Millennial Debate Standardized Testing Debate


A2: No SAT Requirement Lowers Quality of the Incoming Class



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A2: No SAT Requirement Lowers Quality of the Incoming Class

No difference in graduation rates between those who submit test scores and those who do not

James Moynihan, MA, Spring, 2014, MA Thesis Admitting Bias: A Review of the Test-Optional Admission Policy at George Mason University, http://digilib.gmu.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1920/8679/Moynihan_thesis_2014.pdf?sequence=1 DOA: 10-25-15


The increased national growth of the test-optional policy is a relatively new enrollment practice. Over the past decade, higher education has seen a significant increase in interest of diverse constituents. Originally, Bates College adopted the test optional policy in hopes of increasing their total application numbers, and it worked.
Applications rose from 2,500 in 1984 to just fewer than 3,500 in 1989. William Hiss, who was the dean of admission during that period, said, “If I had had to choose making tests optional and losing 1,000 applications it would have been tough. But when you gain 1,000 applications? There's no downside.” Minority applications also increased as nearly half of Bates’s Black and Hispanic applicants applied without submitting test scores. Once enrolled, statistics showed nearly identical GPA and graduation rates from students who did submit their test scores as students who did not submit test scores (Epstein,

2009).

Those admitted under test optional succeed in universities

James Moynihan, MA, Spring, 2014, MA Thesis Admitting Bias: A Review of the Test-Optional Admission Policy at George Mason University, http://digilib.gmu.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1920/8679/Moynihan_thesis_2014.pdf?sequence=1 DOA: 10-25-15
Colleges and Universities have promoted the idea of diversity within their institutions but are reluctant to make any substantial changes to their evaluation measures or the cultures of enrollment at each institution. By encouraging cultural diversity, schools will naturally accrue students from diverse backgrounds. As the diversity of applicants increases, it is the responsibility of each institution to evaluate the intelligence of students individually. In order to uniquely evaluate each student, schools must take into account new areas of intelligence. The promotion of diversity would indicate that cultural intelligence may be a significant area of assessment for students. Schools must understand that each student is different and successful intelligence cannot be assumed the same for each student. While the SAT provides an efficient way to evaluate students, it is clearly evaluating isolated areas of intelligence that do not reflect the goals of cultural diversity for an evolving educational system.
Test-optional admission practices have proven to increase application and matriculation numbers of underrepresented students and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. The students who are admissible under the test-optional policy are capable of thriving within a collegiate setting.

A2: Helps Kids Who Don’t Go to Elite Prep Schools




No longer true

Charles Murray, 2013, Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, DC. He is a co-author (with Richard J. Herrnstein) of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994). Soares, Joseph A. (2011-09-30). SAT Wars: The Case for Test-Optional College Admissions, Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition, page number at the end of card


For most high school students who want to attend an elite college, the SAT is more than a test. It is one of life’s landmarks. Waiting for the scores— one for Verbal, one for Math, and now one for Writing, with a possible 800 on each— is painfully suspenseful. The exact scores are commonly remembered forever after. So it has been for half a century. But events of recent years have challenged the SAT’s position. In 2001, Richard Atkinson (2001), president of the University of California, proposed dropping the SAT as a requirement for admission. More and more prestigious small colleges, such as Middlebury and Bennington, are making the SAT optional. The charge that the SAT is slanted in favor of privileged students—“ a wealth test,” as Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls it— has been ubiquitous (Zwick, 2004). I have watched the attacks on the SAT with dismay. Back in 1961, the test helped get me into Harvard from a small Iowa town by giving me a way to show that I could compete with applicants from Exeter and Andover. Ever since, I have seen the SAT as the friend of the little guy, just as James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, said it would be when he urged the SAT upon the nation in the 1940s. Conant’s cause was as unambiguously liberal in the 1940s as income redistribution is today. Then, America’s elite colleges drew most of their students from a small set of elite secondary schools, concentrated in the northeastern United States, to which America’s wealthy sent their children. The mission of the SAT was to identify intellectual talent regardless of race, color, creed, money, or geography, and give that talent a chance to blossom. Students from small towns and from poor neighborhoods in big cities were supposed to benefit— as I thought I did, and as many others think they did. But data trump gratitude. The evidence has become overwhelming that the SAT no longer serves a democratizing purpose. Worse, events have conspired to make the SAT a negative force in American life. And so I find myself arguing that the SAT should be abolished. Not just deemphasized, but no longer administered. Nothing important would be lost by so doing. Much would be gained. Soares, Joseph A. (2011-09-30). SAT Wars: The Case for Test-Optional College Admissions (Kindle Locations 1490-1498). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.

