Tag: SAT

Harvard Reverses Course, Brings Back Standardized Testing

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Harvard announced Thursday that it will bring back standardized testing requirements for the admission process.

The Ivy League school first dropped the testing policy in June 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and later announced in 2021 that it would extend the test-optional policy for four additional years, according to the Harvard Crimson. Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, announced that the requirement would return “starting with next year’s admissions cycle” and claimed that the reinstatement would bring “important information back into the admissions process.”

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Another Elite University Will Reinstate Standardized Testing for Admission

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Brown University

Brown University will reinstate a policy requiring standardized testing as part of the admissions process, according to a Tuesday news release.

First year applicants for next year’s admissions cycle will be required to submit standardized test scores, like the SAT or ACT, in their applications, according to the university news release. Brown suspended its testing policy in the summer of 2020 citing “unprecedented obstacles to testing” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Yale University Reinstitutes Standardized Testing in Admissions

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Yale University

Another elite university in the U.S. has backtracked on its decision to eliminate standardized testing in admissions after years of following the practice.

Yale University announced Thursday that it would be instituting a “flexible testing policy,” which allows students to submit several different test scores for admissions, including ACT, SAT, International Baccalaureate, and Advanced Placement scores, according to a Yale website. The university said that after performing extensive research, they found that “test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future.”

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Elite Colleges Reconsidering SAT Score Requirements

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Several elite universities are considering reversing recent decisions to reduce or even eliminate requirements for application that include standardized test scores such as the SAT exams.

According to Axios, multiple colleges used the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to weaken the importance of SAT and ACT test scores in most student applications. But in recent weeks, several schools have reversed course; Yale is considering repealing its prior policy of making SAT/ACT requirements optional, with Dartmouth already reinstating the requirements earlier this month. MIT reversed a similar policy back in 2022.

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College Board Refuses to Revise Courses to Follow New Florida Law Restricting Sex, Gender Instruction

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The College Board refused to revise its Advanced Placement courses in response to new Florida laws limiting school instruction on controversial sexual topics.

The board, a nonprofit that produces the SAT and Advanced Placement programs, “will not modify our courses to accommodate restrictions on teaching essential, college-level topics,” it stated in a recent news release.

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Florida First State to Accept Classic Learning Test as Alternative to SAT, ACT

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Florida has become the first state in the nation to officially accept the Classic Learning Test as an alternative to SAT and ACT, the latter of which are considered ideologically slanted to the left.

The legislation, signed earlier this month by Gov. Ron DeSantis, makes the exam eligible as an option for students seeking to qualify for state-funded scholarships to Florida colleges and universities. It also allows school districts to offer the CLT to 11th graders.

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Florida Seeks to Replace SAT with CLT, Following Classical Education Trend

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ feud with the College Board is calling attention to alternatives in standardized testing methods, including the Classical Learning Test (CLT).

DeSantis began pushing back against the College Board, which administers the SAT entrance exam and Advanced Placement (AP) curricula, in January when his administration rejected the trial-run of the AP African American Studies course in the state of Florida.

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Commentary: Accreditation Is a Means of Government Control in Education

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Accreditation pervades American education from kindergarten through graduate school. It has become a means through which the government enforces subpar educational outcomes and increases its power.

Of course, it didn’t start out that way.

Primary and secondary accreditation began in the 1880s as a voluntary method to improve quality among schools and establish standards for students preparing for college.

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Tennessee Universities Reinstate Standardized Testing Requirement

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The University of Tennessee System (UT) announced recently that it has ended its test-optional admissions policy. 

The new policy requires first-year applicants to submit an ACT or SAT score in order to be considered for the Fall 2023 semester.

Melissa Tindell, executive director of communications at the UT system, told Campus Reform that standardized test scores are part of a “holistic” admissions process. 

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Commentary: MIT Bucks the Trend and Reinstates Its SAT/ACT Requirement

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SAT multiple choice exam with a number 2 pencil

In case you missed it, on Monday MIT announced that they would be reinstating their SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles. Like many universities, MIT had ditched the tests during the pandemic.

Even prior to the pandemic, however, there had been a widespread push to abandon these tests to enhance diversity.

