Description

The Wall Street Journal presents "Inside The Admissions Office." Students across America sent in their questions – expert Deans of Admissions from eight top colleges provide the real answers. In this clip admissions deans offer their take on a student's concern about standardized test scores.

Transcript

How Important Are the SATs and Other Standardized Tests Jordan Goldman: The last student question we’re going to take is, a student named Jenny asked that a lot of schools are starting not to factor in the SAT’s, some schools are backing away from in saying, “You’ll only need to submit in if you’d like to.” Do all of you require the SAT and do you feel that this is a key part of the admissions process for you; and what do you think about some of the people that are starting to back away from that? Nancy Hargrave Meislahn: Can we broaden up to be standardized test not just SAT? I think that, that’s a critical difference. We require them. It’s another day to point as you have said earlier. Jenny Rickard: We required them at Bryn Mawr, but given all the conversations about standardized testing, you know over the past few years, we did analysis of how predictive they were in the process. And what we found was that among our standardized test which we’ve required the SAT or the ACT and two SAT subject tests, that the subject tests for us tended to be more predictive actually of the grades in college. So we decided actually to open up, make, create a test flexible option which enable to students to AP scores, submit AP scores and lieu of SAT’s or ACT. So there’s a whole sort of menu option that you can choose. Trying not to make it more complicated, actually trying to let students use tests that they may have already taken as part of the admissions process. And I think this will be an evolving conversation as more information comes out about standardized test, etc. But we kept the standardized test requirement because as we’ve mentioned earlier, we can’t visit every high school in the world. We can’t necessarily know every high school so well that standardized test do give us some information that’s very helpful, that can balance out the more important piece which is the transcript. So we use them but we use them traditiously and in the context of all the other pieces of the application. And so, I’m always sort of reticent to talk about standardized testing policies in some ways because it inflates the importance of them in our application process, but I know that there an important thing to all of our students apply. But think about your transcript really as the driving force behind your application. Seth Allen: I think this is part of a larger conversation though as we look at the landscape of higher education, some of the traditional measures you use in the admission process, well, I don’t see them going away anytime soon. We’re starting to see some of them erode, so schools jumping on thinking about standardized testing in a different way or re-imagining what the essay question might be and thinking about it instead of one large essay and series of short questions. We’re linking it to questions that are designed to elicit different kinds of responses from students than just tell us something new about yourself. And I think that makes a lot of sense, I mean the current process that probably most, if not all of us use in selective college admissions has been around for 60 years now. And students are different, colleges are different, society is different and it makes sense that the admission process will change with the times. Richard L. Nesbitt: I want to follow up on something that Jenny was saying. At Bryn Mawr, we’ve done some researches ourselves at Williams to look at what predicts academic success with all of the things that you can look at. If you just take standardized test course totally out of contact, they really aren’t very good predictors of academic success. Unfortunately, when we look at class rank, when we look at teacher recommendations, interviews, there really is no good predictor. When you start to build a better predictor, when you put together these things we’ve been talking about, the strong program, the grades and you throw in standardized test course as well as the subject tests, you build a bit of a better predictor. But I think it’s important to say that it’s all taken in the context of the student, what their socio economic background is. We know that standardized testing is highly correlated with family income. And so you have to take that into account or if families, their primary language is not English at home, we’re going to take those things into account when we’re considering standardized test. Roby Blust: One thing that I show students at Marquette is we have a really wide range of test course, test course for our incoming class. So you see an average, and sometimes students say, “Well, that’s what I have to have. I have to have that score.” And we have scores across the whole range of test course because it is in—or in combination of all the things that we’re looking at. And I think that sometimes is kind of a little bit of a relief that I can see myself somewhere along this continuum and it’s going to be in combination with all those things.