A2: Use ACT/ACT Good




ACT has many weaknesses

Richard Atkinson & Saul Geiser, 2013, Saul Geiser is a Research Associate in the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley. He is former Director of Research for Admissions and Outreach for the University of California system, Richard C. Atkinson is President Emeritus of the University of California and Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science and Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. Soares, Joseph A. (2011-09-30). SAT Wars: The Case for Test-Optional College Admissions, Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition, page number at end of card


Yet the ACT still falls short of being a true achievement test in several ways. Like the SAT, the ACT remains a norm-referenced test and is used by colleges and universities primarily to compare students against one another rather than to assess curriculum mastery. The ACT is scored in a manner that produces almost the same bell curve distribution as the SAT. It is true that the ACT also provides standards-based interpretations indicating the knowledge and skills that students at different score levels generally can be expected to have learned (ACT, 2009a). But those interpretations are only approximations and do not necessarily identify what an examinee actually knows. It is difficult to reconcile the ACT’s norm-referenced scoring with the idea of a criterion-referenced assessment or to understand how one test could serve both functions equally. The ACT lacks the depth of subject matter coverage that one finds in other achievement tests such as the SAT Subject Tests or AP exams. The ACT science section, for example, is intended to cover high school biology, chemistry, physics, and earth/ space science. But the actual test requires little knowledge in any of these disciplines, and a student who is adept at reading charts and tables quickly to identify patterns and trends can do well on this section— section— unlike the SAT Subject Tests or AP exams in the sciences, which require intensive subject matter knowledge. In a curious twist, the ACT and SAT appear to have converged over time. Whereas the SAT has shed many of its trickier and more esoteric item types, such as verbal analogies and quantitative comparisons, the ACT has become more SAT-like in some ways, such as the premium it places on students’ time management skills. It is not surprising that almost all U.S. colleges and universities now accept both tests and treat ACT and SAT scores interchangeably. Finally, another fundamental problem for the ACT— or for any test that aspires to serve as the nation’s achievement test— is the absence of national curriculum standards in the United States. The ACT has tried to overcome this problem through its curriculum surveys, but the “average” curriculum does not necessarily reflect what students are expected to learn in any given state, district, or school. The lack of direct alignment between curriculum and assessment has led the National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC, 2008) to criticize the practice followed by some states, such as Colorado, Illinois, and Michigan, of requiring all K– 12 students to take the ACT, whether or not they plan on attending college, and using the results as a measure of student achievement in the schools. This practice runs counter to the American Educational Research Association’s guidelines on testing: “Admission tests, whether they are intended to measure achievement or ability, are not directly linked to a particular instructional curriculum and, therefore, are not appropriate for detecting changes in middle school or high school performance” (American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, & National Council on Measurement in Education, 1999, p. 143). Of course, using the ACT to assess achievement in high school is not the same as using it to assess readiness for college. But the same underlying problem— the loose alignment between curriculum and assessment— is evident in both contexts. It may be that no one test, however well designed, can ever be entirely satisfactory in a country with a strong tradition of federalism and local control over the schools. Developing an effective and robust single national achievement test may be impossible in the absence of a national curriculum. Soares, Joseph A. (2011-09-30). SAT Wars: The Case for Test-Optional College Admissions (Kindle Locations 684-690). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.

Grades are a better predictor than the SAT II and the ACT

John Aubrey Douglas, 2013, Douglas is Fellow in the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Conditions for Admission: Access, Equity, and the Social Contract of Public Universities (2007). Soares, Joseph A. (2011-09-30). SAT Wars: The Case for Test-Optional College Admissions, Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition, page number at the end of card


A follow-up study by the University of California also demonstrated that subject tests, like the ACT, are only marginally better than the SAT. That means that subject-based tests, including a second array of tests marketed by ETS as the SAT II, are only philosophically better as an admissions requirement for the premier public university system in the United States. High school grades remain the best single measure of demonstrated academic achievement— a pretty good philosophical trump card. Soares, Joseph A. (2011-09-30). SAT Wars: The Case for Test-Optional College Admissions (Kindle Locations 1131-1133). Teachers College Press. Kindle Edition.



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