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EdSurge
Don’t Call Them Test Companies: How the College Board and ACT Have Shifted Focus
By Jeffrey R. Young
Jul 31, 2019
These days the leaders of the College Board, which runs the SAT, have
been making a surprising argument—that colleges and parents should stop
taking the scores of its signature test so seriously. Or, at least,
that SAT scores should be considered as just one factor among many in
judging whether a student is ready for college, or a fit for a
highly-selective campus.
“The era of trying to measure aptitude is finally over,” wrote the
College Board’s president, David Coleman, in an essay in The Atlantic
earlier this summer, referring to the version of the test that has been
in place since 2014, when the SAT was last revised. “The new SAT does
not tell students or anyone else how smart students are, or how capable
they are of learning new things. It only says something about whether
students have yet attained the reading, writing, and math skills they
will use to gain knowledge in college or career training; it makes no
statement about what they are capable of learning.”
In this new era, the College Board is testing a controversial new
metric that has been labeled as an “adversity score.” The group calls
the new tool the Environmental Context Dashboard, and its goal is to
help college admissions officials put an applicant’s SAT score in
perspective by showing whether the students come from a place of
hardship or relative advantage.
Meanwhile, the SAT’s largest competitor, the ACT, has been working to
rebrand itself as well, moving away from a focus on scoring students.
In a statement on its website in May, the ACT said that it is
transforming itself from an “assessment company” into “an organization
providing learning, measurement, and navigation support to learners.”
The group is increasingly stressing what it calls a “holistic
framework” it developed to help students prepare for college, and has
added new tools including a test for social-emotional skills.
The groups are looking to change their focus as the college admissions
process is under fresh scrutiny in the wake of the Varsity Blues
scandal, in which parents paid millions of dollars to get their kids
into highly selective colleges by cheating on admissions tests or
helping them pose as student athletes.
These changes also come at a time when a growing number of colleges are
moving away from their reliance on standardized tests—by going “test
optional” or otherwise de-emphasizing the exam when making admissions
decisions. A group called FairTest, a watchdog group critical of the
SAT and ACT, has compiled a list of more than 1,000 colleges in the
U.S. “that do not use ACT/SAT scores to admit substantial numbers of
students into bachelor-degree programs.”
Many colleges going test-optional argue that the tests work against
their efforts to build more diverse classes. A poll of admissions
leaders conducted last fall by Inside Higher Ed found that many are
concerned that admissions tests have shown signs of racial bias, and
many colleges that have moved away from the SAT and ACT say they have
seen an uptick in minority students.
“If you were trying to design a system to perpetuate power, wealth and
privilege—and for that matter race, to advantage white people and
Asians—you can hardly do better than these tests,” argues Jim
McCorkell, CEO and founder of College Possible, a nonprofit that helps
underprivileged students get into college and complete their studies.
In a way, the College Board and ACT are trying to resolve what is a
fundamental contradiction in their missions. On one hand, they help
colleges sort through the huge numbers of applicants and decide who to
admit. But both groups also pledge to make college accessible to a
broad mix of students, and to help every student become college-ready.
“They’re not like people spinning their mustaches saying, ‘How do we
screw the world over?’ That’s not what they’re trying to do,” says
McCorkell, who praises the latest efforts by the groups to encourage
diversity in admissions. Still, he wishes the tests had less influence
than they do, since he worries that they can work against the students
he advocates for.
Nicholas Lemann, a journalism professor at Columbia University who
wrote a book in 1999 about the history of the SAT called “The Big
Test,” says such contradictions put these admissions-test makers in a
tough, even impossible, spot.
“The idea that you can work this out in a way that’s going to make
everybody happy is a chimera—it’s just not going to happen,” Lemann
said in an interview with EdSurge, stressing that the tests have become
a key part of how Harvard University and other elite colleges pick
their students. “Admission to these schools is a zero-sum game,” he
points out, “and there’s just no agreement as to who should get these
slots.”
Diversity and the SAT
The College Board’s new “adversity score” responds to a broader trend
among colleges to try to attract and enroll more first-generation
students and those from families with few resources, says Annie Reznik,
the executive director of the Coalition for College.
The three-year-old nonprofit works with about 140 public and private
colleges to increase access to higher education. She says selective
colleges these days are trying new forms of outreach to
first-generation and low-income students because they realize that
these applicants often don’t understand how the admissions process
works and may miss opportunities as a result.
Reznik, who previously worked as an admissions counselor, says the
group provides free advice on how to navigate the application process.
The coalition also holds what it calls “coalition day” events for ninth
and tenth graders in towns across the country to inform parents and
students, sometimes with representatives from several colleges in
attendance.
Why would the colleges work together when they are often competing for
the same students? “Our mentality is, let’s get students that have
never been in the pipeline before into it, and then we can fight over
them,” says Reznik.
She says that her organization also works to help students select
colleges that not only are likely to accept them, but also where they
are likely to finish. In some cases, she says, the most selective
colleges don’t have the best track records teaching first-generation
students. And, she adds, “some colleges that have very high outcomes
have high admissions rates,” meaning that students should look to find
the best fit for them. The coalition only works with colleges that have
a 60 percent graduation rate or better.
Reznik praises the College Board’s new adversity score, and says it can
help the students her group supports, some of whom might have SAT
scores that are lower than the national average but high compared to
others in their school or neighborhood. While the coalition helps
students tell their stories in their personal essays on applications,
not all students realize, or know how, to articulate the obstacles they
have overcome.
