Applications Surged After Colleges Started Ignoring Standardized Test Scores
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Applications Surged After Colleges Started Ignoring Standardized Test Scores
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What happened when college admissions offices started ignoring the standardized test scores? NBC News asked college administrators like Jon Burdick, Cornell's vice provost for enrollment:
When the health crisis closed testing sites in 2020, four of Cornell's undergraduate colleges decided to go test optional, meaning students could submit a test score if they thought it would help them, but didn't have to. Three of Cornell's colleges adopted test-blind policies, meaning admissions officers wouldn't look at any student's scores. The effects were immediate, Burdick said. Like many other colleges and universities, Cornell was inundated with applications — roughly 71,000 compared to 50,000 in a typical year. And the new applications — particularly those that arrived without test scores attached — were far more likely to come from "students that have felt historically excluded," Burdick said.
The university had always looked at many factors in making admissions decisions, and low test scores were never singularly disqualifying, Burdick said. But it became clear that students had been self-rejecting, deciding not to apply to places like Cornell because they thought their lower SAT scores meant they couldn't get in, he said. Other colleges also saw a similar surge in applications.... At Cornell, managing the surge in applications wasn't easy, Burdick said. The university hired several admissions officers and about a dozen part-time application readers — paid for in part by the additional application fees....
In the end, Cornell enrolled a more diverse class, including a nearly 50 percent increase in the share of first-generation college students. "It showed me that these students, given the opportunity, can show really impressive competitive credentials and get admitted with the test barrier reduced or eliminated," Burdick said.
Research on colleges that went test optional years ago shows that students admitted without test scores come from more diverse backgrounds and do about as well in their classes once they arrive as peers who did submit test scores.
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They can "get admitted with the test barrier reduced or eliminated". Similarly, I can compete at the olympics if there are no barriers to my doing so.
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by AleRunner ( 4556245 ) on Monday April 18, 2022 @04:37AM (#62455850)
The bit which really matters is this (from the last link in the summary)
The findings are dramatic....the coefficients for SAT/ACT scores are always less than 0.02, which means that an increase
in test scores of one standard deviation is associated with an increase of less than 2 percentage points in six-year
graduation rates; this relationship is even negative at the historically black colleges and universities (HBCU’s).If it's true that higher SAT scores sometimes predict less able (more stupid?) people then using a high SAT score to let people in is actually lowering the bar.
Now, I'd say that I'm surprised by the result, to the extent that I'd normally suspect that there's something wrong with it. This wouldn't be the first time I've seen some garbage science in social sciences, if my gut instinct is right, however I've got no right to criticise it until I find a clear piece of scientific evidence that shows this is wrong. They've put their science out there and I haven't. Before we have any right to criticise this, we need hard evidence that SAT scores are in some way linked to future academic achievement.
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It just means that SAT scores are less a measure of your possible scholar achievements, but more a measure of how much your parents are able or willing to spend, so you can pass the SAT with a high score.
Children from families with enough income or time to spend on SAT tutors, SAT prep classes or SAT exercises will have better chances at high scores.
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I think the "wealth" effect of SAT tutors / prep classes is highly overstated. You can buy an SAT prep book for $20-$30. These contain the same "tips and tricks" that any fancy course will teach you. Even poor people can afford that. Kids get out of it what they put into it, so at the end of the day, it's still mostly based on motivation and intelligence. And learning/prepping directly from a book is very analogous to what one does in college so ones success in doing so is probably a good predictor.
When I w
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I think the "wealth" effect of SAT tutors / prep classes is highly overstated. You can buy an SAT prep book for $20-$30. These contain the same "tips and tricks" that any fancy course will teach you. Even poor people can afford that. Kids get out of it what they put into it, so at the end of the day, it's still mostly based on motivation and intelligence.
Arguably the largest effect wealth has on SAT scores is how easily it can compensate for a lack of motivation. Just look at the difference between taking a class in programming and taking a Coursera course. Most students could perform just as well on an aptitude test after taking both courses, but they don't. Students in a physical class with a teacher, who grades them and reports those grades to a school (and the kid's parents), do far better on average. Just paying for courses has a huge effect, even if from the same institution. A free Coursera class will have a 2-6% completion rate, while paid classes have a 45-55% completion rate (articles found in a quick google search varied widely).
So a student who has access to actual tutors is going to do far better than most students given access to the same educational material for free, regardless of their level of motivation.
