Revolutionary thinking? Colleges let students opt out of admissions exams – By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo (CS Monitor) / Jan 6 2020
By moving away from test requirements, colleges are contributing to a profound change in the way society measures merit. Instead of a single SAT or ACT result, they’re reinforcing the importance of a student’s talents and character.
After classes and 4-H Club meetings and homework, Esmeralda Hernandez spent a portion of her spring semester junior year engaged in a nightly routine familiar to millions of American teens: logging on to a website to practice math, reading, and timed test-taking for the SAT.
While she scored fairly well, she decided to study more over the summer and take the entrance exam a second time. Her hard work paid off: She earned the highest score in her small senior class in tiny Swainsboro, Georgia. But for a farmworker’s daughter whose college aspirations stretched beyond state lines, it still didn’t seem good enough.
In her home nestled in the woods on a dirt road, she kept looking longingly at a postcard sent by the University of Chicago, her top choice. What always caught her eye was the image of a coffee stain on the card, which, when looked at closely, showed the chemical formula for coffee. The quirky intellectualism behind the card only reinforced her desire to attend the elite university.
Yet she nearly gave up on her dream school, until she discovered it offered full scholarships – and the option of applying without submitting an SAT score. Suddenly, hope rushed back in, tinged with uncertainty.
“I thought that if I hid my test scores from the school, they would ask, what are you hiding?” she says. “But it was also very freeing in the fact that I didn’t have to be defined by something that was only four hours and didn’t really, in my opinion, define who I was as a person. … There were so many more things that reflected how intelligent or motivated I was.”
Few things in life loom over American high school students more than college admissions tests. After years of toiling to earn good grades, years of slogging through Advanced Placement courses, and years of participating in extracurricular activities to burnish their credentials, many students take a test that they’ve been told can either catapult or crush their college hopes.
But now a movement is accelerating across the country – with more colleges giving students the choice of either submitting their SAT or ACT scores or not. Public and private colleges from Arizona to Illinois to Massachusetts – including some of the most elite – have adopted a test-optional model or are moving toward it. It marks one of the biggest changes in college admissions in the past two decades.
The result is a feeling of relief – and liberation – among both high schoolers and parents, in competitive metropolises and quiet rural towns alike. Perhaps more important, the move is contributing to a profound shift in the way schools and society measure a person’s value. Instead of giving the impression that admissions is based largely on a single test score, more colleges now proclaim loudly that the totality of an individual – yes, the good grades earned, but also the person’s unique talents and character – is so important that a test score is no longer necessary.
Continue to article: https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2020/0106/Revolutionary-thinking-Colleges-let-students-opt-out-of-admissions-exams
