Recently a parent of one of my seniors e-mailed me asking if the son should answer the optional COVID-19 essay question on his Early Decision application. My response was that the boy should write the essay only if the pandemic had impacted him and his family in significant ways, or if he felt the need to provide context for his academic performance last spring. I suggested that the question was on the application for good reason, given how tumultuous the pandemic has been for students (and us), but that admission officers don’t particularly want to read hundreds of COVID-themed essays.
Embedded in that exchange was an unasked but more profound and interesting philosophical question. What does “optional” mean in a college admissions context? Is “optional” ever really optional?
That issue reared its head earlier this week in a thread on the NACAC Exchange that brought back memories of its ancestor, the NACAC e-list, where heated debates about admission issues great and small were a daily occurrence. Being able to disagree about what we believe is healthy, but this particular debate started out passionate, moved quickly to personal, and ended up ugly.
The genesis of the thread was a post by Bob Schaeffer of FairTest, responding to an article that appeared on Monday in the Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania. That article questioned whether Penn’s adoption of test-optional policies will advantage wealthy students, and quoted Brian Taylor, the managing director of consulting firm Ivy Coach.
Taylor argued that test-optional policies are a sham (my word, not his), not “worth the paper they’re written on.” He suggests that if one student does not report test scores and another student reports strong scores, the student with test scores will “win every time.”
I believe that both protagonists are at least occasional readers of ECA (my judgment has been questioned several times by Ivy Coach, as is its right). The mission of this blog is to promote a conversation about the ethical considerations in college admission, so I am choosing to ignore the back and forth on the NACAC e-list and focus on what “optional” does and should mean in an admissions context.
So why would anyone believe that “optional” shouldn’t be taken at face value? Before focusing in on test-optional, let’s look at the notion of the “optional” essay. For much of my career the prevailing wisdom, the college admissions equivalent of the unwritten rules of baseball, was that optional essays aren’t really optional. According to the reasoning, “optional” in “optional essay” has the same meaning as “optional” in “optional off-season NFL workout.” The underlying assumption is that a student’s willingness to complete an essay that’s optional is a marker of seriousness, such that completing the optional essay is almost a measure of demonstrated interest.
That raises an essential follow-up question. Should an institution label an essay question or any other part of the application as “optional” if it really isn’t? The operative ethical principle is the principle of transparency, the idea that admission officers and institutions should be open and honest about what they value and what they are measuring. We should not only be “practicing what we preach” but also “preaching what we practice.” To go back to the demonstrated interest example, it is perfectly legitimate to measure a student’s level of interest. What is not legitimate is placing value on a particular measure of interest when you haven’t been transparent to students that it is important to demonstrate interest in that way.
So how does that apply to testing, or submission of test scores, being optional? What offended Bob Schaeffer and led to his post was Brian Taylor’s suggestion that admission officers are not “telling it like it is” with regard to their test-optional policies.
That offends me as well. There is certainly a discussion to be had about how colleges will and should treat those who submit scores vs. those who don’t, but the insinuation that the admission profession is lying about test-optional policies doesn’t strike me as true. College admission/enrollment management is a complex dance between pursuing institutional interest and the public interest, but what made me feel comfortable being part of this profession is that by and large college counselors on both sides of the desks are trying to treat students right and honestly. Are there threats to that fabric? Certainly. If I thought that admission offices were deliberately misleading students about their test-optional policies, I would leave the profession.
Let us recognize that in 2020-21 there is a wide spectrum of views and motivations under the test-optional banner. There are the true believers who question whether testing is a legitimate part of the admissions process. There are those for whom test-optional policies are a tool for profile enhancement. And there are colleges that are test-optional because they have no, well, option.
Some of that is a recognition that students aren’t able to test through no fault of their own, and the first rule of moral judgment is that you shouldn’t punish someone for something they are incapable of choosing. Some of it is a desire for affiliation. Just as once upon a time colleges joined the Common Application because they wanted to be seen as part of an elite club, today colleges that wish they could be requiring test scores are probably afraid to fight the crowd, and maybe afraid of student and counselor backlash if they insist on requiring test scores in the current climate.
So how should colleges with test-optional policies treat those who submit vs. those who don’t? Trying to evaluate different students from different backgrounds with different experiences is always a challenge, but never more so than this year given the wide disparity of policies and practices among schools in the wake of the pandemic. More information is usually seen as better than less information, but is it fair to advantage the student who has the opportunity to follow Taylor’s advice and drive three states away or to Nebraska in order to have a testing experience when the only students able to do that are those who are already advantaged? And might that advice put the health of students and their loved ones in jeopardy? If students with test scores “win every time,” then colleges are neither “telling it like it is” nor doing the right thing.
This year equity has to be a guiding principle in ways it never has been before. The optional COVID essay is an opportunity for a student to talk about how he or she has responded to COVID. Should institutions have to answer the same question? How are they responding to serve students whose lives have been upended this year? Which practices, from heavy reliance on Early Decision to heavy reliance on “optional” test scores, might be convenient but wrong?
Submitting test scores should be optional. Doing what’s right by our students should not.