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When I was in high school I spent a ton of time and effort prepping for the SAT and got a fairly good score.
When I was in high school, spending a lot of time and effort preparing for the ACT/SAT wasn't even on my radar. Things have changed over the years.
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Good teachers, like good coaches, work hard to motivate their students to put in the effort required to achieve the desired result.
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Yes that is true. But I guarantee every other method you come up with can also be games by the wealthy. The wealthy can afford to fund the loophole methods. The wealthy can afford all the extracurricular things. They can, and do, hire a consultant to advise them.
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by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Monday April 18, 2022 @04:58AM (#62455890)
Now, I'd say that I'm surprised by the result, to the extent that I'd normally suspect that there's something wrong with it.
MIT for example claims that "[their] ability to accurately predict student academic success at MIT is significantly improved by considering standardized testing -- especially in mathematics" [mitadmissions.org]. Maybe Cornell isn't teaching in a way for which high ability demonstrated by testing is relevant but MIT is? Or maybe Cornell's results are garbage as you say, that's also possible.
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by GrumpySteen ( 1250194 ) on Monday April 18, 2022 @07:39AM (#62456038)
Or maybe MIT makes no effort to assist students who didn't get the best mathematics education before arriving and Cornell does.
From MIT's own page:
In other words, there is no path through MIT that does not rest on a rigorous foundation in mathematics, and we need to be sure our students are ready for that as soon as they arrive
It's a blatant fuck-you to anyone who went to a high school with a poor mathematics curriculum and couldn't afford tutors to;provide them with a better education.
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I started off high school in a typically low-resource rural public high school, then got to go to a better school with college level courses, and I am thankful that on various fronts they caught what was missing and I benefited from a few 'catch up' classes, as the school decided it was their job to make up for lacking curriculum rather than the student's fault. So after losing roughly a semester to 'remedial' (comparitively speaking) courses, I got to the more rigorous and useful coursework.
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It's not that simple. The solution has to come from improving the education in high schools, not from having MIT accept students with insufficient math background.
If accepted, a student who comes with insufficient math preparation may fail in their classes that require math knowledge. This certainly does not help the student in the long run. -
Which is why, when I was approaching the end of my enlistment, I went to community college to get my math and science up to par. Not only did it help me a lot when I got to the University, I think having that additional transcript of recent A's in directly relevant courses helped me get accepted. Universities have to make a cut-off somewhere. The many factors that drive student achievement gaps in primary and secondary school should not be the responsibility of the University.
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I have talent for math, so my case isn't typical, as I never needed tutors, or even much studying, to get consistent A scores in high school math and physics classes. Math for me always simply fun. But one thing I noticed over the decades since is how poor what we were taught was, with teachers themselves barely grasping what they were talking about.
On the flip side, once YouTube became a thing it was as if finding an entire new world. Suddenly there were EXTRAORDINARILY GOOD teachers for a change, teaching
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It's not a fuck-you, it's MIT stating that they expect a certain level of preparedness for their courses. If someone wasn't prepared by their high school but for whatever reason feel compelled to get into MIT then they need to find another way to learn these skills.
This is one of the primary functions of junior/community college.
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Maybe Cornell isn't teaching in a way for which high ability demonstrated by testing is relevant but MIT is? Or maybe Cornell's results are garbage . . .
From the link you provided:
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Cornell probably has a lot more humanities majors than MIT has. MIT is an engineering school.
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Well, it's the same argument everywhere. Can a supreme court judge be effective if they didn't go to an ivy league school? Can an person applying to an ivy league school do well if they are not in the top 15% of the SAT scores? Can a person not in a privileged educational, economic class score in the top 15% of the SAT? Plenty of opportunity to exclude people by class in a less perfect system. But people argue, and as far as i can tell their only argument is how that privilege they enjoy due to that exclusi
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Firstly the olympics implies a lot of things, that you have passed through several level of competition and have been on that track since you were a child. Secondly, the olympics is yes actually about competition and being able to compare yourself to others like you. If you win a medal great, if not the effort is acknowledged. Unless of course the knowledge of fitness, diet, problem solving, are meaningless to the human civilization and are not things an individual can use in life after the olympics then,
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I had found in College, the toughest classes I had to take were at the 100 level. (Even in my junior and senior years). Colleges seem to delight in having a high fail out rate. At the 200's and up. (including the 500's and 600's master classes) the Classes were more intended in actually teaching information, vs finding way to trick students into failing out our, figuring that college wasn't for them.
