The Importance of SAT and ACT in College Admissions

A growing number of experts and university administrators wonder whether the switch to test optional policies around the SAT and ACT has been a mistake. Research has increasingly shown that standardized test scores contain real information, helping to predict college grades, chances of graduation, and post-college success. Test scores are more reliable than high school grades, partly because of grade inflation in recent years. This quote comes from articles in Forbes and the New York Times on the use of SAT and ACT in college admissions, and their findings, the data behind the findings are fascinating.

They go on to say, without test scores, admissions officers sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between applicants who are likely to do well at elite colleges and those who are likely to struggle. Researchers who have studied the issue say that test scores can be particularly helpful in identifying lower-income students and underrepresented minorities who will thrive. These students do not score as high on average as students from affluent communities or white and Asian students, but a solid score for a student from a less-privileged background is often a sign of enormous potential. Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University, says standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades.

Stuart Schmill, the Dean of Admissions at MIT, who reinstated their test requirement, said, just getting straight A's is not enough information for us to know whether the students are going to succeed or not. The New York Times article continues, an academic study released last summer by the group Opportunity Insights covering the group of famous colleges known as IV Plus colleges. That's the eight in the Ivy League along with Duke, MIT, Stanford, and the University of Chicago showed little relationship between high school grade point average and success in college. However, the researchers found a strong relationship between SAT and ACT scores and later success.

Likewise, a faculty committee at the University of California system led by Dr. Henry Sanchez, a pathologist, and Eddie Kamo, I hope I'm saying that correctly, a professor of education, concluded in 2020 that test scores were better than high school grades at predicting student success in the system's nine colleges, where more than 230,000 undergraduates are enrolled. The relative advantage of test scores has grown over time, the committee found. John Friedman, another economics professor, said, and I quote, test scores have vastly more predictive power than is commonly understood in the popular debate.

Now, key points here. The data clearly shows that the SAT or ACT is a better predictor than high school GPA of grades in college and graduation rates from college and success after college in terms of graduate school placement and job placement. But the most interesting part of the New York Times article comes near the end. I quote, when university administrators were asked whether they were aware of the research showing the value of test scores, they have generally said that they were, but several said to the author of the article, not for quotation, that they feared the political reaction on their campuses and in the media if they reinstated tests.

It's not politically correct, Charles Deacon said the longtime admissions dean at Georgetown University. So the key question here to understand what colleges are going to do next is really to ask, are they aware of this research? Yes, the article makes that clear. They are also afraid of the potential political blowback if they acknowledge this reality. So put yourself in the shoes of a college president for a second. You're aware of this tool that better than any other tool can predict college grades, graduation rates from college and post college outcomes. But you're afraid to reinstate a requirement for scores.

You know that switching to test optional brings in an average of 10 to 50,000 extra applications a year because when your test optional students are much more likely to apply to your college. Now at $75 per application, that could be around $3.75 million for a single college. You're also aware that more applications make your college seem more selective because you get to deny more students. This makes all of your alumni happy, which leads the data shows to more donations to your college. So you are financially incentivized to stay test optional, but you still know the data points to the predictive validity of this tool known as standardized tests.

What are you going to do? What's the safest move for you to make politically? That's how we can figure out what they're most likely to do. You're going to stay test optional to reap those financial benefits. But each year, you're going to prioritize test scores more and more, giving kids with the scores more and more of an advantage in this process, both in terms of getting admitted and the scholarships you offer to them. And the data in these articles backs up that conclusion. Now this begs the question, are colleges already admitting more students when they include a standardized test score in their application?

The data is pretty clear on this. Boston College has an admission rate of nine and a half percent when you apply without a test score. When you apply with a test score, students are admitted at a rate of 27%. At Notre Dame, we see the admission rate double for students who include an SAT or an ACT score with their application. Now I can keep going and giving more examples, but you get the idea. What does this mean for families who are looking to apply to college in the next couple of years? If I'm a junior, a sophomore, a freshman, I'm treating the SAT and the ACT like any kid in the past, I'm going to prep.

