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Home » Why are some universities reinstating standardized test requirements?

Why are some universities reinstating standardized test requirements?

The New Neo Posted on by

Some elite colleges that previously had abandoned admissions requirements to submit standardized test scores are now re-instituting such requirements. This may seem like a return to old-fashioned merit-based admissions. But apparently there’s a different explanation, at least at Yale and perhaps at other universities:

Yet, the meritocracy argument does not appear to have won the day entirely in New Haven. The university buttressed its announcement of the new admissions policy with the claim that “tests can help increase rather than decrease diversity,” and that “inviting students to apply without any test scores can, inadvertently, disadvantage students from low-income, first-generation, and rural backgrounds.” Mandatory test scores, in other words, are not back in because they produce the most qualified student body but because the university now believes that testing in fact promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion, which presumably remain Yale’s highest priorities.

How did Yale’s leadership reach this conclusion? “When admissions officers reviewed applications with no scores,” the university’s statement maintains, “they placed greater weight on other parts of the application. But this shift frequently worked to the disadvantage of applicants from lower socio-economic backgrounds.” The university’s faceless admissions bureaucrats may, for example, have failed to consider that applicants from low-income secondary schools have fewer means besides standardized test scores to demonstrate their talent, while more “privileged” students can produce transcripts with honors courses, long lists of unique study and “enrichment” opportunities, and more informative recommendation letters from dedicated teachers in stabler environments.

Seems as though it was the law of unintended consequences that took over when the tests were jettisoned.

NOTE: And while we’re at it, there’s another Harvard professor accused of plagiarism:

Harvard professor Christina Cross is a rising star in the field of critical race studies. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, secured the support of the National Science Foundation, and garnered attention from the New York Times, where she published an influential article title “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home.”

Cross’s 2019 dissertation, “The Color, Class, and Context of Family Structure and Its Association with Children’s Educational Performance,” won a slate of awards, including the American Sociological Association Dissertation Award and the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, and helped catapult her onto the Harvard faculty.

According to a new complaint filed with Harvard’s office of research integrity, however, Cross’s work is compromised by multiple instances of plagiarism, including “verbatim plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, uncited paraphrasing, and uncited quotations from other sources.”

The Harvard Crimson doesn’t think much of the charges, citing a statement by “plagiarism expert” Jonathan Bailey saying the allegations against Cross are weak. Recently a total of four black female scholars in the race or social justice fields at Harvard, including ex-President Claudine Gay, have been accused of plagiarism. The Crinson takes a “conservatives pounce” approach to the whole thing:

The allegations against Cross mark the fourth in a rapid series of anonymous plagiarism complaints of varying severity lodged against Black women at Harvard amid a growing right-wing attack against diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education. …

In an interview, Bailey said he was concerned that the recent spate of allegations represent the “weaponization of plagiarism” to score political points — not to deal with serious concerns of research misconduct.

“It’s using plagiarism allegations, not to address issues of academic or research integrity, but rather to address political or social grievances that a person may have,” Bailey said.

Comments

Why are some universities reinstating standardized test requirements? — 30 Comments

  1. I keep thinking about Cromwell’s words in dismissing the Long Parliament: “”You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately … Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

    Applies very well to the ‘leadership’ of much of American academia.

  2. That Bailey guy’s just mad that folks are doing for free what he does for money & doing it better against people he wants to impress.

  3. Even with the Ivies’ famous grade inflation, the differences are hard to paper over and to avoid various accusations, profs must be choking on their PhDs when grading certain folks.
    So, yes, if we require at least some preparation, the more distasteful part of that exercise might be reduced.
    I mean, it could be so bad that even students noticed.

  4. “Recently a total of four black female scholars in the race or social justice fields at Harvard, including ex-President Claudine Gay, have been accused of plagiarism.”
    That is rather disgusting, is it not? Race or social justice fields peopled by racialist females? At Haavad! what the H is Haavad doing with studies in so-called social justice fields? Used to be a primo university, but now is full of gutter-dwellers and garbage courses. Never forget, CRT was coined by a black Haavad Law prof in 1974.