The real issue is the college/university system is in a lot of conflict with itself.
Their Marketing Depart
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Universities would either have to abolish grades and hand out diplomas like participation awards, or there would be a 99% drop out rate
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Somehow this does not happen in countries where universities are basically free. So your hypothesis needs some work.
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Those places have standards for their students, unlike, evidently, the US who doesn't acknowledge test scores and admits any old retard underachiever whose willing to dig themselves into debt for an education they're not going to succeed in attaining
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From the summary, which you clearly didn't read before jumping at the chance to dump on US students.
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Yea, but other evidence shows that those people are much more likely to drop out. So basically youâ(TM)re giving black people a ton of debt and they donâ(TM)t graduate with a degree, you can see the solution is more racist in its outcome, but that is exactly the way the left in power wants it, blacks should be perpetually poor because they might stop voting for them if they make their own way and donâ(TM)t need handouts.
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and they have an TRADES Track for people as well.
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Yep. The Mumbai diploma mills.
Pay their diploma fee, get a diploma.
It's worth less than the effort used to wipe your ass with it. But hey.
Simply handing out participation trophy diplomas doesn't mean you get a quality education or are a usable work prospect.
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You mean like in northern EU countries? Some universities have no fees & no entry requirements. All you have to do is turn up & keep up.
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> Some universities have no fees & no entry requirements. All you have to do is turn up & keep up.
Good point. What are their graduation rates like?
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The have entrance requirements, Abitur, Matura, the equivalent of a high level high school diploma.
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by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Monday April 18, 2022 @04:19AM (#62455834)
Standardized testing is the least racist way to admit students. If people of a certain race or background are not scoring high, it means they were not taught properly in K-12 education. Standardized testing reveals which regions of the country need resources K-12 (ohh, you don't wanna fix THAT, do you?). In fact, the less you rely on test scores.. the more elitist students you will get. You will get the rich kids who could afford extra-curricular activities and training. You will get the ones who can spin a good story about how they went to a protest or shit like that. Also, you will take away the incentive to study the hard subjects. Tell me something, if you needed brain surgery.. would hire your brain surgeon based on whether he faced hardships in life? or will you hire based on "this dude will not turn me into a vegetable"?
Imagine there is a kid who wants to be a brain surgeon, he knows his shit quite well... Without a standardized test, how does he prove that he knows anything? how does he prove that he is in the top 1% of kids that can learn/memorize the shit you need to know to do brain surgery. I mean, you do want brain surgeons to be the best we have, don't you?
Fix the schools, fix the parental attitudes.. don't bitch about standardardized tests. Bitch about the people who told you studies aren't important. Bitch about the parents who didn't make you learn shit.
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How many of the people in the eastern hemisphere do not even reach a high school level? You are talking about people who were chosen to achieve past the normal and given every opportunity to do so. I have to ask then how much of that is privilege and then how much would that privilege be worth is everyone had equal opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty that way?
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You do realize that the Eastern Hemisphere contains Europe, Africa and Asia along with 82% of the Workd population?
If we limit the discussion to China it has a tertiary education rate which is slightly above the OECD average (maybe less older students). Around 40%. So it is not like only the most gifted students get that opportunity. They are simply building a broad well educated population although their education system still has some shortcomings compared to western education systems (critical thought fo
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You assume that universities need kids to have reached a certain level, and can do nothing if they haven't.
In reality, if there are gaps in a student's knowledge they can be filled. That then allows them to reach their full potential. Just because the local schools failed them, does not mean that they are incapable of learning given the right opportunity.
Arguably there should be another way to address this, but there isn't and universities have the opportunity right now.
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> In reality, if there are gaps in a student's knowledge they can be filled.
Look up "McNamara's Morons", a Vietnam era project to fill the ranks of US military with men with IQ's lower than 83. It was a very dangerous disaster. The idea that less capable students can master higher skills is fantasy for people who've neve taught real lessons to a a class of mixed talent.
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The admissions process selects candidates with the capability to succeed. It just use prior failure of the educational system as a hard barrier.
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The admissions process is often not permitted to select students with the highest capability or likelihood to succeed. I't sonsidered biased and even federally prohibited if those factors include race, gender, gender identity, religion, naitonality, marital status, without physical handicaps, although every one of those correlate strongly with likelihood of success in college. It's understandable to extend opportunities to those whose academic careers have been hindered by such factors, but there are cases
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These kinds of issues don't come up in other countries, because they try to fix the system as a whole. In the US you have too many people trying to stop things getting better, so everyone ends up doing what they can and it being resolved by these kinds of lawsuits.
