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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A train is heading west from Albany to Buffalo, 300 miles away, at 70 miles per hour. A minivan is heading east from Buffalo to Albany, at 55 miles per hour. How many episodes of Today Explained can the family in the minivan listen to before they pass the train.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The SAT has been, for decades, the cornerstone of American college admissions. You take the test, and it essentially decides the course of the rest of your life. Some people, like the editor of the show, Matthew Collette, believe any adult you meet who, quote, can't remember what they got on the scholastic aptitude test actually just doesn't want to talk about their score. I agree with that theory.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Scott Jassik. He's the editor and founder of Inside Higher Ed. Does he remember what he got on the SAT? I do. I'm not sure I'll share it, but I do remember. He does remember. Oh, well, they've changed a lot since I took him. But they are a series of multiple choice questions designed to test vocabulary and math. There are reading passages that they have to read and then answer questions. And, you know, that's pretty much it. So just a really fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, definitely. We called up Scott because the SAT is at risk of losing its place in American college admissions right now. A lot of colleges are not requiring it anymore, and some won't even look at it when you submit it. Schools like Princeton, Stanford, and Notre Dame all make test scores optional on their applications. And this is both the SAT and the ACT, the SAT's main competitor.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are the SATs still relevant with so many schools going test optional? Not really. At the same time, the SAT has just announced it's going digital, and it's shortening the exam from three hours to two hours. No more pencils and paper, laptops instead.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And which schools have made the tests optional? Well, just about all of them did last year, and more than half of the four-year colleges have done so again this year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The coronavirus outbreak has forced the College Board to cancel all spring test dates. Students couldn't take the SAT or ACT. Many could, but many were turned away even after they registered on time because many testing centers were closed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the criticisms of the tests predate the pandemic. It's an inaccurate predictor. It's highly coachable. It's biased against many important populations. By test scores, there are white students who do better and wealthier students do better. Also, some Asian students do better, and many are uncomfortable with that as our college dividing line.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what does this mean for the test? Some people might still take it? Yes, some people are going to still take the test. In general, last year, the students who were applying to the most prestigious colleges continued to take the SAT, or more of them took the SAT. But they had the option of not taking it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so what most students who take the exams will do is they'll take the exam, get their score, and then they will find the average score at the college they are applying to. And if their score is above, they'll submit it. If it's below, they won't.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's talk about which schools specifically will be still looking at these tests and which of them won't because there's some big brands involved here, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. I mean, look, Harvard in December announced that for the next four years, they are not looking at the SAT if students don't want to submit. This is big stuff, right? I mean, Harvard often sets the standard. If they have a COVID response, other schools follow it. If they have an admissions response, I think others will similarly fall in line.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, then there's another category, which is test-blind as opposed to test-optional. Test-blind colleges will not look at an SAT score, period, even if you submit it. And that's the whole University of California system, Berkeley, UCLA, all of the UCs. And in March, the California State University system is expected to join them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, if Harvard's not looking at the SATs, why would anyone else look at them?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, I mean, there are some colleges and universities that say it helps them to pick a class, that it helps them deal with grade inflation, which is a big problem. But if the colleges find that the students admitted for this fall do well and don't drop out more than previous classes had dropouts, then that argument will go away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, the SATs just announced these changes. People are going to want to know, well, did they work? I'm not sure they're going to, but the jury is still out on that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the changes you're referring to are these SAT tests going digital? Right, going digital and becoming a shorter test. Tell us more about those changes.
--:-- Scott Jassik: Well, I mean, the digital change makes a lot of sense. Now, it will be faster and easier, and it'll work the way that students work, on a computer. Results also will come faster too. Look, students today are used to digital. They already take exams digitally. And many would find it more traumatic, I guess, to take a long paper and pencil test than a digital test. So it really makes perfect sense.
--:-- Scott Jassik: Students also prefer a shorter test. It will be two hours instead of three, with shorter reading passages and calculators allowed for the entire math portion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The changes will probably make the SAT more popular. It's just, will they be enough to overcome students' reluctance to take the test?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do students like these tests? Is that a crazy question?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, is there going to be any convincing kids that the SAT is, like, fun?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Fun, I doubt. I mean, look, it's a test. It's not fun. But the students who like the SAT and the ACT are, not surprisingly, the students who do really well. And so some students are going to continue to take it, hoping for good scores. But I don't think they'll be calling it fun.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: College admissions have always been something of a flashpoint in this country for discussions of inequality and race and meritocracy. We've covered this debate on the show before in terms of affirmative action. The Supreme Court just announced it would be hearing cases about affirmative action in college admissions. These are cases brought by a group of conservative students, mostly Asian Americans, who say they were discriminated against by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina in favor of...