McCorkell, who leads College Possible, says he agrees, and knows the situation from personal experience.
“I grew up in a low-income family, and I would have welcomed a score
that indicated that we came from a place that didn’t have very much
money,” he says. “I didn’t know how to say it. I wasn’t comfortable
with that until I was 35. It took a long time to get [past] the feeling
of being ashamed of my background—ashamed that my parents didn’t finish
high school. It didn’t even occur to me that it could possibly be a
positive.”
That said, he says there is a shift in attitude among the students his
group works with, and colleges are working to help celebrate
first-generation students.
“We’re seeing lots of college campuses now they’ll have a community
called ‘I’m first’ that I’m a first-generation college student. At some
of our partner schools we’re seeing that some of the students are
wearing t-shirts that say “I’m first.”
Officials for The College Board declined requests to be interviewed for
this article. But the group’s president, Jeremy Singer, said in an
email statement that it is focusing on helping students from a range of
backgrounds succeed. “The core of our work is in helping students
recognize their potential, then clearing a path so they can move
confidently toward college and claim their future,” he wrote. “Over the
past several years, we have transformed what we offer students and
educators ... to deliver concrete opportunities for students.”
It’s unclear whether the new Environmental Context Dashboard will keep
colleges who are thinking about dropping the SAT from doing so. The
group FairTest lists 30 colleges that it says are considering going
test-optional.
Action at ACT
The ACT, meanwhile, has taken a different approach to foster student diversity.
The group is offering support services to schools and individual
students that are designed to help prepare students to get in and
succeed in college—and not just academically. It calls its approach the
ACT Holistic Framework, which it claims is based on research into
student success. The framework emphasizes four elements: core academic
skills, behavioral skills, “cross-cutting skills” and education and
career navigation skills.
“Our approach is all about the individual” rather than telling colleges
about a student’s environment, says Alina von Davier, who leads the ACT
Next project for the group.
One component is a test the group offers called Tessera, which is
designed to measure a student’s social-emotional learning skills and
help them improve them. These scores are not shared with colleges, so
the ACT is not creating a new high-stakes test, says von Davier.
Instead, students can use the test to develop their skills, which can
help them succeed on their own. “We want to help all learners
everywhere,” she adds, “not only through assessment but also through
learning.”
The group continues to build its portfolio of services around the
framework. Just this month the group acquired Mawi Learning, a
social-emotional learning company that offers online and blended
courses in SEL.
The ACT did not shy away from framing its offerings as a better
alternative to what its longtime competitor is doing. In a statement on
its website in May, the group argued that its approach was better for
students than the College Board’s environmental dashboard.
“We believe attempts to quantify the degree of adversity encountered by
students, while well-intentioned, are misguided because of the quality
and types of data employed,” they wrote. “When school- or
neighborhood-level data are used to compute an adversity score, the
score might reflect a portion of the context for that individual’s
experience, but it will rarely, if ever, reflect the fuller
circumstances of that individual’s life and, as such, it runs the risk
of or introducing or reinforcing potential bias or stereotypes.”
The ACT started in the 1950s, and has always set itself apart from the
College Board, says Lemann, who wrote “The Big Test.” Noting that the
ACT started at the University of Iowa, he says the test was designed
with state universities in mind, which at the time had nearly open
admissions and so the goal was not to weed out students. Instead,
professors and administrators were looking for more of a diagnostic
test to see which level of courses to place students in. That way,
Lemann says, “faculty didn’t have to get into this labor-intensive
process of teaching unprepared students.”
‘The Rise of Meritocracy’
When the SAT was started, in 1926, the word “meritocracy” hadn’t been coined, Lemann points out in his book.
When the word was first used, in 1958, it appeared in a work of satire,
by Michael Dunlop Young, a sociologist. That satirical work, called
“The Rise of the Meritocracy,” presented a dystopian world in which
only those with skills succeeded, while all others were doomed to an
underclass. It was presented as a nightmare scenario where no one had
any privilege or way to guarantee success for their children.
Yet the founders of the SAT saw their creation as a way to distribute
access to the nation’s top colleges more fairly, according to Lemann.
“The people who started this system were in their own minds idealists,”
he told EdSurge. “They thought they were taking Harvard away from the
bankers and giving it to a new class of technocrats who would work
mainly for the government.”
They weren’t at all imagining the mix of race and class who attend
elite colleges today, he argues. “they weren’t ‘racist.’ It just didn’t
occur to them that this should be a factor,” he says. “It also didn’t
occur to them that the system would be gamed by fortunate parents to
get a better result for their kids.”
The SAT and ACT have both changed many times as the testing groups have responded to societal shifts since they began.
Meanwhile, Lemann concludes in his book, college admission has become a
bigger force in American society—for better or for worse—than the
designers of the first SAT could have realized.
“That our universities have evolved into a national personnel
department represents the striking of a complicated bargain,” he
writes. “They have gotten out of it the chance to be big and
important—to be treated by the public, and not wrongly, as an object of
yearning, an all-powerful arbiter of fates. They have lost a certain
apartness from the world, a commitment to pure learning and
scholarship, a freedom from instrumentalism. Universities are now
political and economic institutions.”
Which is why things like the SAT’s “adversity score” have elicited such widespread interest, and controversy.
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