After toiling over a test for three hours straight, you can finally say you’ve successfully completed your SAT and are done with tests for good. Then the realization hits you — you still have the SAT Subject Tests and SAT Essay. Luckily for you, on Jan. 19, 2021, the College Board announced that they would no longer be conducting the SAT Essay or Subject SATs in the U.S. This comes as a relief for many students and marks the beginning of a shift in the college application: the removal of the standardized tests for good.
The College Board’s decision was sudden, albeit not completely unexpected. Though many schools still considered subject test scores, very few actually required them. Even for the schools that accepted them, the subject tests were a relatively insignificant datapoint.
The long established AP tests make the subject tests even more pointless as many of the tests had AP counterparts.
The purpose of subject tests was to test for college readiness, but there is a critical difference in measuring how a student already achieves in a class versus how they might achieve in the future. Like the SATs, the subject tests simply do not account for how a student can grow over the course of their college career—or even just from the day of the test to the end of highschool.
The same can be said for the SAT Essay which not only costs extra to take but is not recommended—let alone required—by a significant portion of colleges. After a demanding three hour test, it is not fair to expect students to then immediately write a coherent essay. There are also a variety of other avenues through which students can display their writing prowess, including the AP Language and Composition or AP Literature tests, or even just formal essays such as the Extended Essay written for the IB program.
Students already fork over hundreds of dollars to the College Board for SAT and AP tests, so the elimination of unnecessary standardized tests is a welcome sight. Even with fee waivers, lower-income families simply cannot afford to spend money for a set of tests that are ultimately useless. Putting an end to these additional expenses creates an even playing field for all students to showcase their intellectual prowess without needing to do so through expensive paper testing.
Financial reasons played a major part in the College Board’s decision to get rid of the tests. Bob Schaeffer, interim Executive Director of FairTest, said, “The College Board is simply acknowledging the economically inevitable.”
As much as the College Board tries to promote itself as a non-profit organization committed to helping students in their pursuit for higher education, in actuality they operate as your typical corporation. Once they realized that the subject tests were no longer a viable business avenue, they cut their losses.
Fortunately, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, an increasing number of schools have gone test optional and some even test blind. Even highly selective schools like the University of California school system have made the transition as a way to counter the inherent inequality posed by the SATs. The abolishment of the subject tests are just the first step in many other colleges realizing that too great of an importance is placed on the SATs.
In light of the College Board’s decisions, it is becoming obvious to many that any form of standardized testing is becoming irrelevant. Schools are no longer places where new industrial workers are being made, but rather a place of creativity and motivating a younger, brighter generation of students. As the subject tests and essay have been eliminated, so too may the SATs, AP tests and ACTs and we begin to enter an age where a student’s ability to innovate and grow is valued more than their ability to take a test.
Article by Athira Nair of Richard Montgomery High School
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