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Will these new test policies make college admissions fairer? Well, many people say so. While many colleges removed the test requirement because of the pandemic, they are also thinking about the Supreme Court case. Many people expect the colleges to lose at the Supreme Court. There are not five justices with a history of backing affirmative action. So if they lose, they need to have ways to admit students that do not result in there being no black students, no Latino students.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So this is also attractive to them in that sense. Most colleges that have dropped requirements for the SAT and ACT then experience a rise in applications from minority students and a rise in admits of minority students.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How do you judge a student when you're not looking at test scores? Primarily on grades. We can look at a transcript and get three and a half years of one's academic performance versus three and a half hours on a Saturday morning. And those three and a half years on a transcript is going to tell us a whole heck of a lot more.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: While many high schools think they maybe are fooling the colleges with special GPAs that give extra points for AP classes or various other classes, most colleges redo the GPA in whatever way they like, and then they have a tool to compare. In terms of the concerns about grade inflation, they also know what students at that high school are getting generally in their grades, and they can also compare that way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Look, the college application process is a lot about students doing things because they're told to do them. You've got to study for the SAT, so that's something they do. And so, you know, students are very good at listening to others tell them what to do, but it doesn't mean they like it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hi, I'm a current senior in the class of 2022. I think that the removal of mandatory testing for college admissions is probably a good thing for college accessibility and fairness. I've seen some of my friends and peers struggle with standardized testing. Often really bright kids just don't test very well, and to a lot of us it really feels like the ACT is just a barrier to college that doesn't represent who we really are and what we can achieve.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Choose the phrase that finishes the sentence correctly. More Today Explained after this blank. Is it A, message from our sponsors? B, chance to get some app coupons? C, dollop of corporate propaganda? Or D, all of the above?
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Reading comprehension. The tone of the last segment was A. Ironic, B. Pessimistic, C. garrulous, or D. Agnostic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Nicole Hemmer. I am a research associate at Columbia University and a columnist for CNN. Beautiful. So, Nicole, how big a deal are these changes to how colleges decide which students to admit?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: It's a huge deal. I mean, the SAT has been a staple of college admissions for decades. I mean, your parents would have taken it if they went to college. Chances are your grandparents might have taken it, depending on how old you are, when they went to college. So moving to test optional is a real sea change.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And it reflects, you know, a broader change that's happening at universities as they try to figure out how do we make admissions more equitable? How do we bring in classes that look more like the population of the United States?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How did the SAT become such a sort of essential part of this process in the first place?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: So it actually has its roots in World War I. It was during that time at the dawn of modern social science when the army started having people take IQ tests. And the idea was you've brought all of these people, all these men really. Men and women of different religions, of different races, of different nationalities. From across the United States, how do you evaluate them?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And one of the ways they did this was through these IQ tests. And it became so popular that the test was adapted in the 1920s for the College Board. And they started using the SAT and some other tests. And pretty much by the 1940s, the SAT had become the gold standard of testing for college admissions and has been ever since.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I want you to open your books and work out correct solutions to the problems you missed. And why did colleges want something like this?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: They weren't just comfortable admitting men whose fathers had gone to Harvard before them? They were pretty comfortable with that.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there as I felt that it is not just a college, but it's a university with something definite to offer. Then, too, I wish to go to the same college as my father. To be a Harvard man is an enviable distinction, and one I seriously hope I shall attain.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Legacy admissions has been a big part of colleges for a long time. April 23rd, 1935, John F. Kennedy.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: But the idea was that the SAT could make college admissions more meritocratic. This idea that the United States is a big country and it's a big country dedicated to this idea that everyone gets an equal shot. And if you have the SAT, you can find that diamond in the rough, that farm boy out in Kansas whose parents may have never gone to college, but has this kind of native intelligence that at either a public land grant university or at an elite school on the East Coast could be shaped into one of the next leaders of the United States.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: And it was, as you can tell from that description, it was still a very constricted vision of what counts as meritocracy, right? It's almost universally white, almost universally men. Of course, there are co-ed colleges in the U.S. at that point, but the elite colleges were pretty much all male only. And so it was this idea of meritocracy that fit in with the very limited vision of universities in the early 20th century.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the SAT must start out small, but how does it get to be the sort of defining metric of college admissions?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: So it grows alongside higher education in the United States. Because elite schools are part of this consortium of the College Board, they just agree to use the SAT. It becomes standard for their admissions. That sort of spreads and becomes standard for other schools' admissions as they are copying these more elite colleges.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: But, you know, in the 1940s and 1950s, due in large part to the GI Bill, which is this massive piece of legislation passed to support returning soldiers after the war, the size of the college population in the U.S. mushrooms. GIs could get up to $500 of tuition, and that would cover tuition at any private or public institution in the United States at that time.