Princeton University’s decision to reinstate SAT and ACT testing requirements marks a victory for common sense.
The students who choose not to report their test scores to admissions departments are generally those who calculate that their scores are too low to make their applications competitive. Colleges have always understood that, but have gone along with “test-optional” policies in the hope that these students would nonetheless perform as well academically as those who excelled on tests. Why would anyone think that?
Colleges could imagine—or pretend—that the tests were biased or somehow unable to capture intellectual talents that would manifest themselves in the classroom. But the standardized tests have been subject to millions of trials over decades of scrutiny. They may not be perfect, but they don’t screen out intellectual talent. Making them optional just led universities with such policies to admit a second tier of less-qualified students who generally underperformed their more qualified peers.
[RELATED: What Should We Look for in a College President?]
A place like Princeton pays a price for playing this game. It makes it harder to maintain its competitive position against other elite universities. This is a matter of elite schools competing with one another for the most academically talented students. Test-optional policies are a form of self-handicapping.
Many colleges and universities outside the elite ranks are still test-optional. They face a different calculus. The overall number of students qualified for college has fallen and will continue to decline. These colleges compete not based on finding the best students, but on filling their overall quota of more-or-less qualified students. They can’t afford to bypass the mediocre applicants who opt not to report test results.
The same decline in academic rigor is visible beyond admissions.
[RELATED: A Look at the $10 Billion Industry Indoctrinating America’s Students]
At Harvard, for instance, a recent university report warned that grade inflation had become so extreme that grades “no longer meaningfully distinguish between students.” The reaction from many undergraduates was not concern about the erosion of standards but outrage that the university would even consider grading more strictly. One student described the report as “soul-crushing.” Another said it made her “rethink” her decision to attend Harvard.
This, too, is the consequence of lowering expectations. Whether in admissions or grading, universities that once prided themselves on intellectual rigor now shrink from enforcing it.
Princeton’s decision to return to standardized testing is a small but important acknowledgment that excellence requires standards—and that those standards can’t be sustained on ideology alone.
Follow the National Association of Scholars on X.
Image: “Princeton University” by Karl Thomas Moore on Wikimedia Commons
“This is a matter of elite schools competing with one another for the most academically talented students.”
Are they? Or are they instead competing for the most ideologically pure students?
It’s like baseball before Jackie Robinson — in banning anyone to the right of Vladimir Lenin, they are excluding a lot of academically qualified students.
At Harvard, for instance, a recent university report warned that grade inflation had become so extreme that grades “no longer meaningfully distinguish between students.”
In this inherently bad?
Until a century ago, other than Latin honors, there were no way for future employers to distinguish between Harvard students. The registrar merely confirmed that the student had graduated, he wasn’t going to hand-copy each transcript for everyone who asked.
Was academic rigor less in the 1880s, before the photocopier?
Did Harvard become more rigorous in the 1970s when it did?
Or in the 1990s when transcripts became computerized?
Is there any evidence that actual academic rigor increases when students are placed in ruthless cut-throat competition with each other? Or does cheating increase as they increasingly sabotage each other’s studies? Cutting pages out of library books is 20th Century, but there are ways to do it now.
Quick question to those with grad degrees — what were your GRAD GPAs?
I don’t even have one as all three graduate degrees along with some nondegree courses (e.g. the water polo class I took between degrees because I had an employee tuition/fee waiver and it looked like fun) are all combined into one transcript GPA.
No one has ever asked about my Grad GPA — I’ve been asked about what I studied, the topic of my dissertation, the members of my committee, but never about my GPA.
So if this works for grad school — if everyone is comfortable with grad school being this way — then why wouldn’t it work for undergrad? Have an exit exam if you must have a number, but make the whole thing pass/fail, which is what grad school essentially is.