Dartmouth Reinstates the SAT

Nearly four years after announcing it would temporarily remove the testing requirement for applicants, Dartmouth has announced it is reinstating the SAT.

When Dartmouth suspended its standardized testing requirement for undergraduate applicants in June 2020, it was a pragmatic pause taken by most colleges and universities in response to an unprecedented global pandemic. At the time, we imagined the resulting “test-optional” policy as a short-term practice rather than an informed commentary on the role of testing in our holistic evaluation process. Nearly four years later, having studied the role of testing in our admissions process as well as its value as a predictor of student success at Dartmouth, we are removing the extended pause and reactivating the standardized testing requirement for undergraduate admission, effective with the Class of 2029.

To its credit, Dartmouth carried out its own research which found that standardized testing in combination with grades was very effective at predicting student success. Also, directly contradicting the arguments made by those who want to eliminate testing (such as Ibram Kendi) Dartmouth found that testing was a great way to identify academically gifted students who might otherwise be overlooked.

The faculty researchers write: “Our overall conclusion is that SAT and ACT scores are a key method by which Dartmouth can identify students who will succeed at Dartmouth, including high performing students…who may attend a high school for which Dartmouth has less information to (fully) judge the transcript.” Simply said, it is another opportunity to identify students who are the top performers in their environments, wherever they might be.

What Dartmouth describes is sort of the testing equivalent of grading on a curve. Students from a top high school may have average SAT scores that are much higher than students at a relatively poor performing school. So they don’t just look at the absolute number, they consider it in the context of the high school it came from. If a student managed to outperform most of their peers then that student is probably going to succeed even if there score would only have been average somewhere else.

The findings of the Dartmouth research weren’t unique. In January the NY Times wrote about similar findings by researchers looking at Ivy League schools:

An academic study released last summer by the group Opportunity Insights, covering the so-called Ivy Plus colleges (the eight in the Ivy League, along with Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and the University of Chicago), showed little relationship between high school grade point average and success in college. The researchers found a strong relationship between test scores and later success.

Likewise, a faculty committee at the University of California system — led by Dr. Henry Sánchez, a pathologist, and Eddie Comeaux, 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.

“Test scores have vastly more predictive power than is commonly understood in the popular debate,” said John Friedman, an economics professor at Brown and one of the authors of the Ivy Plus admissions study.

The dean of admissions for Dartmouth gave an interview in which he said he was also aware that the pandemic had resulted in grade inflation that had made grades even less useful as a metric.

It was definitely part of the consideration. The impact of the pandemic on learning is significant and harder to quantify as we keep moving through. But there’s no question that remote learning in high school and middle school had an impact. It’s pretty clear across at least my pool, where we’re meeting students who have very strong grades in high school and where there are lots of students who share that profile. I’m not criticizing the high schools, I’m just acknowledging that the surplus of excellence requires more information to be able to assess it.

Where I work, given our selectivity, it complicates the question of “How do we make informed decisions that require some precision among a pool of high achievers?” Information is valuable, and why would you leave any information on the table? We’re not saying in this reactivation that your test score defines you. We’re not saying we no longer value the whole person or the integrity of a transcript and curriculum; those remain the heart of our process. But having scores as part of that assessment is meaningful to us.

There is an answer to why you would leave information on the table. The answer is and has been because critics of testing claim the tests themselves are racist. That’s what David Leonhardt of the NY Times reported last month.

Standardized tests have become especially unpopular among political progressives, and university campuses are dominated by progressives.

Many consider the tests to be unfair because there are score gaps by race and class. Average scores for modest-income, Black and Hispanic students are lower than those for white, Asian and upper-income students. The tests’ critics worry that reinstating test requirements will reduce diversity.

This is precisely how the UC system in California wound up ditching the tests. In 2019 the system was sued by activists and the Compton School District claiming the tests were racist and the system agreed to drop them.

It’s good to see another Ivy League school bringing testing back (MIT had already done so) and effectively saying no thanks to the anti-testing ideologues like Ibram Kendi.