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George Washington University Announces it Will no Longer Require SAT or ACT Scores
This from Monday’s Washington Post:
George Washington University dropped its testing requirement for most freshman admissions Monday, becoming one of the largest and most prominent schools to declare that its applicants don’t have to take the SAT or ACT.
The announcement from the private university in the nation’s capital underscores a growing belief in some college admission circles that standardized tests are a barrier to recruiting disadvantaged students. While that view is sharply debated, many say it is possible to assemble a strong class without forcing applicants to submit a score from tests that critics say are culturally biased and often fail to reflect academic potential.
I’m certain that the reason for the change was race. That is, senior administrators at the school realized that its use of SAT and ACT scores hampered racial diversity — specifically its ability to admit black and Latino students. Consequently, they decided to eliminate such test scores as a requirement for admission.
I wonder, however, if such administrators have considered all the consequences of the new policy. Here is one: Suppose you were a black high school student with high SAT scores. The following thought might occur to you: “If I go to GW, people will suspect that I went there because my SAT scores were low — that I couldn’t get into a school that required high SAT scores.” As a consequence, you might think twice about attending GW, and the chances that you’d decide to attend the university would be lower after the policy change than before.
The end result is that average SAT scores for GW students will decrease — and I strongly suspect that the decrease will be bigger among black and Latino students than white and Asian students. This in turn will cause racial gaps (in things like college grade point averages and propensities to major in STEM fields) to increase. A policy that was supposed to help black and Latino students might instead harm them.
And here is a perhaps more insidious aspect of the policy change: When services like US News & World Report list the “average SAT” for GW, the number will no longer be an average of all the students, only those who choose to report their scores.This decision by GW will make it appear that the average SAT score of it students increased, when it really did not (and likely even decreased). I wonder if US News and other college-rating services will be honest and upfront about the change.
Published in General
It could also have another effect: If you can’t consider SAT scores for admission, the relative importance of the reputation of the applicant’s high school will go up. A 90% average from an elite prep school is going to carry more weight than a 90% from some rural school or an inner-city school with a terrible reputation.
Today, smart kids stuck in terrible schools still have an ‘out’ – they can ace the SAT. Take that away, and you take away an alternative pathway for kids who had the bad luck of being in an area with a bad school.
This will also promote grade inflation in high schools and make the problem of determining who is ‘college material’ that much harder.
Met a man this morning who used to run a “college prep” HS in CO. I noted that there doesn’t seem to be much to prep for anymore (with all the remedial classes for freshman now and what not). This is just icing on that cake.
A lot of GW undergrads are foreign born with rich parents, many of them diplomats. Most aren’t strong academically anyway, otherwise they’d go to Georgetown or American. There are lots of prep school and legacy kids who attend GW, but its prestige – what there is of it – comes from the post-grad programs. It’s always been a popular commuter/professional degree school. The undergrads are just cash cows.
Tim – thank you for the post. There are a lot of dynamics at play here, but as a personal anecdote I so wish I had gone to an undergraduate school better suited to my level of preparation and ability. I graduated 34 years ago, but I still view those years with some level of regret. I really struggled just to get through. It was probably a good experience to struggle, but my actual education and possibly my career choices were altered negatively by lagging behind the average. Whenever I read stories like this I just think how better off these kids would be if they just got really good advice about how education works in terms of personal development.
Unfortunately, we treat the names of institutions as a proxy for merit (until you actually meet and get to know some of the graduates).
I understand the students’ desire for the prestigious name. They are not being irrational, but arguably short-sighted.
Tim,
I think this may be the straw that breaks the camels back. No other country on the face of the earth completely ignores standardized testing for College entry. This is the final result of the hopeless nihilism that has broken standard after standard and reduced the finest educational system in the world to a second class echo chamber for left wing nonsense.
I would rather go to an on-line University that had standards than put up with the pure psychosis that the goof balls at George Washington U. have wrapped themselves around.
No more that’s the limit.
Regards,
Jim
Once you remove all the silliness like scores and grades, the admissions staff will have more time to focus on the important factors like race and diversity.
The SAT isn’t perfect – but neither are grades, 500-word admissions essays, or teacher recommendations. It is an imperfect part of a whole that should help to give a more complete picture of an applicant.
The reason we bother with the SAT is that everyone in the country takes the same exact test that is graded on the same exact scale. It is also strongly predictive of first-year grades, and weakly predictive after that (often because the top students self-select into the hardest majors).
It might not be a “fair” test, but the point isn’t cosmic justice; it’s to enable admissions officers to make a straight comparison between applicants of radically different backgrounds, evaluate their grades in context, and determine whether or not they can do the work at the school.
I am sure my wife will be happy to learn that the degree she paid 10s of thousands of dollars for is now worth less than the paper its printed on.
So…they’re just in it for the money now.
More student loans from kids who can’t possibly afford it, much less academically suited for the environment, means more money from the government for those loans. GW can continue to raise their tuition accordingly.
It’s a win-win for everyone!
GW undergrad is generally a school for wealthy, but academically average students. It’s a private school. Interestingly it’s undergrad tuition is already one of the highest in the country, but grad school costs are actually competitive. For example, Jackie Kennedy Onassis went there for undergrad, while Colin Powell went there for grad school. Lots of active duty folks go there for advanced professional degrees on their D.C. tour so the federal government is a big customer. It’s an atypical school.
Yeah this sounds dumb. I must say, in response to Karen, that yes, GW stands for Georgetown Waitlist, but it’s consistently ranked above American. Anyway…
No; it’s fairly obviously comic justice.
The SATs and ACTs are just a money making racket. I say good riddance to both. Honestly why have these convoluted exercises in banality come to be so important? The first thing with respect to collage that we should have everyone realize is that there isn’t that much of a substantial difference between most universities. If you graduate from the University of Illinois you are as educated as an Oxford grad. Heck the real determinant of how well educated you will become is yourself rather than your school. There is far too much value in higher education being placed on meaningless fluffery.