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Whatever makes you think these issues don't occur in other nations? In the UK, the tests are called "O Levels" and "A Levels". Japan, and China, have very intensive training for students to get the scores they need for college admissions. It's balanced in modern societies with desires to "level the playing field".
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teach the test / cram for the test does = good students per say.
Now it may trun out people who are good at test taking but not good at useing that knowledge.
Do we need more Paper MCSE people? or people can learn and use knowledge but may be bad at test cramming?
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I't sonsidered biased and even federally prohibited if those factors include race, gender, gender identity, religion, naitonality, marital status, without physical handicaps, although every one of those correlate strongly with likelihood of success in college.
Correlation does not equal causation, so quit worrying about admissions not including improper correlations like race, sex, religion, etc.
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Exactly what we see here in Denmark: The left wing wants admission to be based on after school merits and interviews. All experience shows that these kind of admissions favour the children of academics even more than a grade based system. (Danish universities admit in two qouta: one based on marks alone, one based on "other things". The left wing always wants more admissions from the second qouta as they simply hate marks although they evidently give more social equality.)
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Yep. Although this isn't in my particular field, I read a fair amount of research in education & occasionally come across interesting papers on the relationships between standardised proficiency testing (relatively objective assessments) & teachers' estimates of academic ability & there are typically large biases that disfavour particular minority groups, boys vs girls, extrovert vs introvert, etc.. We have objective assessment precisely because humans, including teachers & interviewers, are
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What I have seen, anecdotally, is that if a black kid studied 4 to 6 hours every day the same as asian kids they too will score in the top 99.9% percentile. If the "race was inferior" how do you explain that there are black doctors and mathematicians? It should be impossible for any black person to do multi-variable calculus. Everyone who puts in the necessary study time can do it. It is only a matter of being motivated, or sometimes forced, to do it.
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I'm not going to make any statement about race, but someone's gotta point out that your statement is analogous to "If height mattered in basketball, people under 6 ft would never dunk!"
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However, arguments about the bias of such tests aside, if there are other ways to judge academic readiness that encourages more applicants, is it not worthwhile, if it does not negatively impact the academic quality of the student body? The TFA points out allowing non-submission increased diversity, so it would seem the elitist argument does not stand up. As for academic impact, the illustrative point from TFA:
The 2014 research revealed that—when given the option at one of those 33 TOP institutions
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When opting for brain surgery, your doctor will be qualified to perform the surgery.
Entrance to college is quite a bit removed.
Also, many doctors have accidentally turned people into vegetables and many doctors have committed fraud. So the old selection processes result in bad surgeons too.
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Bingo, just gonna stop you right there so we can ensure we're both on the same page here.
Greed infected prisons. The end result is the Incarcerated States of America. Go figure.
Greed infected college campuses. The end result is a degree less fitting and more overpriced than a Bugatti EV in Rose Gold, with an industry wearing the same trillion-dollar debt dress to the ball again, pretending it's new high fashion. Go figure.
Greed is now infecting K-12. Much like mainstream news, this isn't about educat
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Everyone knows the K-12 system is broken. What do you do in the meantime? Completely exclude an entire generation of people who were unfortunate enough to live in a bad school district?
Like, in Canada, maybe what you're saying would work. (Though we don't rely on standardized tests as much here; one's entrance is based on their high school grades, with the expectation that the schools are sufficiently standardized that they provide a good baseline to judge everyone.)
But in vast swathes of the USA, you see (
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"Standardized testing is the least racist way to admit students... Standardized testing reveals which regions of the country need resources"
Your second claim is orthogonal to your first. You then proceed to support the second claim but not the first.
If we stipulate your second claim and then act on it, that address future students but still does not tell us what to do about students now. Should we just write off good students who wound up in a bad school?
Colleges do not admit lower schools, they do not admi
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Everything you say is right: standardized test scores are the most objective standard we have. Race, eye color, height, and all the other irrelevant attributes have no influence.
Someone who does not have the necessary knowledge and/or intelligence to succeed, should not be let in anyway. All you are doing is setting them up to fail. Or, worse, you will "pass them through", handing them a paper qualification that they do not deserve. Which then casts doubt on all the other, qualified people who received a
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Well said, sir. Okay, maybe not so well said, but you make good points. I would suggest fewer uses of the word "shit"... but there you are...