  5. If your entire field is phony, like all racial “studies”, It’s hard to be honest about it. It’s a bit like finding an honest global warming expert who believes in global warming.

  7. When Creighton dropped the ACT, I just about choked. To make it even worse, Creighton’s president said Drake University had done the same thing.

    I went to Drake for one year. For me, Creighton should never be compared to Drake in anything.

  8. The thing I am confused about is when does a thought process become so common and widespread that it no longer needs citations?

    I have been working on a semi formal paper to give to friends on a controversial Biblical topic where there are various views even within my own denomination. I am quoting a lot of Bible verses, using The Christian Standard Bible , which allows for up to 1000 verses to be quoted without written permission as long as those verses do not constitute more than 50% of the work and not a whole Book of the Bible as long as you use the designated credits to the CSB with a copyright page.
    The tricky part is the ideas – turning eschatology verses scattered across the Old and New Testament and linking then together into an interpretive theory. Some of this has been discussed probably for 2000 years or more by Jews first, and then Christians. I can go online and see discussions on various sites about the subject.

  9. When everyone has high grades, grades cannot be used to distinguish between good and better students.
    Average High School GPA

    41. The average overall GPA increased by 0.43 points in 2019 compared to 1990. (NAEP)
    42. The three-year period between 2018 and 2021 saw more grade inflation than in the preceding eight years, growing by 0.1 grade points. (K-12 Dive).

    The states with the highest high school GPAs are: 1) South Carolina (3.48), 2) West Virginia (3.44), and 3) Mississippi (3.42). I doubt that these 3 states have the three best secondary school education systems in the country.

    Grades are an increasingly poor method for sorting out students. Thus the return of standardized testing.

    As further evidence that grades are not necessarily to be relied on consider college grades handed out in Schools of Education versus Schools of Engineering. In Ed Schools, 3.7 is a run-of-the-mill GPA. In Engineering Schools, more like 2.8. But a 3.7 student in Education would likely be hard pressed to get a 1.8 average- if that- in engineering. More likely a 1.2.

  10. KiThe Yale argument may have some, pardon the pun, merit.

    When my former employer dropped standardized test scores in favor of “holistic” applications we saw a huge increase in the rich liberal kids who could pad their apps with all sort of extra curricular activities and exotic travel. The poor white smart kid from West Virginia who probably could score 1400 on the SAT was never in the running. But then rich liberal kids who could pay full freight and had the proper politics were just what the faculty and administrators ordered.

  11. Whats the topic in question, sometimes it does require a series of verses to follow the thread from the old and new testament one finds echoes in the new from the old and vice versa

  12. Jon Baker. Good point. As I mentioned in an earlier discussion, I have heard there are about 22,000 dissertations on Shakespeare out in the world. It would be hard to do a new one without accidentally nearly verbatim quoting at least a couple of sentences. I mean, you have to do SVO and the subject of the dissertation limits the S possibilities overall. How many verbs are there, anyway?

    The same may hold true for, say, a thousand dissertations.

    And then there are only so many things worth saying about a particular issue if you’re planning on impressing anybody who needs to be impressed in the process. And if you read your advisor closely, and the likely committee, there are even more restrictions.

    Need to be careful. Still, verbatim and near-verbatim is a bad idea.

  13. There’s an unaddressed problem here. We DID have a “meritocratic” college system, increasingly post WWII. And it turned into what we have now.

    For me to accept what people are saying now, I’d need to see them look at that. How did the scores-based university turn into the PC university of today? And how do you propose to keep it from happening again?

  14. “…But this shift frequently worked to the disadvantage of applicants from lower socio-economic backgrounds.”

    One might ask our DEI friends to consider the damage done to blacks and Hispanics granted favorable admissions to elite schools over more competitive whites and Asians, then drop out and are scarred with debt and defeat.

    I guess the DEI folks don’t care about the long-term, just their short-term diversity stats.

  15. “Mandatory test scores, in other words, are not back in because they produce the most qualified student body but because the university now believes that testing in fact promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion, which presumably remain Yale’s highest priorities.”

