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.
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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.
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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.
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Image: “Princeton University” by Karl Thomas Moore on Wikimedia Commons