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Once you account for high school GPA, standardized tests account for a tiny fraction of a percent of the remaining variance in college performance. Standardized tests are unfortunately not that predictive of college performance and generally only amount to a barrier to entry or as another filter for elite schools.
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Underperformers don't need to go to university. They'll simply not be able to handle it, then drop out, and end up with tens of thousands of $ in debt.
Slow clap -
Is it a good thing to have many more applicants than your fixed capacity to take in? Since you always only end up with the same number of new students, so the answer is "yes only if you end up with overall better students", you could easily just as well end up with worse students.
But now that they have removed the only objective measure (regardless of how useful it was), there is no way to answer the question, until years later when those students graduated, and even then, any measure would be hard to separate from other factors. So, good job for these colleges to make a change that cannot be measured, they can pat themselves on a job well done because no one can challenge them.
But, one obvious downside is now the colleges need to spend much more effort to decide which students to accept, and many students have to spend more effort to apply for more colleges. And why is that? When colleges used test scores as a criteria, most students could practically judge which colleges would likely accept them based on their own scores, and could thus quickly make a shortlist of colleges to apply.
Now, with no test scores to guide them, most students have to take a scattershot approach to apply to as many colleges as feasible so as to both maximize the number of offers they can get, so they can choose the best among them.
This is the same (broken) approach HR departments take to hiring, which resulted in job hunters spamming as many companies as possible, it did not result in better fit between jobs and applicants, it only resulted in resume spamming services. If colleges continues this practice, we can look forward to "college application services" soon to help students to apply to "hundreds of colleges by filling in just one form", and colleges getting flooded with applications they have no resource to handle. Then, of course, those college application services will turn around to "help" colleges filter applicants (using keywords just like broken the HR hiring process).
Also, look forward to see more corruption in college applications, since there is no way you can tell if any student was accepted based on merit, or was it based on their dad's "donations". Such corruption, of course, amplifies social inequality, in an already very unequal country. Good luck with that.
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"(regardless of how useful it was)"
If the measure was not useful, that means that prospective applicants were eliminating themselves before the college got to do their actual evaluation. This provides an advantage to aggressive applicants regardless of any other ability.
"This is the same (broken) approach HR departments take to hiring"
Competent hiring managers will tell you that resumes and interviews can only go so far, and at some point you just have to try people out in the actual work environment and se -
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How on earth is an endowment tied to the size of the administration?
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But now that they have removed the only objective measure (regardless of how useful it was), there is no way to answer the question, until years later when those students graduated, and even then, any measure would be hard to separate from other factors.
You obviously didn't read the paper. They have years of data for applicants who opted to include SAT scores and those who didn't in the same shools. They conclude that there was a small drop in mean GPAs for those who didn't submit SAT scores compared to
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Ok, admission. Nice. What about graduation statistics and later professional performance? Because that is what matters, not that they are allowed to go into the beginner class.
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The answer is right there in the summary, if you'd bothered reading it
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No. It isn't. The OP is suggesting that metrics collected while in school do not correlate to performance in the field. Everything in the summary, including your quoted snippet, refers only to how the new free-range, grass-fed students do "about as well" in their classes and graduate about as often. If that's your only criteria, that the students stay in the field long enough to pay for a 4-6 year degree, then success! But you leave open the bigger, and perhaps more relevant question, of how long they
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But you leave open the bigger, and perhaps more relevant question, of how long they remain in the field and how well they do later. And that, as the OP suggests, is conveniently difficult to follow up on.
But that's not the question at hand, as it's a more general issue about how well college prepares you for the corporate world.
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"about as well in their classes" doesn't mean equal outcomes If your more diverse background students on average take lower difficulty courses or less strenuous subjects.
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Alright, there are fools claiming the SAT is "biased." Rigged so that only white people can score high due to cultural bias in the questions... Umm OK.. maybe.. but then how is in that people whose parents/background is from India and China score the highest.. by far on the SAT? They had zero exposure to white culture, yet they somehow manage to score high on these tests? I mean, seriously.. the cultural bias thing is BS. The cultural bias is that YOUR parents didn't show or tell you the importance of studying. They didn't instill a discipline of spending 4 to 6 hours every day on academics as many Asian parents do. Indian parents don't give a shit about sports (out of the entirety of India, 1.2 billion people, only one Gold medal was obtained in the 2020 Olympics), but they care about academics. So should the NBA draft Indian people because they culturally lack sports emphasis? Should a grammy be given based on the hardships someone faced rather than the music they created? THAT could be cultural, but the goal of the test is to see who can do English and Mathematics the best. If you didn't study or give enough of a shit about it to waste your time on it, then how the fuck are you supposed to do it? The reason you got a low score on the exam is you didn't give a shit about Math and studies. Or you started caring too late.
