The global Corona Virus pandemic has had a tremendous impact on many things. College admission tests is among those. Let’s take a moment to review some of those changes and the impact they might have.
I think the highest impact change we’ve seen so far is a move away from the importance of standardized testing. Many colleges and universities have dropped their testing requirement or made it optional since the pandemic began. The testing services canceled test dates in the spring and summer of 2020, and while tests were offered in the fall many students, had reservations about going out to the public. As yet, no at-home testing is available from the SAT or ACT. With that in mind, I think many colleges felt like they didn’t have a choice but to move away from testing. It’s difficult to require test scores if students have limited opportunities to acquire them. Schools that don’t require tests have been around for a long time. I suspect many of those will continue their stance. However, I’m not convinced that others won’t revert back to requiring tests in the future. Their primary function is to serve as a way to compare different students from different backgrounds. A home-schooled student in California, a private school student in Florida, a public school student in Texas, and an international student from Tokyo might all have perfect grades but their educational experiences are very different. Tests serve as a way to put them on the same scale. Without those, colleges are left with a lot of guesswork.
The College Board has announced it will discontinue its Subject Tests and the optional essay on the SAT. Few colleges required the essay as I think they felt like the results were not as meaningful as other information culled from the test. It was also considerably more labor-intensive to grade. The rest of the test is multiple choice and can be machine graded. Essays must be read and graded by humans. I was a little surprised to see the subject tests going away, but as I’ve thought about it it makes sense. The Subject Tests allowed colleges to get a sense of a student’s knowledge in some specific content areas. However, they already had a way to do this in place. The College Board also publishes AP tests which students use to demonstrate what they’ve learned at the completion of AP courses. So, really, these tests largely do the same thing as Subject Tests. For the most part, colleges have told me in the past they don’t consider AP exam scores in the admission process. I think there is a good chance this will begin to shift in the absence of subject tests. That might be especially true for schools that previously required subject tests.
