Most college students have had their brush with the familiar and dreaded SATs. While national standardized tests such as the SATs and ACTs remain standard fare in college admissions, university administrators and professors have begun to raise questions are beginning to arise concerning their effectiveness.
In February, a coalition of over 130 Massachusetts professors from around 20 schools, including Tufts, Harvard and Brandeis, signed onto a public statement condemning the use of high-stakes standardized testing in high schools as a means of evaluating schools, teachers and individual students. According to a Feb. 22 Washington Post article, the statement pushes education officials to shift assessment policies away from standardized testing.
Part of the statement reads: "Given that standardized tests provide only one indicator of student achievement, and that their high-stakes uses produce ever-increasing incentives to teach to the test, narrow the curriculum or even to cheat, we call on the BESE [Board of Elementary and Secondary Education] to stop using standardized tests in high-stakes decisions affecting students, teachers, and schools."
The statement also emphasizes that standardized testing perpetuates pre-existing education inequalities, saying: "Numerous studies document that the use of high-stakes testing - including test barriers to high school graduation - bears adverse impact on students and is accompanied by widening racial/ethnic and income-based gaps."
The movement against standardized testing is growing. Professors in Georgia and the Chicago area have issued letters opposing the use of standardized testing in evaluating teachers, and over a third of principals in New York State have issued a similar petition. When it comes to college admissions, Tufts continues to rely on standardized testing in an increasingly selective and competitive process.
Tufts' acceptance rates have hovered around 20 percent in recent years, this year dipping to 18.7 percent. Simultaneously, numbers of applications increased this year by 11 percent, in what Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Lee Coffin called a "historical application cycle" according to a Jan. 22 Daily article.
According to Associate Professor of Political Science Deborah Schildkraut, the use of these scores is not a perfect way to test the academic capacity of prospective students.
"Getting into college is so competitive these days and they just get so many applications and from kids whose scores are fantastic. I'm sure the 80% of students not getting in have scores that are very comparable to the 20% who got in," she said. "I would think that scores are useful for weeding out people who are clearly not academically qualified."
This year's testing scores proved impressively high, emphasizing Tufts' already competitive reputation. For the class of 2017, mean SAT scores were 728 for critical reading, 735 for math and 733 on writing, up a few points from last year, according to an April 2. Daily article. The mean ACT score of 32 was the same as last year.
Despite the high achievements of Tufts admitted students in the realm of standardized testing, these capabilities are not everything when it comes to contributing to campus, says Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education Dean Herbert.
"It may be something of an indicator of how they do in classes, but not of everything," she said.
While scores do not count as the entire measure of a student, they do work as a part of an entire picture of that student's academic profile. According to Schildkraut, it would be unfair to admit students who clearly are not up to the same academic level of others, and these scores are an initial indication.
"I suspect it might be useful to weed out people who can't succeed here. If their scores are really that poor, it is not doing them any favors if they're going to be really struggling while they're here," she said.
Freshman Spencer McCleod said standardized testing scores were his forte, but that SAT scores weren't necessarily his only selling point. Having known people with extreme testing anxiety and inability to concentrate in high stress testing environments, McCleod says that factors other than testing should carry more weight.
"Grades and tests aren't always indicative of learning aptitude. They should have several different ways of evaluating people," he said.
While interviews are one way to include a more personal factor in the college acceptance process, McCleod maintained that it is not sufficient.
"When you interview people, you may just get a school of people who can express themselves really well," he said. "And you can't interview every applicant."
Tufts and many other colleges use standardized testing in order to maintain their environment of high academic rigor. However, more and more academic institutions are moving away from relying on SATs and ACTs in admissions. According to a November survey by the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, over 800 colleges and universities no longer require SAT and ACT scores. Bowdoin and Middlebury colleges are among two schools ranked in the U.S. News & World Report's top ten liberal arts college, who have made SAT and ACT scores optional.
Tufts will continue to actively apply standardizes testing scores in its application process, according to Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Lee Coffin.
"There has not been a change in our policy, nor will there be," he told the Daily in an email.
