-Evan Parrotta
In the past I’ve made a lot of starving liberal arts student’s jokes; more than the number of liberal arts majors with jobs (but less than the number of unemployed ones.) But now I have to find room in my heart for them, or at least the people educating them. Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts has made a decision that has splashed their way into my pool of interest with the choice to not to accept SAT/ACT scores from applicants. This isn’t just making it so you can omit the scores either, this is them outright saying that they will not accept them at all! College President Jonathan Lash released an explanation on why they were making this choice, saying that:
“We no longer chase volumes of applications to superficially inflate our “selectivity” and game the U.S. News rankings. We no longer have to worry that any applicant will “lower our average SAT/ACT scores” and thus lower our U.S. News ranking. Instead we choose quality over quantity and focus attention and resources on each applicant and their full portfolio.”
So what does this mean for the SAT/ACT and standardized testing as a whole? Well Hampshire is a liberal arts school that relies on alternative grading methods rather than standardized tests. In short, their alternative practices and being a privet college leaves room for other universities to make excuses for keeping the old standards, but it begs the question, when Hampshire College has one of the highest rates of undergrads returning for graduate school, will other universities follow suit? The SAT and the ACT are known to have cultural biases and a single score cannot reflect the academic success of a student in a college environment, so what do they really do for schools beyond raising their averages? They help turn the growing influx of applicants into a bunch of numbers, helping to weed out the bottom percentiles and helping schools artificially create more appealing classes as well as to show rankings lists how “selective” they are. So here’s to Hampshire College for stepping it up and replacing standardized test scores with students high school grades from all four years, recommendations, taking the time to have in-person interviews with students, having students write more essays, and even taking into consideration student’s “creative supplements” which may be added optionally.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/09/25/what-one-college-discovered-when-it-stopped-accepting-satact-scores/?tid=hybrid_collaborative_2_na
In the past I’ve made a lot of starving liberal arts student’s jokes; more than the number of liberal arts majors with jobs (but less than the number of unemployed ones.) But now I have to find room in my heart for them, or at least the people educating them. Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts has made a decision that has splashed their way into my pool of interest with the choice to not to accept SAT/ACT scores from applicants. This isn’t just making it so you can omit the scores either, this is them outright saying that they will not accept them at all! College President Jonathan Lash released an explanation on why they were making this choice, saying that:
“We no longer chase volumes of applications to superficially inflate our “selectivity” and game the U.S. News rankings. We no longer have to worry that any applicant will “lower our average SAT/ACT scores” and thus lower our U.S. News ranking. Instead we choose quality over quantity and focus attention and resources on each applicant and their full portfolio.”
So what does this mean for the SAT/ACT and standardized testing as a whole? Well Hampshire is a liberal arts school that relies on alternative grading methods rather than standardized tests. In short, their alternative practices and being a privet college leaves room for other universities to make excuses for keeping the old standards, but it begs the question, when Hampshire College has one of the highest rates of undergrads returning for graduate school, will other universities follow suit? The SAT and the ACT are known to have cultural biases and a single score cannot reflect the academic success of a student in a college environment, so what do they really do for schools beyond raising their averages? They help turn the growing influx of applicants into a bunch of numbers, helping to weed out the bottom percentiles and helping schools artificially create more appealing classes as well as to show rankings lists how “selective” they are. So here’s to Hampshire College for stepping it up and replacing standardized test scores with students high school grades from all four years, recommendations, taking the time to have in-person interviews with students, having students write more essays, and even taking into consideration student’s “creative supplements” which may be added optionally.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/09/25/what-one-college-discovered-when-it-stopped-accepting-satact-scores/?tid=hybrid_collaborative_2_na