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Alright, there are fools claiming the SAT is "biased." Rigged so that only white people can score high due to cultural bias in the questions
"Rigged" is not the same as "biased".
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And the new applications — particularly those that arrived without test scores attached — were far more likely to come from "students that have felt historically excluded," Burdick said.
Research on colleges that went test optional years ago shows that students admitted without test scores come from more diverse backgrounds
Weirdly enough, MIT did the exact opposite thing recently [mitadmissions.org], using the same argument:
Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT.
So Cornell believes that students with no test results "can show really impressive competitive credentials" whereas MIT believe that tests "help [...] identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities". So apparently poor students simultaneously can't do well on standardized tests, and therefore are supposed to impress in other ways, but also can't impress in other way so they better do well on standardized tests to impress? My head hurts...
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It is worth reading through the rationale behind MIT’s decision. In particular the announcement you linked to talks about how at MIT passing a rigorous calculus programme is critical to progressing. So the SAT, with its high mathematics content is useful to determine who is well prepared enough to be successful in the MIT programme.
To me this seems logical - the university is testing for preparedness for their own programme which includes a must pass to progress exam. As far as I can see from the argu
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It does seem like providing free/subsidized MOOCs that cover things like remedial mathematics might be a way to help disadvantaged students without lowering admissions to problematic levels where they'd fail to succeed.
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The aim isn't to enroll the best or the brightest - the aim is to get the highest paying customers enrolled.
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Not when the school makes more from investing their endowment than they do on admissions. Then the more "prestigious" the school, the better students they attract, the better later life outcomes of those students, the more they contribute back to the school and pump the endowment.
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Correlation is not causation: many students took a gap year from the pandemic and are applying now. The surge will likely subside in a couple of years.
I don't understand the political agenda of the current Slashdot editors that standardized tests are bad. It's almost as if they didn't do well in school and have a chip on their shoulder. If you didn't realize the importance of tests and learn how to take them well, especially standardized tests, then you weren't paying attention. That's on you, not the rest of society.
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A friend did not get accepted from several big state universities, although her grades and effort should have made her a shoe-in. Two things happened: the standardized test cut, and that these universities are accepting FEWER students this year due to their having overbooked students last year.
It was a big shock to this girls' ego and made her question why she worked so hard. She'll be fine, but it's one of those anecdotes...
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Take away an entrance restriction and more people try to enter. I can see why this is news.
Once they start graduating we'll know if this worked. And by "worked" I mean "showed that their old tests were flawed".
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"Purchases surge after stores stop requiring money!"
May be some downstream negative side effects, but who cares about such details... haters!
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Did they say they aren't looking at students' secondary school marks and other academic qualifications? I must have missed that.
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No but did you really think anyone here would actually rtfa?
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They'll wind up going into massive debt to *maybe* get a degree that may or may not be of any use to them. So many are just going to be financially ruined for no good purpose.
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I have taken a look out of curiosity at sample questions for the LSAT, the SAT and the GRE. The LSAT seemed reasonably well structured and an attempt to find out what students knew or could reason through.
The GRE had some odd questions about the structure of the GRE test itself (IIRC something to do with the grading policy) Quite what that relevance had to anything other than "test preparation" was obscure.
The SAT seems less of an attempt to find out what students knew or could infer than it is an attempt t
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I'd agree about the tests' questionable usefulness in some regards. I can see them being ok at setting a baseline, but like you allude to... by the time I was done with college I felt like I could probably pass a multiple choice test on a topic I knew nothing about just from getting familiar with their structure. That in and of itself could be a useful skill, I suppose, but "do tests measure what we think they measure" is a difficult question even if they correlate with success.
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Removing constraints lets you do all kinds of things that you can't do with the constraints in place. MIT has found that the test constraint is necessary if they are also going to satisfy the "four semesters of calculus, mandatory" constraint.
These tests were originally put in place to *increase* equity. They can still do that job.
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