On my desk right now sit maybe a hundred studies on the SAT. They are written by the College Board, the Educational Testing Service and academics from UPenn, Chicago and Duke, as well as people from the dubious National Center for Fair and Open Testing. These studies correlate things like SAT, SAT II and high school grade point average with things like college GPA and retention rates. Now if all of that sounds boring to you, then we are in the same boat.
However, after about a hundred hours of studying this data I have come to realize that most of the pile is useless. These studies are statistics from places unlike Brown, about students very unlike us. Brown should not require the SAT for admission. This is not because correlated statistics told me, but because our institution is buying into an unfair admission metric. The test is excessive and unnecessary. It hurts students of color, students from lower-income families and women.
To simplify the admission world to test scores is willfully misleading. Yet we require the test - not because it is crucial to our admission decisions but because it fits into a model that the outside world has set for the process. Our requirement is little more than quiet pandering to U.S. News and World Report.
The justifications for using test scores in admission include the need to whittle down a large applicant pool and the value of an external measure by which to gauge high school grades. However, standardized tests cost students and parents a great deal of time and money, produce unnecessary anxiety, divert attention away from more worthwhile academic pursuits and un-necessarily truncate applicant pools. Simplicity and ease for the Admission Office should not be our standards; the careful consideration of our values should be what shapes our process.
Colleges like Bates and Bowdoin have found that the SAT optional policy appeals to all the subgroups of students that you would expect. They are those who are often not being helped by the SAT in admission: "women, rural students, immigrants, learning disabled students, students with spike talents in something (arts, chemistry, athletics, debate, theater, dance, political or campus leadership), and students who speak a second language, no matter what their ethnicity or citizenship." In addition, at these colleges, which are generally regarded as highly demanding academic environments, non-submitters of the SAT earn nearly the exact same grades, and graduate at exactly the same rate.
Admission requirements and standards are a lens through which the outside world can view the values of our institution. As the requirement of an inequitable and biased quantitative measure is ubiquitous, it does little to hurt our standing. However, Brown should take a more nuanced view of the matter, explaining that just as people at Brown take an individualized, holistic approach to their education, so should our admission process. We should deemphasize the role tests play in our process, as they do not measure the range of intellectual qualities and motivation that Brown requires.
When Brown dismantled its average curriculum in 1969, it moved the University in a new direction. Crafted mainly by campus activists, the New Curriculum encouraged exploration, creativity and individuality. This move placed a faith in students and their abilities to create and shape their time and curriculum here at Brown. Yet, despite this "freedom with responsibility," we require our applicants to follow a narrow path. The skills that are required for college are so multifaceted, and students have such wide and varied types of precollegiate success that we as an institution should have some variation and imagination in what we ask our applicants to supply. In short, Brown should allow its applicants to form their applications through an exploration of themselves, with creativity and individuality.
The policy of no testing, if implemented, can speak to the individual attention and genuine intellectual challenge that Brown gives its students, both in admission and after enrollment. This policy will require us to take a more careful and personal approach to admission, one we already are close to. It will expand our applicant pool both in quality and in ethnic, regional and intellectual diversity. It will drive down acceptance rates (as more students apply for the same number of spots) and will continue Brown's history of moral and intellectual challenges to the status quo.
Zac Townsend '08 aspires to moral dominance.