I'm going to do my best. If this is my kid, I'm talking about I'm going to have them work with a firm like Tess Prep Guru's all to increase the number of schools that my son or daughter gets into and the scholarships that they might win. Can you still get into a selective college without a test score? Yes, you can. A key point though, is that you are much more likely to pay full sticker price if you apply without a test score. There are exceptions to this, of course, but the aggregate data paints a clear picture. It shows that students are much more likely to receive merit scholarships that are independent of financial aid needs if they include a strong test score in their application.

So those colleges are not looking at financial need and we're talking award scholarships anywhere from $25,000 to over $100,000 for the four years that student attends college. Why are colleges still offering such big financial rewards for test scores? Because as they strongly indicate in the Forbes and New York Times articles and the research that is behind those articles, college is still really value test scores, mostly because of their predictive value of positive outcomes when students get to college. And admissions officers want this process to be as fair and transparent as possible. And this brings us to the heart of the issue.

Do SAT and ACT scores make the admissions process more fair and transparent? Or do they simply benefit privileged students who are already steeped in privilege? The two articles address this concern. As they say, much of the debate around standardized test scores has to do with privilege. With the Supreme Court's restriction of affirmative action last year, emotions around college admissions are running high. Many educators consider the test to be unfair because there are score gaps by race and class. Test critics worry that reinstating test requirements will reduce diversity. The Supreme Court's affirmative action decision has heightened these concerns.

But this new data should alleviate those concerns. Within every racial group, the data shows that students with higher scores do better in college. The same is true among poor students and among richer students. The authors of the study go on to say that if selective colleges made admissions decisions based solely on test scores, racial and economic diversity would indeed plummet. Yet almost no one in higher education favors using tests as the sole factor for admissions. The question instead is whether the score should be one of the criteria used to identify qualified students from every demographic group.

The reporter from the New York Times continues Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of using the SAT and ACT tests is that other parts of the admissions process have even larger racial and economic biases. Affluent students can participate in expensive activities like music lessons, travel sports teams, all these things that strengthen their applications. These same students often receive extensive editing on their essays. Many affluent students attend private schools where counselors polish each student's application. What I conclude from this is that even though no one likes the SAT, me included very much so, a hard truth we may have to acknowledge is that the SAT and ACT's predictive power comes from the fact that it is the hardest part of the admissions process to game with money.

Can test scores be gained? Well, let's be honest. If you hire my team at Test Prep Guru's, you have brilliant teachers pouring their time and energy into your kid. And yeah, if your kid puts in the work and they do have to do their part and put in the work, their scores will rise. It's that simple when you have expert teachers and kids that want to do the work that's assigned to them, they will improve their scores on these tests. So I'm not going to pretend that there isn't a big advantage to be gained by paying for Test Prep. But as they say in these articles, there are bigger advantages that can be bought on the other parts of the application.

Essays, activities, the high school you attended, and so on. Whereas with the SAT and the ACT, for all their flaws, it does still require a student without anyone there to help them sit down in a room completely on their own and show if they can perform or not. So I don't think it's a question of is the SAT good or bad? The question is really, is college admissions more or less fair with or without testing? Now with this new data, we can see that it is clearly more fair and transparent with testing as one of the tools that evaluate students. As said in the Forbes article, Admit all the subjectivity in the admissions process.

The SAT and ACT, even with their flaws, offer meaningful information about an applicant's readiness to do high level academic work. The test creative fixed benchmark that can be more reliable than high school grades, teacher recommendations, or extracurricular activities. The SAT just tells you a lot about how well prepared students are for college. The authors of the study said. So keep point there. No one is really advocating for using scores as the single element of choosing who gets in to one college over the other. It should also be noted that when colleges are looking at SAT scores, they are putting them into the context of the environment that that student came from to give them a proper evaluation.

Back to the article. And I really like this part. The debate over standardized testing has become caught up in deeper questions about inequality in America. But the data suggests that testing critics have drawn the wrong battle lines. If test scores are used as one factor among others and if colleges give applicants credit for having overcome adversity, which they do, the SAT and ACT can help create diverse classes of highly talented students. MIT is a great example of this. The Dean of Admissions there said he and his colleagues find the scores useful in identifying promising applicants who come from less advantaged high schools and have scores high enough to suggest that they would succeed at MIT.

