Harvard, which ushered in the exam era, is personally putting an end to it?

Text/Akil Bello

In the 1920s, Harvard University adopted the SAT as an entrance exam, sparking a nascent movement of standardized entrance exams among the elite. In the 1960s, when the UC system took the same approach, it made admissions testing a national trend and extended it beyond private universities. Once again, the Harvard and UC systems are a bellwether for the impending changes in higher education and the entire education system. Over the past few months, Harvard university has announced that the exam will be optional for the next 4 years, while California's public universities have decided to stop considering the SAT and ACT.

The most public end comes in undergraduate admissions tests and SAT/ACT, but admissions offices in kindergartens, high schools, and graduate schools are also rejecting standardized tests. Berkeley announced that most of its graduate programs would not require a GRE (Graduate Entrance Examination), Georgia State University's Business School of Business announced it would permanently eliminate the GMAT requirement, Governor Margie Walker High School announced it would cancel an entrance exam, and New York City Mayor Deshow announced that New York City would end the practice of testing gifted courses for 4-year-olds. The announcements underscore the almost universal abandonment of standardized tests that began before the pandemic, but the trend has accelerated over the past 18 months.

From a purely scientific point of view, these changes are long overdue. Relying primarily or entirely on standardized tests should never be possible. Leading associations for education (AERA), psychology (APA), and assessment (NCME) have published joint standards for educational testing that actively discourage standardized testing as the only factor in making high-risk decisions. The guidelines were implemented in the 1980s, when many of the newly formed priority public high schools were highly influenced by the A Nation At Risk report, which touted the decline of public schools and lowering standards, as well as the established admissions process that relies heavily on exams.

Cover cover of the 2014 edition of the Standard for Educational and Psychological Testing and Standard 12.10 Illustration Source: Akil Bello

These test schools are largely modeled after the old schools of Boston and New York. New York City's special schools, which are the only ones that insist on denying admission to exams at any level from kindergarten to graduate school, violate joint guidelines but are written into a state law that many believe is designed to perpetuate apartheid. In 2011, there were 165 outstanding merit-based public testing schools in the United States, 60 percent of which placed strong or moderate emphasis on test scores in their admissions. Today, that number is about 20. Lowell High School in San Francisco, Boston Latin School in Boston, Julia M. Miller in Philadelphia Both the R. Masterman Laboratory and The Model School and Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax have changed their teaching processes to eliminate tests, reduce reliance on scores, or expand the number of tests considered.

The trend towards exams becoming optional and the readjustment with the scientific principles used in exams is not limited to public schools. A survey of more than 50 existing requirements for senior private schools found that only a handful of schools (42 percent) will require next year's applicants to take an entrance exam.

Jill Lee, director of admissions at the San Francisco Bay Area School of Casdiga, said the school not only made the test optional, but also stopped accepting test scores altogether, noting that the school administration had begun to discuss the requirement to cancel the entrance test before the pandemic; the multiple choice questions in the test did not show students' readiness, but the written essay provided more perspectives for students to express themselves easily in writing. During the pandemic, schools in Castiga and other districts joined forces to adopt a proctored paper sent to applicants via Zoom, which they found to provide more useful information than ISEE or SSAT.

Taryn Grogan is director of admissions and strategic engagement at Nueva School, which is also based in the Bay Area. He said entrance exams have always been the smallest part of their admissions process, and that scores on entrance exams are often placed at the back of a document, and they only consider scores after assessing all the other more important factors. She further noted that schools are paying attention to the dialogue in which exams become optional in higher education and may follow their policies.

Exam cancellations have also taken root in state legislation. The Colorado legislature recently passed a law that allows all state universities to take the exam for optional admission, while the Illinois legislature requires its colleges to do the same. Both the legislatures of Maryland and New York have bills that attempt to make the exam optional state law. Even in Florida, which is known for its commitment to the test, Republican governors have proposed changes to state test procedures and policies that would significantly change the role of the test.

As a result, policy changes in admissions offices and state legislatures have forced test publishers to change the way they market. Gone are the ideas that exams pick the students with the strongest learning abilities, that exams are inherently fair and necessary. Exam publishers have begun to discourage over-reliance on (but still in use) exams, acknowledging that exams can do more harm than good and proposing the best way to "choose an exam" in the case of an exam included.

Over the past 30 years, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) has lost its contract to oversee the GMAT, LSAT, and MCAT, but it has been particularly aggressive in marketing its remaining major entrance exam, the GRE. While allowing the GRE to compete with other graduate exams, it also opened up new markets for ETS exams, while also accelerating the social media movement of #GRExit. From Princeton University to Brown University to Colorado State University, hundreds of graduate programs have announced that they will no longer require the GRE as an admission criterion for graduate and doctoral programs. In addition, more than half of the most prestigious MBA programs have gone from requiring only the GMAT exam to accepting the GMAT or GRE exam as optional. Law schools have been slower, but in the past year, a years-long struggle has finally reached its climax aimed at getting law schools to adopt a more flexible approach to entrance exams. More than 30 prestigious U.S. law schools have developed flexible admission policies (accepting LSAT or GRE) or optional exams.

Whether for self-interest, research, the search for greater diversity, or to remove barriers for students from low-income families, elementary, high school, college, and graduate school recognize that the belief that testing can level the playing field has yet to be realized.

For the first time in nearly a century, a child born today has a real possibility of getting into a respected school from kindergarten to doctoral degree without having to spend thousands of dollars on preparatory courses, hundreds of hours of extracurricular study or dozens of Saturday morning exams.

Akil Bello is a Forbes contributor and expresses opinions on behalf of individuals only.

Translated by Stephen