Impact of test score elimination on Stanford recruiting - Printable Version
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Impact of test score elimination on Stanford recruiting - OutsiderFan - 10-16-2021
On the heels of growing momentum, and already practiced in the UC system, the NCAA seems ready to eliminate any requirements for SAT/ACT in college athlete admissions.
How will this impact Stanford? Will Stanford still require standardized test scores at a certain level in order to be admitted to Stanford? Or will Stanford see the handwriting on the wall and just accept that grades, classes, essays, recommendations, and other special abilities athletic or otherwise are enough to determine who should be admitted?
It seems Stanford could increase its recruiting pools a bit if it drops standardized test score requirements, and would have its already small pools evaporate to almost nothing if it was the only D1 school to still require standardized test scores for admissions when the NCAA doesn't.
Thoughts?
RE: Impact of test score elimination on Stanford recruiting - 82lsju - 10-16-2021
(10-16-2021, 08:13 AM)OutsiderFan Wrote: On the heels of growing momentum, and already practiced in the UC system, the NCAA seems ready to eliminate any requirements for SAT/ACT in college athlete admissions.
How will this impact Stanford? Will Stanford still require standardized test scores at a certain level in order to be admitted to Stanford? Or will Stanford see the handwriting on the wall and just accept that grades, classes, essays, recommendations, and other special abilities athletic or otherwise are enough to determine who should be admitted?
It seems Stanford could increase its recruiting pools a bit if it drops standardized test score requirements, and would have its already small pools evaporate to almost nothing if it was the only D1 school to still require standardized test scores for admissions when the NCAA doesn't.
Thoughts?
due to COVID test scores not required last (class of '25) or this year (class of '26), we'll see what happens for the class of '27
RE: Impact of test score elimination on Stanford recruiting - Goose - 10-16-2021
(10-16-2021, 08:13 AM)OutsiderFan Wrote: On the heels of growing momentum, and already practiced in the UC system, the NCAA seems ready to eliminate any requirements for SAT/ACT in college athlete admissions.I think the two are not related. The test score the NCAA required and the test score Stanford unilaterally requires are very different numbers. If Stanford removes their test score requirement it won't be because the NCAA did, but rather because Stanford has decided it is not a usefull admissions tool.
How will this impact Stanford? Will Stanford still require standardized test scores at a certain level in order to be admitted to Stanford? Or will Stanford see the handwriting on the wall and just accept that grades, classes, essays, recommendations, and other special abilities athletic or otherwise are enough to determine who should be admitted?
It seems Stanford could increase its recruiting pools a bit if it drops standardized test score requirements, and would have its already small pools evaporate to almost nothing if it was the only D1 school to still require standardized test scores for admissions when the NCAA doesn't.
Thoughts?
I am old enough to come from the era where it was generally accepted that you couldn't "study for the SATs", so nobody actually tried to do so. I can tell you from experience that your test score was certainly affected by the quality of your high school education. Standardized tests were originally an attempt to predict how well you would do academically without being affected by your previous education/life experience. Obviously, they never succeeded in doing this. These days they are even less useful because people have realized that you can prepare for any test and doing so will get you a better score. It is also inevitably true that if you had a better than average high school education and applied yourself, you will do better than somebody who had an average high school education and applied themselves. You will have taken more tests and been exposed to more reasoning opportunities in your better high school. So, even if one leaves race and economic situations aside, there are biases.
That said, I am not convinced standardized test results are useless. I think that if you scored quite high on the SAT, the odds are better that you will do well in college. I also think that the converse is often not true. If you scored middle of the road you may do great in college. There are other factors.
RE: Impact of test score elimination on Stanford recruiting - BostonCard - 10-16-2021
Not sure that it will be any more of a problem than 2 AP courses, which are also required at Stanford and no where else.
That being said, I see growing momentum towards making standardized tests optional, and I could see that happening at Stanford too.