Without scores, Schmill explained, admissions officers were left with two unappealing options. They would have to guess which students were likely to do well at MIT and almost certainly guess wrong sometimes, rejecting qualified applicants while admitting weaker ones. Or MIT would need to reject more students from less advantaged high schools and admit more from the private schools and advantaged public schools that have a strong record of producing well qualified applicants. The Dean of Admissions at MIT then went on to say, once we brought the test requirement back, we admitted the most diverse class that we have ever had in our history.

Having test scores was helpful. A Harvard economist on this topic added, when you don't have test scores, the students who suffer most are those with high grades at relatively unknown high schools, the kind that rarely send kids to the Ivy League. The SAT is their lifeline. The article ends with asking a great question. What is the mission of America's top universities? The people who run these institutions agree that social mobility should be core to their mission, which is why they give applicants credit for having overcome adversity. But the colleges have another mission as well. Excellence, they want to identify and educate the students most likely to excel.

These students, in turn, can produce cutting-edge scientific research. These students can and will found nonprofit groups and companies that benefit all of society. Many administrators at elite colleges have justified the decision to switch to test optional by claiming that the test do not help them identify such promising students. A claim that is clearly inconsistent with the evidence. The evidence instead suggests that standardized tests can contribute to both excellence and diversity so long as they are used as only one factor in admissions. And this just makes sense, right? It goes on to say, as it happens, most Americans support using standardized test scores in precisely this way.

The Pew Research Center asked Americans whether colleges should consider standardized tests when making admissions decisions. A vast majority of people across racial groups and socioeconomic status support doing so. The article continues, intuitively, the progressive position of less testing sounds as if it should reduce inequities. But the data has suggested that some of these policies may do the opposite, harming vulnerable people. In the case of standardized tests, those people are lower income underrepresented groups. Students who would have done well on the ACT or SAT but who never took the test because it wasn't required.

Many colleges have effectively tried to protect these students from standardized testing. In the process, the colleges denied some of them an opportunity to change their lives and change society for the better. So to sum up these articles and their findings in five points. Number one, colleges are aware that the best predictor of college grades, college graduation rates, graduate school placement, and job placement is the SAT and or the ACT standardized test. Number two, students of all backgrounds benefit from the use of standardized testing. Not because standardized tests are a perfect tool but because they have predictive value.

Number three, many test optional policies hurt the very students who they are intended to help because the other parts of a college application are much easier to game than standardized tests are. Number four, colleges are monetarily incentivized to keep their new test optional policies. However, the revelation that the top colleges are all very much aware of the findings in this article helps us to predict what they're going to do next. And they are very likely to continue to prioritize students with scores. And even more so, they're going to prioritize them more and more year over year. Number five, the majority of Americans support the approach of using testing as one of the factors in the admissions process at elite universities to make it more fair and transparent.

So bottom line, for families who are applying to colleges in the next four or five years, students of all backgrounds who want to expand their opportunities to get into highly selective colleges and earn more scholarships, they will benefit from preparing for standardized tests and doing well on these exams. The increased emphasis on testing at colleges will not cure all of the problems that exist in college admissions. But until we completely reinvent the process of college admissions, standardized tests are our most predictive tool. When we define success as grades in college, graduation rates from college, job placement and graduate school placement after college.

So standardized tests are a tool that can make applying to college easier to understand standardized tests will increase social mobility. And they'll make the decisions by colleges less opaque and more fair. And that's something I can get behind. This episode is brought to you by Test Prep Guru's. Test Prep Guru's helps students raise their ACT and SAT scores so they can achieve their goals for college and beyond. ACT and SAT scores are optional at many colleges. However, submitting a strong score can often double a student's chances of admission. ACT and SAT scores are strongly recommended or required for many college scholarships, including $30,000 per year at USC, $25,000 per year at Notre Dame, or Texas Christian University's $57,000 scholarship among many others.

Visit www.prepguruze.com to take a free ACT or SAT exam and learn more about how your son or daughter can boost their chances of admission to selective colleges by raising his or her standardized test scores. Thank you for listening to the Nick Standlea podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate five stars, and leave a review. The best way to support this podcast is to visit our sponsors in the description. Follow on Instagram at Nick Standlea at nickstandle.com Ask questions. Don't accept the status quo. Be curious.