Eliminating Standardized Tests Has Unintended Consequences
Dear Editor,
College admissions across the country have eliminated standardized testing and other objective performance criteria.
This does more harm to the intended beneficiary. The theory behind eliminating objective measures is that lower socioeconomic students don’t have resources to compete on standardized testing. The problem is that using the same stereotype logic, these same students would also have limited access to writing instruction. Therefore, “oppressed students” wouldn’t be as good at essay writing as the resource rich “oppressors.”
Also, low socioeconomic students may not have access to the kind of experiences, or recommenders, that stand out to admissions staff. Most cannot afford to go on mission trips in foreign locations or participate in expensive hobbies. Yes, a good writer can make cashiering at a local market awe inspiring. But it takes much more skill to make packing grocery bags as enlightening as feeding the sick in Southeast Asia or as unique as building a sailboat from scratch.
The reality is some students are going to do better at some criteria than at other criteria. Why eliminate standardized testing when these same students might actually do worse in comparison at the remaining selection criteria? Adding, not removing, more criteria would be much more beneficial to low economic students.
Eliminating objective criteria, grades and standardized testing, only leaves subjective measures such as essays and recommendations. This only advances political ideology.
Students have lost scholarships and/or been disenrolled for participating in off-campus after-school conservative events. University administrators have literally stolen the stage/microphone from conservative speakers. Students have been encouraged to miss class and assignments to participate in liberal activities. Admissions committees, comprised of the same biased teachers/staff, will likely select candidates based on political activity. Liberal candidates will be admitted/granted scholarships while conservatives will be rejected. This is an intentional strategy to reduce academic freedom by preventing opposition from being on campus to begin with.
This trend does not help lower socioeconomic/oppressed students at all, its only purpose is to advance a political ideology.
As one final point, in a Michigan case, the US Supreme Court ruled that it was legitimate for race to be a factor in admissions. The more objective criteria removed, the more important of a factor race becomes. Depending on how they are written, you can tell race from both essays and recommendations, which affects assessment/grading. Eliminating objective measures makes race more of a factor, making the admissions process more racist.
Alan Burke
I get the argument over standardized testing. There are plenty of thoughts both pro and con. You lost me when you jumped to conservative versus liberal argument? Any real basis for this argument or is this just more hollow fear mongering from a conservative about liberal agenda doom and gloom bs?
While there is certainly a liberal bias in colleges (you know, they support the idea of science for example) but it is news to me that high schools limit conservative activities and this having an impact on college admissions. Do you have examples locally of this happening?
Yep…just continue to dumb it down!
People from low social classes CAN do well on academic testing, if they are intelligent. I know, I’m one of them.
But simply opening the doors to lower class people regardless of their ability helps no-one. Stupid people won’t benefit, and it will drag down the institution and impede intelligent people.
This is educational socialism, and it will work out as well as economic socialism.
Claiming that the reduced importance of standardized testing just ‘opens the door’ for under privileged kids is more misinformation from Austin (note any lack of real information in his comment.) Yet another example of how people like Austin spread misinformation using strawman arguments)
That isn’t what ‘they’ are doing. They have just increased the emphasis on school grades and level or course taken (ie AP courses) as a better measure of performance than a standardized test. Note the basic explanation of UNC’s policy on standardized testing….. https://catalog.unc.edu/admissions/undergraduate/
When you’re a chronic liar like Lying Chris, one of the favored tricks is to put words in other people’s mouth and then argue against something they never said. THAT is making a Straw Man argument.
I said that it would be futile “opening the doors to lower class people REGARDLESS OF THEIR ABILITY”. I support opening doors to working class kids who are intelligent and industrious because I believe in a meritocracy. I have benefited personally from such a program, when I won a free place scholarship to Leeds Grammar School in the 1970’s. Obviously, I am NOT against helping underprivileged kids, I’m in favor of it.
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But Lying Chris is lying, twisting, and distorting. It’s his MO.
He just lies.
My point is that you’re not doing a stupid person any favors by admitting them to MIT. They’d just feel lost, inadequate and hopeless. And they’d slow down and impede the bright kids. Nobody wins.
But if a smart kid from a poor background can cut it, then by all means help them to achieve their full potential.
Some people are intelligent, industrious, and resourceful,and can overcome systemic disadvantages (Orientals and Asians spring to mind).
Others are unintelligent, lazy, and feckless. They will never succeed, no matter how many arbitrary and artificial advantages are bestowed on them.
You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
No one is proposing admitting stupid people to MIT. You are clearly misrepresenting the impact of reducing importance of standardized testing from college admissions. But that is what you do. So you be you.
My comment stands as they are NOT proposing to ‘Open Doors to lower class regardless of their ability.’
Nice try though.
No, you deliberately omitted the qualifying phrase, trying to smear me as an elitist.
You really are an odious despicable little creep.
“They have just increased the emphasis on school grades and level or course taken (ie AP courses) as a better measure of performance than a standardized test.”
Come on Chris, for years now the teachers in schools and colleges have abandoned any notion of grading how students performed. First, they don’t want to EVER have a disproportion of minority students failing and non-minorities performing well. Second, they do not want the overbearing adminstrators and school boards, college predisents, etc., to tell them to change their grading structure to avoid the appearance of discrimination.
I went thru college in a time when if you failed to do the work, you failed. Now, everyone graduates from college, even if they can’t write a structured sentence. The result? The BS degree is now worthless, but the colleges are doing all they can to attract and show high graduation rates for students. . . .all for maintaining their “status” as well as keepign the federal dollars flowing.