    Heh… the university is now pretending to believe that testing in fact ‘promotes’ diversity, equity, and inclusion because in the face of the current bad optics it serves the narrative to do so.

    Which begs the question; fool or knave? Are they so unaware as to not realize that a position that requires deceit and outright lying in order to maintain it, simply reflects its illegitimacy or do they realize the illegitimacy and simply lust for the power?

    I vote for both… they all in their heart of hearts have to sense the truth. But the truth is an anathema to them for it stands in the way of their possessing the One Ring.

  16. I do remember ages again when i wrote a high school paper on othello it was in the where houston baker stanley fish and skip gates were on the march

  17. Actually the high school paper was on goethes faust the college was on othello but the problem became more entrenched in four years

  18. Plagiarism aside, it’s troubling to realize the extent to which so-called elite universities are handing out PhDs to unserious people who obviously lack the intellect, curiosity, and industry necessary to actually contribute in a meaningful way to humanity’s store of knowledge. Too many people are getting doctorate degrees simply because they want the credential and the title. (Jill Biden comes to mind.). Even if they aren’t directly cribbing from a previous scholar’s thesis, there seems to be a strong tendency among PhD candidates, in the social sciences especially, to rehash the same ideas that appear in hundreds of previous theses.

  19. In theory, this could benefit the poor, but non-minority, applicant who gets perfect SAT scores, but I doubt it. There are still plenty of privileged kids who get perfect scores. I suspect scores are coming back in order to weed out the sort of unqualified applicants who got in on the strength of the inflated grades, and recommendations, and extracurricular activities when standardized testing wasn’t a factor. They don’t want brilliant kids from North Dakota or West Virginia, if those applicants aren’t “people of diversity.”

  20. How do those schools prove to the world that they are still the most elite? Are we supposed to trust them? Not hardly. Huge incentive to exaggerate, if not outright lie. And if HS grades are utilized, then just recruit from SC, WV and MI. Which really leaves standardized testing. And without that super elite status, why would anyone go to your school, instead of, say, Creighton or Duke?

  21. Abraxas

    In theory, this could benefit the poor, but non-minority, applicant who gets perfect SAT scores, but I doubt it… They don’t want brilliant kids from North Dakota or West Virginia, if those applicants aren’t “people of diversity.”

    Correction: They don’t want brilliant kids from North Dakota or West Virginia, if those applicants aren’t “people of diversity”, unless their daddy could give $10 million to the university. 🙂

    This article is 14 years old, but is still relevant: Minding the Campus:How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others (2010). The article discusses a book by Thomas J. Espenshade & Alexandria Walton Radford:No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life
    Lower-class whites were at a disadvantage for admission to elite colleges compared to wealthier whites and also to minorities.

    The lower-class whites proved to be all-around losers. When equally matched for background factors (including SAT scores and high school GPAs), the better-off whites were more than three times as likely to be accepted as the poorest whites (.28 vs. .08 admissions probability). Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant’s admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it. The opposite class trend was seen among non-whites, where the poorer the applicant the greater the probability of acceptance when all other factors are taken into account. Class-based affirmative action does exist within the three non-white ethno-racial groupings, but among the whites the groups advanced are those with money.

    Then compare lower-class whites’ chances of admission compared to lower-class minorities: even worse.

    When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely. These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low.

    The basic reason is that elite universities are much more willing to divvy out scholarship money if the recipient increases their “diversity scores.” Poor whites don’t do that to the degree that poor or affluent minorities do, so they get neither admission nor scholarship money. Whereas poor minorities provide a double dose of diversity: poor and minority.

    Another interesting point about the article has to do with school activities. All applicants to elite universities know that school activities help chances for admission. It turns out that certain activities reduce chances for admission- and I’m not talking about mugging or dope dealing.

    But what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call “career-oriented activities” was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”

    ROTC, 4-H, and FFA harm your chances of admission to an elite university.
    Elite universities LOVE diversity, provided that a given diversity checklist is filled out. And ROTC et al aren’t on that list.