“Data shows tests like the SAT are biased against students from low-income households. Poorer students tend to perform worse on the test,” CNN reported in 2015. “Blacks and Hispanics also consistently score lower on the SAT than whites.” (CNN conveniently left out that Asian Americans score much higher than whites, presumably because it didn’t fit the narrative.)

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The Online SAT Will Be Shorter and Easier

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Woman on laptop

A common college admissions test, the SAT, will roll out its online version in the U.S. starting in March 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported. The new test is reportedly expected to be easier, shorter and simpler.

The test will be reduced from three hours to two with shorter reading passages followed by single questions, while math problems will be less wordy with calculators permitted for every question, according to Priscilla Rodriguez, vice president of college readiness assessments at the College Board, the test’s operator and regulator, the WSJ reported.

“The digital SAT will be easier to take, easier to give and more relevant,” Rodriguez told the WSJ.

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Commentary: Critical Race Theory Has Radically Transformed America’s Corporations and Public Schools

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People in the streets protesting

Just four weeks ago, I wrote about the rising resistance to the woke craze and critical race theory, and much has transpired since then.

Here in California, even Disneyland has not been spared the wrath of the crazies. On May 7, the incomparable Christopher Rufo reported that “The Wokest Place on Earth” now includes employee trainings on systemic racism, white privilege, white fragility, and white saviors, and also launched racially segregated “affinity groups” at the company’s headquarters.

But just five days later, Rufo disclosed that Disney “has removed its entire antiracism program from the company’s internal portal, effectively scrubbing it out of existence.” Rufo added, “This is a major victory in the war against ‘woke capital,’” and noted that a “significant backlash from the public” was responsible for the shift. While some skeptics suggested that the policy was being “tweaked or rebranded, not scrubbed,” Rufo responded, “Possibly, but small victories start to add up. We’ve set the precedent—and forced a $329 billion company to back down.”

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University of Tennessee, Knoxville to Require SAT, ACT Scores For Home-Schoolers, But Not For Public School Students Through Fall 2025

Corinne Murdock
Person filling in exam answers

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) will be test-optional until fall 2025 for all applicants – unless you were home-schooled. UTK will prohibit home-schoolers from capitalizing on their test-optional policy, as well as those students from schools that didn’t use alpha or numerical grading systems. UTK said their decision reflected a commitment to equity in a press release issued on Thursday.

The test-optional policy doesn’t mean that eligible applicants get a free pass entirely from admissions. According to the UTK admissions page, applicants that don’t submit their ACT or SAT scores will be considered a “test-optional applicant” and must submit an additional essay. However, the essay has less to do with academics and more to do with character – the current prompt this year asks applicants to recount an example of their leadership in a personal essay.

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University System of Georgia Reinstates ACT, SAT Requirement

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Reading and English exam booklet

The University System of Georgia is requiring for next school year’s round of admissions either ACT or SAT test scores from all applying students.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Get Schooled Blog reports that this is part of a larger push by the system to firmly return Georgia’s schools to the pre-COVID status quo.

The system said in a statement that it had “asked all campuses to plan for resuming normal operations for the Fall 2021 semester.”

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Commentary: Getting Rid of the SAT Essay Won’t Help Anyone

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It’s official. Last month, the College Board announced that it would discontinue the essay-writing section of the SAT. It’s the latest in a series of recent decisions to reduce the use of standardized testing in college admissions. Proponents of the decision cited claims of racism and bias against underrepresented groups. But those claims don’t hold water. And ditching the writing portion of the SAT is unlikely to help anyone. 

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Testing Giant College Board to Sever Financial Ties with China after Blackburn Letter

The Center Square

College Board, the entity responsible for developing SAT and AP tests, will sever financial ties with the Chinese Confucius Institute Headquarters (Hanban) at the end of the year.

U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee, and six other U.S. senators sent a letter to College Board CEO David Coleman last week, asking for clarification of the board’s financial relationship with Hanban and the extent of Chinese government influence on test development and guest teacher placements in the U.S.

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The Tennessee Star Report: Noah Tyler of Classic Learning Test Talks About Their Alternative to the ‘Progressive’ Influenced SAT and ACT Standardized Testing

Julie Carr

Live from music row on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – Leahy spoke to Chief Strategy Officer Noah Tyler from Classic Learning Test about their new approach to standardized testing.

