In recent years, colleges have been under fire for the many faults in their admissions process. The 2019 college admissions scandal was a criminal conspiracy involving bribery, money laundering and application fabrication, with notable people such as Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin, that worked to sway admissions decisions at the top universities in America.
The scandal is one of the most recent proofs of how college admissions is an unfair playing field. Whether it be because of legacy students or huge family donations to a school, wealth and power play a vital part in the game that is the college admissions system.
Standardized testing is the latest component of the college admissions process to be criticized as it has proven to be an outdated and inaccurate assessment of one’s level of college preparedness.
One of the first things many tutors and teachers say to their students when preparing them for their upcoming test is that the SAT and the ACT are not measures of your intellectual abilities; they measure your ability to take a test.
What do college admissions officers gain from knowing how well you can take a test?
In theory, standardized testing is a pragmatic way to assess what one has learned; however, it does not take into consideration external factors and conditions that may affect the way a student tests. Tests lack diversity, and they do not take into consideration the different types of students that will be taking the test. English learning students, unconventional thinkers, students with anxiety and simply bad test takers all suffer because they assess students homogeneously.
Because these exams are so imperative in the world of education, it actually hinders the learning experience as people start “teaching the test” instead of fostering a challenging and critical learning environment. Standardized testing has only created a bunch of anxious students and teachers scrambling to master a test that they most likely will not find use for in the “real world.”
One test should not be the determining factor of a student’s college preparedness or intellect, especially when the origins of college admissions testing are inherently discriminatory towards marginalized communities.
According to the National Education Association (NEA), many white Anglo-Saxon nationalists in the 19th Century were worried about the infiltration of minorities into the American school system as more immigrants came into the U.S. Psychologist Carl Bringham, who claimed that African-Americans “were on the low end of the racial, ethnic, and/or cultural spectrum,” was one of the main developers of a test used to assess the aptitude of U.S army in World War I that segregated soldiers into units based on race and performance. This aptitude test heavily influenced the development of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or the SAT that we know of today.
The SAT can be seen to have displayed evident bias towards minority groups from its very beginning. Years of research prove that even as the test evolved throughout the decades, the race and class barriers that the test inflicted withstood throughout the span of time. According to Fair Test research, students of color performed significantly lower on college admissions tests, preventing them from getting the merit scholarships they needed to attend a good college, thereby contributing to the drastic racial gaps and inequities in college acceptances and enrollment.
The average score nationwide on the reading section of the SAT was 429 for Black students last year–99 points behind the average for white students. Some may argue that these low scores for people of color are a result of lack of commitment, a racist viewpoint, or incompetence. However, a lot of other factors play a role in the different performances between races. Black and brown students often come from lower-income families compared to their white counterparts, preventing them from being able to afford private tutors and SAT and ACT classes.
Standardized testing is an outdated, inaccurate and unrealistic test of aptitude that does more detriment to the high school learning experience than help. The University of California Board has already unanimously voted to not require the SAT or ACT on student application as a lawsuit claims they are “deeply biased and provide no meaningful information about a student’s ability to succeed.”
This has inspired many other schools like George Washington University and Hampshire College to follow their lead. Standardized testing is one of the many ways systemic racism still exists in society. It creates a huge barrier preventing applicants of color from achieving the education they deserve and perpetuates the prejudiced conditions that they live under today.
Article by Kristal Maimo-Fokum of John F. Kennedy High School
Graphic by Khanh Nguyen of Richard Montgomery High School