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Suddenly, you have people going to college whose parents wouldn't have gone to college, who were middle or working class. And as those college sizes grow, so too do colleges' dependence on the SATs.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is the test that's, you know, growing in popularity similar to the one kids take today?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Yeah, it's actually pretty similar. I mean, the other big news about the SAT is it's going digital, so they're getting rid of the paper test. But before that, I mean, the questions are very similar, multiple choice questions, math problems, there's a reading section and vocabulary, all of that.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: The idea of how intelligence or preparedness is tested by the SAT has remained pretty stable over the course of the last 60 years or so.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, part of the criticisms around the SAT, at least recently, are that wealthier students can pay tutors to do better on the test. They can essentially buy a better score.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Is that a problem people talk about in the 40s and 50s and 60s?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: So they don't talk about it quite as much in the mid-century, in part because, you know, SAT test prep does start pretty early. Stan Kaplan of the Kaplan testing regime he starts offering the test in 1946 but he only offers it in New York. It really in the 1970s that it begins to spread to the rest of the country.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: But it does suggest that SAT is measuring something other than intelligence, right? Because test prep courses actually have a lot to do with how well somebody does on the test.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, imagine two people who are basically as smart as each other. But one of them has gone through all these rigorous test prep courses. They've taken hundreds of practice tests. They've been drilled on vocabulary and analogies and cultural references. And they go in to take the test. Well, the person with the same sort of level of intelligence goes in, having never seen an SAT before. Nobody in their family has seen an SAT. All they know is that this is the test you take to get into college. They have their sharpened number two pencils. Those two students are likely to do very different on the test because that level of familiarity, that practice, does have a real effect on the end results.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that, I guess, brings us to this moment where schools are saying, we don't need this anymore. It seems like we've sort of come a long way from the test's supposedly, you know, meritocratic origins.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: I think so. I mean, the test has been recognized for some time as having a lot of built-in biases. I mean, we talked about test prep, but it has clear biases in terms of performance by race, which suggests that the questions are tilted toward white test takers.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: It really isn't as meritocratic or at least not as objectively meritocratic, if there is such a thing, as the test has been purported to be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so the move to test optional, I think, does reflect an understanding by college admissions teams that, you know, this test, which measures something, is not the type of thing we want to be measuring when we think about the class that we want to admit.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: You know, it doesn't solve all the problems of inequality in colleges. It doesn't even solve most of them. But it does reflect a real attention to trying to find other metrics for building successful, diverse, equitable classes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are a lot of people out there, though, who say that, you know, getting rid of the SAT just means that universities, colleges will just have to make decisions based on other stuff that has to do with wealth and class and status. Like what kind of sports you were able to play or what kinds of extracurriculars you do, or who knows, even how much tutoring your parents were able to afford for all the other core subjects that matter for college admissions.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: Yeah, it's a fair argument because, as it turns out, capitalism has a lot of ways of lifting wealthy, well-connected people to the top. It is not a system that it's easy to make equitable on class terms, on race terms.
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: What I think that it does do, though, is it strips away the myth of objectivity, which is something that the SAT has that essays and extracurriculars and things like that don't have.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So in a way, it does this thing of recognizing that it is an inherently subjective process, and it gives more space, I think, to universities to embrace that it's a subjective process and to think about the values that are shaping the classes that they bring in, the students that they bring in.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that there is space for some kind of testing, but I think you would want to have testing that indicates to a university what kind of resources should we have in place for the students that we admit to thrive, right? It's less about saying, you know, this tells us that this student is very smart and this student is going to succeed here and is better at indicating what do we need to do to help this student succeed here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Look, I think that it is a mistake to think about universities, especially elite universities, as wholly altruistic institutions. But I do think that there has been an earnest effort over the past 20 or 30 years to figure out how to make, particularly elite universities, but I think other universities and colleges as well, how to make them serve a broader range of Americans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is certainly the case that the incoming class at Harvard, the incoming class at Purdue University, the incoming class at community colleges are much more diverse than they were 40 years ago.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that does represent a big step forward. And it is part of a conscious effort by admissions offices to cultivate a broader and more diverse student body.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But we'll always be a couple of steps behind the American population, probably.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is that a safe assumption?
--:-- Nicole Hemmer: I think that's a pretty safe assumption because of the broader inequities in American society.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hey. Hey.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It comes back to capitalism.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nicole Hemmer, she's got a podcast called Past Present, where she and her co-hosts bring historical context to present day political and cultural debates, kind of like what she did on this show today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our episode was produced by Will Reed, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: C. Are still using a Quip toothbrush or D. Can spell Ramosfrum.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We all have moments where we could have done better, like cutting your own hair. Oh, yikes. Or forgetting sunscreen, so now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. Learn more at schwab.com.
