This past September, Harry and I went to the annual conference of National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC). NACAC is the flagship association of professionals in and around college admissions, comprised of high school counselors, independent consultants, college admissions officers, advocate, counselors, and support professions.
This year’s conference was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center and brought together about 7,000 people to network, learn, and commiserate. The core of the conference is the education sessions, where practitioners present research, discuss trends, and dissect outcomes.
This year’s conference had no less than 5 sessions about testing optional admission policies (not counting the session put on by the College Board, which must have faced questions about the move away from tests). Here are the titles of those sessions:
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- – College Admission is Test Optional. Now What? (organized by FairTest)
- –Standardized Testing and College Grades: A Look at their Association and Why Authentic –Student Work is Important
- –The Future of Test-Optional: Creating a Measurable and Mission-Driven Case For Your Testing Policy
- –Testing Our Patience: Evaluating the Digital SAT/PSAT Transition
- –The Urgency of Simplicity: Lumina Foundation’s Great Admissions Redesign
We led, attended or watched the recording of the sessions. Below you’ll find our takeaways (there are links to the sessions, if you’re a NACAC member).
College Admission is Test Optional. Now What?
Hosted by FairTest Executive Director Harry Feder, this session shared the expertise of Nikki Chun (2nd from left), Vice Provost for Enrollment Management, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Sheila Akbar (3rd from left), President & CEOO, Signet Education and featured Timothy Fields (far left), Senior Associate Dean at Emory University and co-author of The Black Family’s Guide to College Admission.
Here is a summary of some of the major points in the sessions.
Test optional policies get underrepresented populations enrolled in the class:
Tim shared data from Emory:
- – 71% of underrepresented students did not submit scores
- – 74% of students from high challenged neighborhoods did not submit scores
- – 77% first generation students didn’t submit scores
This data belies the “diamonds in the rough” argument. Seems like Emory is finding more diamonds WITHOUT scores.
A few more points from the session:
- – Harry highlighted the media focus on highly rejective colleges warping the conversation about whether colleges are going back, specifically think about how littler coverage Michigan got when it extended its policy (the same day Yale went back to requiring tests).
- – Nikki pointed out how unlikely it is that Hawai’i will go back because the tests doesn’t represent well the skills of her students.
- – Tim reinforced that requiring the test may prevent more students from applying
- – Sheila highlightled how important it is for colleges to be clear and consistent about their policy narrative, saying “If a college doesn’t take control of its narrative, someone else will tell the (wrong) story for them.”
This session was actually covered in detail by Higher Ed Dive. Here are a few slides:
Standardized Testing and College Grades: A Look at their Association and Why Authentic Student Work is Important
This session was led byBlaire Moody Rideout, Director of Undergraduate Admissions in the Ross School of Business at University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Blair has been active in the last few admissions cycles presenting about Ross’s implementation of portfolio assessments in their shift away from standardized tests. Blaire was joined by Mark Mills, a UMich Data Scientist.
This session provided a lot of data from Michigan and Ross about the performance of students and the value provided by tests. Their data provided a level of granularity that isn’t often provided by universities and is a great model for transparency. The biggest take away we walked away with was test scores don’t really tell you much about grades (except maybe at the lower end of test scores, less than 24 on ACT).
A few takeaways:
- –Higher test scores are less predictive of course grades.
- –College admissions needs to focus more on student’s K-12 experiences and less on external requirements.
- –“It can be interpreted that test scores can best be used to predict lower college grades, rather than as a predictor of student success, or a metric of student achievement in the admission process.”
–They found that the association between test scores and grades has significantly weakened over time (3 to 5 times weaker than in the past) and will be almost non-existent by 2025. - –Course grades have gotten better over time, perhaps not because of grade inflation but because they’ve gotten better at teaching.
Here are a few slides that were shared:
The Future of Test-Optional: Creating a Measurable and Mission-Driven Case For Your Testing Policy
This session brought together thee different colleges to discuss how their missions, values, and strategic goals inform their testing policies. Presenters were Stephen Pultz, Assistant Vice President for Enrollment at University of San Diego, Marcela Mejia-Martinez, Assistant Vice President of Admissions at Chapman University, Jason Hale, Assistant Vice President of Enrollment Management at Texas Tech University.
Our takeaways from the session:
University of San Diego reported that since becoming test blind they experienced:
- – 26.4% increase in Black student applications
- – 14.3% increase in Hispanic student applications
- – 9.8% increase enrollment of students of color
- – A transformation into an over 25% Latino and 50% POC
All of the above happened while average GPA went up.
Chapman University reported that since adopting a test optional policy, which they had been considering prior to the pandemic:
- – They have enrolled 20% Pell eligible students
- – 1st year retention rate is higher.
Texas Tech reported similar benefits from a test optional policy:
- – Enrollment from 2021-23 has grown in all departments except Architecture, esp in Arts & Sciences.
- – For its Fall 2023 class, it experienced an increase in academic warning for everyone–non-submitters and submitters.
- – Hispanic test optional enrollment increased by 25.1% and Black by 37.8% (from 2021-23)
- Pell eligibility large correlation to test optional enrollment.
- – A higher proportion of low income students apply without tests.
- – Difference in academic performance at TT for three enrollment classes (thus half the figure is from freshman year grades) was .3 of GPA (which is 51% lower than the difference at UT Austin) and prompted the University to do a better job serving the entirety of its student body.
A few themes that emerged were that new support services or approaches were implemented to meet changing student needs, improving public transparency about use of tests, and reevaluating scholarships to ensure that testing didn’t bias awarding of scholarships.
Here are a few specific comments I noted:
- – This is a test that has a difference but makes no difference.
- – Testing policy is informed by but not driven by the student performance data.
– Testing policy decisions are influenced by market position.
– All 3 schools had been discussing and researching the feasibility of changed testing policies prior to the pandemic.
– All data requires context.
Here are a few slides:
Testing Our Patience: Evaluating the Digital SAT/PSAT Transition
First, this session wins the title prize: Testing Our Patience is an amazing play on words.
The session was a panel with (from left in the image above) Ben Neely, Chief Academic Officer at Revolution Prep, Christine Grover, Director of College Counseling at Trinity Preparatory School, Gil Villanueva, Vice President for Enrollment at Rhodes College, John Thurston, Director of College Counseling at Waynflete School.
Ben was the moderator and gave good summaries of student and family reactions to the digital test, which has been mixed but skewed positive. John and Christine both discussed the challenges they encountered with having sufficient Wifi for school-wide testing and how they solved those and other issues. The real highlights, though, were the conversations about testing policy.
What we took away from the session:
- –Most colleges are still test optional.
- –Colleges that went back to requiring cited needing the test to recruit under-represented students but didn’t provide data to support that.
- –UT – Austin provided some data substantiating the test being correlated with an .86 lower GPA but calling that causal is an overreach.
- –Schools have stopped releasing admit rates for submitters vs non-submitters
- –Applicant pools at institutions with the same admit rates behave differently and we should dig into why.
- –Colleges must improve clarity about testing policy.
- –Only high scorers submitting tests is exacerbating the stress and questions for higher scores.
- –There will be 12 ways to take the ACT in April of 2025.
- –Most students do not understand well the upcoming changes to the ACT.
- –Colleges will have to create policies about the optional ACT science section.
– Testing policies preferences are often driven by faculty and not by admission staff.
These are some of the slides:
