Xavier University announces it will no longer require the SAT or ACT for admission.

https://www.wcpo.com/news/educ...graduate-application

As a graduate of Xavier I don’t think this is a good idea. I don’t think the SAT or ACT are end all but I think it is a valuable part of ones admission portfolio and to cut it out completely seems a bit silly.
I am no test taking master and actually do horribly on tests but still feel they are important to an overall understanding of a person.

I am also no academic wizard either.
I had a 3.2 GPA in High School, took the SAT once, and scored a 993 but I also had a lot of extracurriculars as well as work experience that I do believe is a huge part of what should be considered.

I did 2 years at Wittenberg University and 2 years at Xavier University neither of which is a slouch by any means in the academic world. No Ivy League but certainly schools that have numerous excellent programs.
I was accepted to every school I applied to:
Wittenberg
Xavier
Davis & Elkins
Union College
Indiana Wesleyan (the actual one not the bazillion satellite campus that are everywhere now)
Eastern Kentucky
The College of New Jersey
Asbury College (though a University now)

All pretty solid schools and I had an SAT of 993. So clearly at these places it was not all about the test score nor should it be but I certainly think it should be included in the overall understanding of the student.

What is next removing the LSAT requirement from Law School admissions?

I think the SAT is starting to make itself irrelevant with its, "Disadvantage Index".

Good. The test taking industry needs to die. The tests have NEVER been good at predicting college success. When they were originally developed they were to be used as a comparison tool only, not a set score for admission standards. The whole business of prepping to take these courses is crazy. Other metrics are much better. The LSAT and the GRE are just as bad. I do hope they eliminate them as well. Besides law school graduates are starving these days due to an oversupply.

Its time I admit I never took the SAT! Nope. Along about my senior year in college, I was ordered to the Deans office. Instead I went to my advisors office first. I showed him my letter ordering me there. He said it was about my failure to take the test. His advice to me was to go as "ordered", but then not bother with the test.

It was needed by the University to establish my predicted grade point average. I already had a grade point average so there was no reason to predict it. My advisors view was they probably screwed up big time. Giving me grades I'd earned instead of what they should have been.i

But now I've retired. I'm amused when I get information about my "career". I have no interest in my career. I stepped out of that rat race 10 years ago. Felt good. I used to excel at taking tests. Now I won't even take a survey over the phone.

They are all money makers!

quote:

Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:
Good. The test taking industry needs to die. The tests have NEVER been good at predicting college success. When they were originally developed they were to be used as a comparison tool only, not a set score for admission standards. The whole business of prepping to take these courses is crazy. Other metrics are much better. The LSAT and the GRE are just as bad. I do hope they eliminate them as well. Besides law school graduates are starving these days due to an oversupply.

Ditto.

College Board is the evil empire. It's a money machine and it's part of a corrupt university system. Standardized tests like this prove little and only serve to harm students financially.

Trust me, it's an arms race for SAT prep in my area. Like hundreds (yes, plural) of dollars AN HOUR for SAT prep, just to make a kid competitive at not just top-tier schools, but even mid/top.

And while those kids are spending tens of thousands just to prepare for a damned test--they AREN'T doing their actual school work.

Burn. It. Down.

quote:

What is next removing the LSAT requirement from Law School admissions?

Actually, the University of Arizona and, I believe Harvard, will now accept the GMAT in place of the LSAT. As someone with a JD, I am not okay with that. The LSAT is its own kind of special and should be taken by all those that apply to law school.

What happens when kids are weak test takers? One test determines their academic career? Who is making money off those tests? The bureaucracy will always believe it is relevant. That's what the SAT/ACT/GRE/GMAT are to me. If a kid is or isn't going to make it through college, I doubt a test before they get to college can determine that.

Example below:

I'm not a strong test taker, never took the SAT, ACT, GRE or GMAT. I was a mediocre student in high school but somehow have a BA and MBA. Sorry but I can't memorize and regurgitate information for tests. But when it comes to reading and writing papers with some thinking thrown in there, I'm all good.

This is not exactly a new thing. Some schools have been doing this for quite awhile. Bates College in Maine for instance did not require or use SAT scores in their admissions process. I was accepted to Bates but didn't end up going there. This was over 20 years ago.

When you get college credit for just showing up. Or get credit for protesting Trump. Or needing a safe place for exams. Or credit because you feel the exam is biased towards white students. These devalue the hard work, sweat, studying and accomplishing good grades of ALL the graduates who came before.

quote:

Originally posted by Edmond:
What happens when kids are weak test takers? One test determines their academic career? Who is making money off those tests? The bureaucracy will always believe it is relevant. That's what the SAT/ACT/GRE/GMAT are to me. If a kid is or isn't going to make it through college, I doubt a test before they get to college can determine that.

Example below:

I'm not a strong test taker, never took the SAT, ACT, GRE or GMAT. I was a mediocre student in high school but somehow have a BA and MBA. Sorry but I can't memorize and regurgitate information for tests. But when it comes to reading and writing papers with some thinking thrown in there, I'm all good.

Did you read my post?

I said nothing about the tests being the sole determination for admission I also stated that I think that is a bad idea.
But I do think it is an important part of ones admissions portfolio.

As to this money stuff you all are referring to I’ll admit I guess I am out of the loop.
I think the test cost $50 take when I did it some 16 years ago.
Had No idea it costs thousands now.
Never heard of anyone taking a prep test course. We just showed up on Saturday to take the test.

that's pretty sad actually --

schools should look at numerous factors : SAT / ACT scores being one in the mix

test scores
GPA
class rank
extra-curriculars / volunteering / etc

i tend to like standardized tests because it is an objective 'standard' against which you can judge thousands -- 'apples to apples'

there are issues with it sure - but I would be wary of schools which dropped the test

I'm guessing there are larger issues at play at those schools like declining admissions they want to compensate for

------------------------------------

I never took a SAT either only the ACT.
Got into to a local college in Iowa - got an AA then transferred to the University of Houston where I got my BA in Business.

I'm not surprised.

The tests are not the problem, the Universities and parental expectations are. All these high schools that indoctrinated the kids to believing they needed a 4 year degree to get anywhere in life are the perpetrators of the problem. Universities hitched into the bandwagon, and have hosed the kids.

These days, the 6-year matriculation rate for all students (race, origin, and sex) Hoover's around 54%. For woman it is 56%, for men it is 51%. Private school is about 58%, and public school is 51%.

We (USA) have the highest % of high school graduates enroll within 15 months of graduation, and have the lowest 1 year retention rate of all first world countries. The four year graduation rate is in the single digits as of 2017 (as % of those enrolled four years earlier).

College has not gotten harder, we simply push too many kids into college, and the kids are too soft these days.

If they don't have something like SAT/ACT, how do they objectively evaluate students from different schools, school system, states, and even countries, that do have equivalent curricula and/or evaluations methods? There needs to be a system for equivalently evaluating students.

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
If they don't have something like SAT/ACT, how do they objectively evaluate students from different schools, school system, states, and even countries, that do have equivalent curricula and/or evaluations methods? There needs to be a system for equivalently evaluating students.

Every college admissions office is filled with reps who are assigned to regions. They become intimately familiar with the schools in their region and know what the programs at each school in that region is like, to a greater or lesser degree. Because the rep has all the schools in a single area (and around here it's often like Philly/NYC/Jersey region), they can judge large pools of applicants from the same area because they are familiar with all those schools.

Every year, admissions officers from universities get together and they really do look at each school's profiles and judge them (i.e. how much do we "believe" what a school says about its profile). Universities are all comparing the results of kids from X Y or Z school who have come to their institution--and they talk about it quite openly. Then they hit the college counsellors at those schools with things like, "hey, you've got some grade inflation going on, so we might not value your diploma so highly any longer". It's like downgrading a country's credit rating at the World Bank.

Standardized testing is going the way of the dodo and has been for years. AP curriculum is disappearing rapidly and SAT/ACT are on the outs too.

In their place (and, mind you, the reps know the schools), college admissions offices have begun asking for external metrics like students having articles or work published in journals, doing art shows outside of school, presenting at conferences, etc. That way the school can't just say what it wants about its own rigor because kids are being judged by outside entities.

And, at the far more radical end of the evaluation spectrum, there's a new thing called Mastery Transcript Consortium that is being taken in lieu of College Board rackets. MTC is a whole new paradigm in the evaluation of students that doesn't revolve around standardized testing.

Just as an FYI, at Vanderbilt, for instance, the region rep for our area reads north of 1200 applications per year just from this region. Each application has, usually, 3 letters of rec, transcripts, about half a dozen essays, personal statements, answers to questions and perhaps also an art portfolio.

So each rep is reading literally dozens of pages per kid x 1000+ kids; they outright reject some, and then the remainder from all the regions make it to an admissions committee who reads them and they argue over those final kids' admission.

Given the amount that each kid's app involves (you could check out Common App if you want an idea of what it involves, minus each school's unique supplements), SAT is a dinosaur. There are a myriad of ways to judge a kid that are a better determiner of their longevity in a school (which is what they really care about) than SAT.