Get the Ricochet app
Ricochet will work fine in a browser on your mobile devices, but for the best experience please download our app.
Dartmouth College is reinstating standardized tests (the SAT) as part of the admissions process.
National Review (I think this is outside the paywall).
The reinstatement comes after a study by Dartmouth faculty (re)discovered that standardized tests are a way to discover capable students who did not get high grades at high schools in privileged towns.
As reported in the Forbes article:
[The faculty study] concluded that: “high school grades paired with standardized testing are the most reliable indicators for success in Dartmouth's course of study.” This conclusion echoes statements published recently in The New York Times’ far-ranging evaluation of the SAT. The article notes that standardized test scores tend to be a better metric for predicting success in college than grade point average, quoting M.I.T. Dean of Admission Stuart Schmill: “Just getting straight A’s is not enough information for us to know whether the students are going to succeed or not.”
More from the Dartmouth announcement, as reported in the Forbes article:
Contrary to pandemic-era assumptions about the potential of standardized testing to exacerbate inequalities in the admissions process, the Dartmouth study further added that: “these test scores better position Admissions to identify high-achieving less-advantaged applicants and high-achieving applicants who attend high schools for which Dartmouth has less information to interpret the transcripts.” Researchers found that test-optional policies unintentionally created a barrier for less advantaged students due to the fact that such students often opted against submitting their scores, even when those scores would benefit their application and demonstrate their preparedness for Dartmouth’s rigorous curriculum.
To which this old man (high school class of 1974) says, “Duh! Finding high potential students coming from other-than-elite high schools was the point of looking at standardized testing in the middle of the 20th Century.”
Standardized tests were pushed when I was in school as a tool of equalization for ethnic minority students and students from less-known high schools in rural and inner city areas to show that they were capable of study at highly regarded colleges and universities. They were a tool to increase what colleges and universities now call "diversity." Previously those colleges and universities admitted students almost exclusively from high schools with which the college or university was already familiar and thus could gauge what the student’s grade point average meant.
Hence I never understood the drive in the late 2010s to eliminate from college admissions processes the standardized test, due to their somehow contributing to inequality for ethnic minority or economically disadvantaged students. Those were exactly the students the standardized tests were benefitting in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the reasons I am “conservative” is that I often find that the people and organizations which chase the latest fad seem to come back to the place from which they started many decades earlier. Some supposedly very smart people seem to keep learning the same thing over and over.
Discussion (31)
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
Next they'll discover that children do best in homes with both parents, a married mother and father.
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
I guess Dartmouth found that admitting students who couldn’t complete even the easiest of first year work meant their % graduating dropped by a lot and % returning after first year even more. There isn’t enough remedial work or empty courses to get some of the admitted to get close to success.
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
What’s the old adage…
Don’t tear down the wall until you know why it was built in the first place.
CHARTER MEMBER
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
Ask the people who grew up coping with the old “new math” what they think of the new “new math.”
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
A lot of recognition follows the discarding of the testing regimens established in the mid-twentieth century of what it means to be conservative. Retain and spend money on what is proven to work until the new stuff shows that necessary quality.
I think the damage we will see from the climate change movement and resulting energy and environmental policies will dwarf what the Democrats and RINOs have done to education. A RINO is someone who pretends to be conservative.
EDIT: I hold this position because I don't believe the data presented in support of these movements is truthful, factual, and accurate in its conclusions.
You're seeing five of 31 comments. Sign in, or join for just $5 per month, to read them all and add your own.