Harvard’s move to test-optional admissions through 2026– applicants won’t have to submit SAT or ACT scores — will be great for admissions officials, writes Megan McArdle in a Washington Post commentary. They’ll have more power with less scrutiny.
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It will do little or nothing for disadvantaged students, based on pre-pandemic research.
“Standardized tests mirror other patterns of disadvantage in society, such as race and income,” writes McArdle. But so do other measures of merit. Grades, essays, “well-curated extracurriculars and so forth all get better when a college-educated parent is directing the process, and using their incomes for tutors or consultants,” she writes.
Test scores enable critics to analyze “how much of a benefit affirmative action or legacy admissions is conferring — or whether Harvard is, in fact, discriminating against Asian students, as an ongoing lawsuit alleges,” writes McArdle.
Now, just as in the past, Harvard admissions officers will admit classes that fit their idea of what Harvard should be, and if that idea included more low-income students, or underrepresented minorities, they’d already have admitted them. Instead, they have chosen to maximize other things, such as institutional prestige and future donation potential.
The difference is that making the tests optional makes it harder for the rest of us to see what, exactly, they are maximizing, or what tradeoffs they are making to get there. And admissions officers will undoubtedly be very relieved to stop talking about that.
“Holistic” test-optional admissions make it easier to discriminate against Asian Americans and harder to prove, writes Glenn Reynolds in the New York Post.
Harvard “will look more at essays, at grades, at how many buildings parents might endow and whether there might be favorable press or gossip associated with a particular admissions decision,” he writes.
As blogger Freddie deBoer writes, “Now it’s in their best interest to have even more leeway to select the bumbling doofus children of the affluent, and you’re applauding them for it in the name of ‘equity.’ Brilliant.” (“Equity” is a term woke academics have chosen because it sounds kind of like “equality,” which Americans like, but actually means active racial discrimination, which Americans don’t.)
Asian students tend to do very well on objective tests, such as the SAT, Reynolds points out. But elite schools don’t want too many Asians, so they need to stress subjective criteria.
Once the Ivy League emphasized “well-roundedness,” “leadership” and athletics over academics to keep out pushy, hard-studying Jewish immigrants, he writes. “Now it’s doing it again.”
“The gentry class is pulling up the ladders of economic and social opportunity to defend its place at the top, even as it does a worse and worse job of improving the lives of people at the bottom,” Reynolds concludes. “New York is canceling next month’s Regents exams. Same thing: less recognition for merit at the bottom, more power for the connected at the top.”