Serendipity35

Reading on the Open Campus blog and earlier on the ACT blog got me thinking about how the long tail of this pandemic will be felt in education. One area that seems to be changed in the long term is admissions testing and perhaps testing for placement in general.

Many colleges have extended their test-optional policies that began last year into this year. Those schools include the entire Ivy League and big players like Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin.

Most predictions have said that the SAT and the ACT will never return to the role they played, but colleges still need some way of assessing both if a student should be admitted and where they should be placed after admission.

For admissions, it seems that the two measures being used are the "rigor" of the classes that applicants took in high school and their grades in them.

The term "rigor" in education is difficult to determine. It is used to describe instruction, coursework, learning experiences, and expectations that are challenging. On a micro level, I might say that a  multiple-choice test on a novel is not as rigorous as an essay test. But measuring rigor for a high school course at a distance by a college is difficult. Clearly, an honors junior English course at one high school is not equal to those at other schools.

What colleges have been doing is collecting data on students who already enrolled and comparing them to their high-school courses and grades. When they have enough data on a particular high school (starting with the highest sending schools), they can track the grade-point averages (GPA), freshman year success, and eventual degree completions of students from that particular school.

?Even when I applied to college in the last century, placement tests given at the college after admission played a much more significant role in my college course selection and path.

Besides helping to decide if a student is admitted to the college, these tests are supposed to measure readiness and predict success. One of those posts I read gives the example that 93% of test-optional applicants to Georgia Tech took calculus in high school, but that isn’t really part of the SAT’s math section. Since students will be required to have calculus, how useful is that SAT score? 

We'll see what a few years of test-optional college admissions produce. As others have said, the pandemic will have a very long tail for higher education.