One of the few positives to come out of the pandemic is that my wife and I have been able to fill our evenings binge-watching entire television series. We have discovered and fallen in love with shows like Justified that somehow missed our radar, we have finally seen The Wire, and we have re-watched The Good Wife. We always choose dramas, and we have asked ourselves more than once if we might have an unhealthy attraction to violence.
That may explain our current fascination with The Sopranos. I started watching The Sopranos religiously about halfway through its original run, so it’s been fun to go back and watch it from the beginning.
The very second episode features a scene where Silvio Dante (played by Steve Van Zandt, better known as the guitar player in Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band), entertains his fellow mobsters in the back room of the Bada Bing! strip club by doing his impression of Al Pacino from Godfather 3: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”
I know that sentiment all too well, because I feel it every time I write about college admission testing. I vow to lay off the subject, because quite frankly I’m tired of writing about it, and then before I know it, “they pull me back in.”
Last week Inside Higher Ed published an ECA column that, borrowing from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, offered two alternative titles. One was “Testing’s Existential Crisis,” and the other was “Blanche DuBois, Confederate Statues, and College Admission Testing.”
The column was a reflection on the combination of forces threatening the testing industry, from technology issues that prevent customers from buying their product (registering for tests) to changes in public attitudes toward testing mirroring changes in attitudes toward Confederate statues.
While I am not presumptuous enough to believe that the column had any influence, two of the issues raised popped up in other venues later in the week. I pointed out the testing industry’s overreliance on high schools and high school counselors as part of its supply chain, and Eric Hoover wrote a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education examining that issue in depth. I also wrote about how the term “optional” can be confusing for students who may think that “test-optional” or “optional essay” are akin to “optional” National Football League off-season practices. Within a couple of days NACAC had produced its “Test-optional means test-optional” list, and nearly 500 colleges have signed on to that document.
It is the test-optional discussion that has pulled me back in. Several incidents last week make me wonder whether the test-optional movement is about to become a new front in the college admission culture wars.
Last week the International Educational Consultants Association (IECA) issued a statement calling on colleges and universities to make permanent test-optional policies for both admission and scholarships. On the NACAC Exchange, some independent consultants and high school counselors attempted to guilt and shame colleges that have yet gone the test-optional route, arguing that test centers could enable the spread of the virus and citing reports that some students are being assigned to test centers more than 100 miles away from their homes.
A few voices went a step farther, taking a position I advanced earlier in the summer with tongue firmly in cheek. They argued that being test-optional does not go far enough, that colleges and universities should go test-blind, not taking test scores into consideration at all in the coming admissions cycle.
What caught my eye, though, was that on the very same day two different published opinion articles in two different newspapers in two different cities argued that test-optional admission might, contrary to common belief, lessen access to college for students from low-income families. Depending on your perspective, that’s either an amazing coincidence or suspicious.
One of those was in my local newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch. On Monday, August 3, it published a guest op-ed with the title “Test-optional admissions might widen disparities.” The author of the piece was Dr. Sarah Turner, a professor of economics and education at the University of Virginia. Turner is a respected researcher best known for her work with Caroline Hoxby at Stanford on the Expanding College Opportunities Project. That project, ultimately taken over by the College Board, attempted to increase the number of low-income, high-scoring high school seniors applying to selective colleges by sending the students packets of information and fee waivers to provide knowledge and motivation to expand their college horizons.
Turner’s op-ed argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the assumption that test-optional policies are more equitable, promoting the enrollment of low-income and underserved students, is “naïve.” She suggests that removing test scores from the admissions equation places more weight on high school grades, which she describes as “most useful when seen within the context of standardized test scores,” and she argues that the value of high school grades is even more limited due to grade inflation and the disruption of school last spring by COVID-19. She also argues that “history shows that tests have been democratizing.”
I found the timing, placement, and content of the article odd, and I soon learned I wasn’t alone. Turner’s article was already the subject of a vigorous conversation on Twitter, with Jon Boeckenstedt at Oregon State finding that it contained six of his nine “tropes” used by defenders of testing. He also voiced a suspicion that had occurred to me as well, that the article might be part of a campaign orchestrated by the testing industry to impugn the test-optional movement.
That suspicion only increased when I discovered that, on the same day as Sarah Turner’s article appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a letter to the editor written by four Chicago-area school superintendents had been published in the Chicago Sun-Times. The letter, titled “Defending the SAT/ACT,” pointed out that the Illinois State Board of Education provides the SAT to Illinois students free of charge, and expressed concern that “some” colleges and universities are making testing optional.
The superintendents’ letter is not as detailed or nuanced as the Turner op-ed, but both articles employ remarkably similar arguments. Like Turner, the superintendents challenge the conventional wisdom, stating “having the SAT and ACT be optional might sound like it will make access to college more equitable, but it creates more barriers.” Like Turner, they argue that high-school grades are unreliable, given that “research indicates low-income and minority students overall are still performing lower academically.” And both articles argue that the SAT and ACT serve a valuable diagnostic function measuring student growth.
So are the two op-ed’s coincidental or evidence of a pro-test campaign (not the same thing as a protest campaign)? Zachary Goldberg, spokesperson for the College Board, told ECA that the College Board was unaware of Turner’s op-ed before it appeared.
I’ll take his word for it, but I also know that answer doesn’t qualify as a blanket denial of any involvement. The two articles bear some resemblance to the playbook used in a previous defense of testing, the 2017 “advertorial” in The Atlantic paid for and written by none other than the College Board. The two main tenets of that advertorial, entitled, “When Grades Don’t Show the Whole Picture,” were that high school grades are unreliable predictors and that test-optional policies harm rather than help diversity.
The conspiracy theory would make a great plot twist on the dramas my wife and I binge watch, but I am more interested in the arguments being advanced in the two articles.
Of the two the superintendents’ letter makes the weaker case. The fact that many, not “some,” colleges are moving to test-optional doesn’t impact the use of the SAT as a statewide assessment in Illinois, and the reality is that the new front in the battle between ACT and SAT is not college admissions testing but statewide testing. That’s where the money is. Test-optional policies don’t mean that students can’t submit test scores, only that they have the option not to.
I agree with Sarah Turner that grade inflation and the turmoil in schools this past spring make high school grades a less than perfect predictor of college performance, but I don’t have the same faith in test scores she has. Everything I’ve read suggests that test scores provide only a small amount of added value to high school grades. For many institutions admitting the majority of their applicants test scores add no predictive value.
The contention that test scores provide an objective measure guaranteeing equity for low-income and underrepresented students is an assumption dating back to the early years when testing was seen as a measure of nature rather than nurture. We have known for a long time that test scores have a strong correlation to family income, and the “score inflation” created by the wealthy paying thousands of dollars for test prep makes test scores even less equitable. Sarah Turner writes that “test scores are a way to convey to colleges achievement and skills that might not be represented on a high school transcript.” I’d love to know what those are.
One of the characteristics of culture wars is that neither side is likely to be convinced to change its view. So it may be with the test-optional culture war, even though the current popularity of test-optional policies is a function of pragmatism rather than philosophy. I’m far from anti-testing, but farther from being convinced by the two op-eds last week.