If you want to know if someone is smart all you need to do is try and hold a conversations with them for an hour. By the end of that you will know pretty well where they stand. Assuming you yourself aren’t an idiot, which is probably a pretty big assumption to make about most collage administrators.
It’s all about money anymore, isn’t it? Does it matter what caliber of student gets in, as long as the tuition is paid? Does it matter whether it’s a government-backed student loan or the Bank of Dad? Being able to crow about your diversity might bring bragging points.
Really?! That’s good to know. Thanks! I don’t remember that being the case when I was there for grad school, but that was 10 years ago. Good for GW. I was there during Tractenburg’s tenure, and he was the Donald Trump of Foggy Bottom. I guess his work must’ve paid off. I’ve got a friend who went to American, so I’ll remind her of that when I see her next. She always turned her nose up at GW. I was really excited when GW acquired some of Corcoran’s campus and collection. My MFA in Painting got an upgrade, not that there was anywhere to go but up.
The college system in the U.S. is unwinding and not sustainable in the long run. The return on investment is diminishing for a number of reasons. “Fairness” doesn’t assist in determining if one has the aptitude to complete certain tasks.
GW has a reputation as one of the most expensive universities in the country.
Culturally biased? How is the math culturally biased? What is it about black and other minority students that makes it hard for them to read a passage in the verbal section and answer questions about it, even though they are arguably as prepared for college as the white students who have a “cultural” advantage? Or maybe they are not that prepared?
I remember the famous “regatta” example. Supposedly the word showed up on one of those analogy questions. Something like, “yacht is to regatta” as “horse is to derby” or as “runner is to marathon,” etc. The complaint from the cultural bias crowd was that black students would be unlikely to know what a regatta was.
Well, guess where I (a white male) learned what a regatta was. From a book. And that is the secret of how the SAT exam is biased. It favors students who read books. Unless you are willing to argue that black students who read books don’t learn as much as white students do from those books, the cultural bias argument fails to persuade.
Oh, it won’t lose any value. Because at the undergrad level, the whole point of “elite” universities isn’t education anyway. It’s a place for the elite to send their spawn to network and prepare to rule the world. Like that Apple decal in the window of a Prius, or all those “I ******* Love Science” posts on a Facebook account, a degree from an “elite” school is a tribal identifier, not proof of learning or academic accomplishment. At the grad level? Somewhat different, probably. But a B-average math major from any small state college is more knowledgeable and useful than any sociology or “*insert PC trend here* Studies” grad from Hahvad. The remaining exceptions where “elite” still has real meaning are almost always the science/tech/math based schools like Cal Tech, where your 500 word BS essay on the Puerto Rican transgender struggle isn’t going to do squat to get you in.
American is definitely not stronger academically than GW (at least not when I was at Harvard on the Potomac and took summer classes at GW).
Yeah, GW is ranked a bit above American in the regular university rankings and a lot above it in grad rankings, law, for example.
Almost everything the left does to help the “marginalized” hurts them. But they only care about how the effort makes them feel.
Nor do the supposed beneficiaries of the help care about the unintended consequences. They seem willing to take the gain of a place at GW without test scores along with the opprobrium of a society that wonders whether the GW grad is just an affirmative action baby, and not worthy of a job or grad school placement.
As a law student in the 1970s I observed that many (but not all) of the black students in my class were woefully unprepared, barely passed their courses, should have been kicked out for a mass cheating scandal on their freshman writing assignment in violation of a strict honor code, and several at least had trouble passing the bar exam after graduation. If any of them got a job as lawyers that would also have been as a result of affirmative action. Other black students in the class were competent, studied hard, and did well.
Larry David portrayed the stigma effect in his episode of “Curb” in which Richard Lewis introduces Larry to Richard’s dermatologist, who happens to be black. Larry says, jokingly to Richard, “How can you let this guy be your doctor, you know, because of affirmative action?” He expects a laugh from them both, but doesn’t get one.
Assuming, arguendo, that the SATs are culturally biased*, that still isn’t an argument to do away with the test. The fact that a university wants SAT scores doesn’t mean that they are then legally obligated to take the kids with the highest scores, not correct for variations in geography, socioeconomic status, quality of school, etc.
The admissions staff is capable of looking at those scores in context, and all evidence points to them doing so. We aren’t seeing a situation in which admissions expects kids from SE DC or rural Alabama to get the same scores as La Jolla County Day kids; rather, the more privileged you are, the higher scores you need to have.
*an assumption with which I heartily disagree – it’s called “a math book” and “a library” and both are readily available
I mean, it’s the JOB of admissions officers to figure these things out. What the “SAT is culturally biased!” crowd believes is that (a) it is a widely-known, almost irrefutable fact that the SAT is such a biased test that its signal-to-noise ratio renders it virtually meaningless when making straight-up comparisons between applicants of different backgrounds; and simultaneously, (b) admissions officers, whose expertise is in evaluating tens of thousands of students every year from all over the country, are completely unaware of this and blindly choose the kids with the highest scores.
WHAT?
I agree with that. The test can help identify students at either end of the distribution, i.e.,
But in the great middle the test scores should be one input among several.
That said, I don’t see any reason why a black kid from the ghetto should score any lower on these tests than a white kid assuming that the former is just as smart and well-prepared for college as the latter. If he is not as smart or as well-prepared then we need to have a different discussion about who gets admitted and who gets rejected.
Both GW and AU had huge foreign undergrad student cohorts when I was around. I imagine that’s a big driver for this: they’re getting the second/third tiers of such students. I wonder if their SAT scores dragged down the averages.