" is a full employment act for college admission consultants. Board scores are a useful data point and admissions officers at good schools already make quite judicious use of them. (Among other things, scores above a threshhold tend to have no impact in the decision, seen by the fact that IIRC white and Asian kids with perfect SATs still have a less than 50% admission rate at HYPS.)

When it comes to the UofC -- few if any kids who can't get into the 90th percentile of the SAT or ACT are going to have the chops to make good use of the College curriculum. With a lot of support and an easy concentration they can eek out their bachelors, but that's a bit of mockery of what the UofC stands for.
posted by MattD at 8:53 AM on June 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

While I agree with many of the arguments against moving away from the SAT and ACT, there’s one group who can benefit from a more subjective admissions process: smart kids with learning disabilities.

There are a lot of very bright kids with a lot of potential out there who simply cannot perform well on one or all components of standardized tests. This is especially problematic in the case of “gifted” kids who have extremely focused or skewed abilities.

To use myself as an example: I have ADHD and a diagnosed math learning disability, and I was also reading and writing at a college level (uh, whatever that means) by elementary school.

I always scored perfectly on the language/verbal sections of standardized tests, and would usually score 15% if I was *lucky* on the math portions. (That’s with involved parents, tutoring, and other support, which I know most kids with learning disabilities don’t have access to).

Universities that relied heavily on interviews, essays, and other less quantatitive admissions processes were a godsend to me because I could prove that I had potential beyond my comically awful math SAT scores.

I did not fail out of the universities that gave me a shot(I started at one and transferred to another): I graduated undergrad with a 3.9 GPA, went to Stanford for my masters, and I now work as a university researcher, where I work with mathematical concepts all the time. I’m capable of understanding and using them, my brain just doesn’t do standardized testing in that way.

While I think we should be quite wary of shedding standardized tests entirely, I do think we should keep in mind that subjective admissions standards don’t just benefit the over-wealthy and over-proframmmed. I regularly think about all the enormously talented and less privileged kids out there who don’t test well and who never got the chances that I did to prove myself in other ways.

I don’t know what the answer here is, though. Perhaps standardized tests are the least bad option. Or perhaps we could weight more subjective considerations higher for kids with documented learning disabilities.
posted by faineg at 1:03 PM on June 19, 2018 [1 favorite]