  22. Here’s a fun bit on the DEI front:
    ___________________________________

    Complaint Alleges University of Wisconsin DEI Czar, Husband of Harvard’s DEI Chief, Has Decades-Long History of Research Misconduct

    The chief diversity officer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, LaVar Charleston, who also teaches at the university’s school of education, has a decades-long track record of research misconduct, according to a complaint filed with the university on Wednesday and a Washington Free Beacon analysis. That misconduct includes presenting old studies as new research, which he has done at least five times over the course of his career.

    https://freebeacon.com/campus/complaint-alleges-university-of-wisconsin-dei-czar-husband-of-harvards-dei-chief-has-decades-long-history-of-research-misconduct/
    ___________________________________

    Really ripe misconduct, if you check it. And married to the Harvard DEI Chief. Imagine that!

    In my Anglophile reading I noticed how often the 20th C British authors would mention how Everyone who was Anyone knew Everyone.

    The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or something like that.

  25. When I was working, we had a customer who brought in consultants to improve their business. In their defense, it seemed to work – up to a point.
    One of the improvements was to produce reports on every aspect of their operation. Since the company I worked for printed the reports, I couldn’t help noticing that over time, the number and length of these reports kept increasing. The largest of them peaked at 23 copies, 5 times a week, of a report which often ran to 900 pages. Obviously no one was reading this, because no one could. The most anyone could do was to occasionally refer to it for specific pieces of information.
    What I inferred was that the consultants had to constantly make changes, because if they ever stopped “improving” things then they’d be out of a job.
    Similarly, the DEI bureaucracy in Academia has to keep changing things because if they don’t there’s no justification for keeping them on the payroll. If dormitories are segregated, then they have to be integrated – if they’re integrated than they have to be segregated. If you’re relying on standardized tests then you have to stop – if you aren’t then you have to start.
    Whatever you’re doing, you have to do something else, and this can never be allowed to stop because if it ever does they won’t get paid.

  26. Miguel Cervantes,

    The topic is what is broadly called ” End Times prophecy.”

    You are right, the Old and New Testament verses have ” echoes”.

    The New Testament writers quoted a lot from the Old Testament and some Old Testament ideas were further developed in the New Testament.

  27. richf

    Similarly, the DEI bureaucracy in Academia has to keep changing things because if they don’t there’s no justification for keeping them on the payroll.

    Which is why the proper response to DEI is not to grudgingly go through the motions that DEI might mandate, but to get rid of DEI.

    Whatever you’re doing, you have to do something else, and this can never be allowed to stop because if it ever does they won’t get paid.

    The progs/social justice warriors/libs will ALWAYS find something else you need to do to bring about nirvana, a.k.a. the future utopia. Their self-defined mission is to find things that OTHER PEOPLE should do to bring about the future utopia. If they aren’t trying to order other people around, they are failing in their mission to bring about the future utopia. One they order you to do one thing, and you comply, they will quickly find another thing you have to do.

    Don’t beat up gays. Then Gay marriage. Then 57 pronouns you have to use to address people- and you will be fired if you inadvertently use the wrong pronoun.

    Once you jump through one hoop, they will find another hoop you are supposed to jump through. And so on. It’s always something. Busybodies.

    The worst of it is that for the most part, their moves towards the future utopia don’t improve things a bit, but usually make things worse. Consider all the hoops the Commies in China and Russia et al had their underlings do.

    All about as successful as the 60 year mission in Cuba to bring milk to the masses. Milk production up 10% in 60 years in Cuba. Milk production nearly quintupled in Latin America during the same time.

    And we have let these jerks take over the universities and the media, and more.

  28. Some expert. Jonathan Bailey doesn’t even have a degree in plagiarism. Maybe he should go to Harvard. They seem to be full of practitioners in that field.

  29. richf: “… the DEI bureaucracy in Academia [and Government and Corporate/ Business] has to keep changing things because if they don’t there’s no justification for keeping them on the payroll.”

    Force metrics on the DEI groupies:
    1) if you DEI folks have done your job then the whole institution has been inculcated with applicable DEI values, and your services are no longer needed.
    2) if you DEI folks have failed to achieve institution wide acceptance of the DEI values, then you are incompetent and will be fired.

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