BC
RE: Impact of test score elimination on Stanford recruiting - BobK - 10-16-2021
Two AP classes is Football not other sports. Suspect you are only referring to FB.
RE: Impact of test score elimination on Stanford recruiting - BostonCard - 10-16-2021
(10-16-2021, 09:51 AM)BobK Wrote: Two AP classes is Football not other sports. Suspect you are only referring to FB.
Football (and basektball) are presuably the only sports where removing the SAT as a requirement at other schools might be a significant competitive disadvantage, but at least in football, I suspect AP classes are a greater barrier to entry.
BC
RE: Impact of test score elimination on Stanford recruiting - Softball Fan - 10-16-2021
https://www.applerouth.com/blog/2020/02/13/uc-faculty-issue-a-powerful-data-driven-defense-of-standardized-testing-in-college-admissions/
UC President Janet Napolitano directed an Academic Senate task force study to show there was little correlation between test scores and graduation rates.
Oops, the study ended up showing there was an exceedingly high correlation between test scores and graduation rates.
"For UC students admitted with SAT scores under 700, 35% had dropped out of UC within a year and only 50% graduated within seven years. Among students with test scores over 1400, 97% continued past freshman year and 92% graduated within seven years."
Nevermind about facts. The UC Regents then voted unanimously to permanently eliminate test score requirements.
UC Regents have made a half-hearted promise to develop a non-racist, non-discriminatory test within four years. It will never happen. How would you structure a test that someone somewhere doesn't claim the questions or test format are discriminatory?
RE: Impact of test score elimination on Stanford recruiting - BostonCard - 10-16-2021
Right, that was the data I was referring to, but it doesn’t appear that test scores tell you all that much on top of GPA, as this University of Chicago study shows:
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/test-scores-dont-stack-gpas-predicting-college-success
Quote: High-school GPAs might be stronger indicators of college readiness because they measure a wider variety of skills—including effort over an entire semester in many different types of classes, and demonstration of academic skills through multiple formats. On the other hand, standardized tests measure a smaller set of skills, and students can prepare for these tests in narrow ways that may not translate into better preparation to succeed in college.
As I noted earlier in the thread, I’m not necessarily advocating for the removal of test scores from admissions requirements, but having looked at multiple studies on this issue, I can’t come to any definitive conclusions; there is evidence both for and against the predictive power of test scores for subsequent success in college.
Not to be a bothsiderist on this, I am suspicious of people who are dogmatic one way or the other given the contradictory data.
BC
RE: Impact of test score elimination on Stanford recruiting - M T - 10-16-2021
There is a difference between the predictions based on aggregated school grades and a prediction based on school grades at a single institution or school grades for a single student.
Suppose a private school wanted to increase their profit by promising parents of potential students that all school grades will be A+ so all students will get a perfect GPA, thus increasing their chance of getting into schools that use GPA as a major criteria.
Suppose a school wants a winning tiddlywinks team and lets it be known to potential students that teachers & administrators will preferentially grade higher for students on that team, thus increasing their chances of getting admission, scholarships, and NIL in college.
How do you think the GPA of the principal's child relates to other students' GPAs that get the same standardized test scores?
Suppose a school has "AP" classes that give a basic level of instruction.
More than a handful of decades ago, it wasn't clear how a GPA in one state corresponded with a GPA in another state, or that you could trust a GPA for a particular student. Did Senior year math or history in one state teach the same material as the same course in another state and grade it similarly. Indeed, in the school system I attended, it wasn't clear that a particular GPA in my school was equivalent to the same GPA in another school.
I know a teacher who retired in the past decade who retired partly because he/she was tired of the administration telling her/him to grade easier for particular students.
Standardized testing was intended to be a better measurement that was less subject to local or personal distortions. The complaint these days seems to be that such tests don't take into account factors other than testable knowledge or reasoning abilities.
My opinion is that the UC is making another mistake, but it certainly isn't its first nor last. Obviously the UC Board of Regents has a different opinion.