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Commentary: Can Americans ‘Handle the Truth’ About Individual Achievement Differences?

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by George Leef   In the 1992 movie A Few Good Men, there is a courtroom scene where the prosecuting attorney (played by Tom Cruise) tells the defendant Marine officer Nathan Jessup (played by Jack Nicholson) that he wants the truth. To that, Jessup shouts back, “You can’t handle the truth.” What brings that to mind is the recent revelation that the College Board (CB) has begun calculating an “adversity score” for each student who takes its aptitude test, the SAT. Apparently, the people running the CB don’t believe that we can handle the truth that individual students vary in their academic abilities, and therefore their actual SAT scores must be adjusted (“put in context”) to supposedly reflect the circumstances of the test taker. Schools will receive adversity scores that boost the actual scores of students to the degree that the CB thinks they have faced adversity in their lives. How well students are actually prepared for academic work will now be hidden behind an egalitarian gauze that is supposed to make things fairer. Strangely, the news about this change in the SAT was not trumpeted by the CB itself but rather was revealed in the Wall Street Journal. Author…

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Texas School Cuts Ties with SAT Over Controversial ‘Adversity Scoring’

Chris Butler

  Members of the Houston, Texas-based Saint Constantine School announced Thursday they will do away with all SAT prep and AP/PSAT programming. School officials said in an emailed statement the SAT’s new adversity score prompted them to act. As The Tennessee Star reported, the people responsible for the SAT exams now assign an adversity score to every student to consider his or her social and economic background. Saint Constantine spokeswoman Megan Mueller (pictured above) said the school will purge itself of the SAT prep and AP/PSAT programming in 2020. “We hope to see schools across the country do the same, and that more people will start to move toward the CLT as a sane option in the world of college admission and standardized testing,” Mueller said in the statement. Mueller did not return The Star’s request for comment Thursday. According to the school’s website, Saint Constantine educates through classical, Christian, practical education and is a mission of the Antiochian Orthodox Church in the Diocese of Mid-America. Jackie Archer, affiliated with Tennessee Rising and Tennessee Textbook Advocates, which looks for bias in public school textbooks, told The Star earlier this week that politics motivates the change in the SAT scoring process.…

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SAT ‘Adversity Scores’ Part of ‘a Left-Wing Strategy,’ Tennessee Expert Says

Chris Butler

  The people responsible for the SAT exams now assign an adversity score to every student to consider their social and economic background. Critics, including a Tennessee education expert, say the adversity scores are ridiculous. According to The Wall Street Journal, colleges will take the numbers into account while reviewing students’ college applications. The paper said the people who oversee the SAT have introduced this concept to clamp down on “income inequality.” Jackie Archer, affiliated with Tennessee Rising and Tennessee Textbook Advocates, which looks for bias in public school textbooks, said politics motivate this. “It is another left-wing strategy to break down the traditional merit-based systems of the past, further dumb-down Americans, and put ‘diversity’ above common-sense policy,” Archer told The Tennessee Star in an email Monday. According to The Wall Street Journal, The College Board is a New York-based nonprofit that oversees the SAT. Jeremy Tate, president of the Maryland-based CLT Exam, said the SAT favors the controversial Common Core standards — and he also said his CLT test is a better alternative. “At CLT we will avoid speaking about the adversity score, but I will say this,” Tate told The Star. “The College Board long, long ago abandoned any clear…

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Commentary: The New SAT ‘Adversity Score’ Turns the Idea of Meritocracy Into a Sham

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by Jarret Stepman   It would be nice to think that high school students can get into a good university based on their abilities or talents, but a proposed change to the SAT shows how the concept of meritocracy has been turned into a sham. The College Board, according to The Wall Street Journal, will now assign an “adversity score” to SAT test takers, “calculated using 15 factors including the crime rate and poverty levels from the student’s high school and neighborhood.” “There are a number of amazing students who may have scored less [on the SAT] but have accomplished more,” said David Coleman, chief executive of the College Board, according to The Wall Street Journal. “We can’t sit on our hands and ignore the disparities of wealth reflected in the SAT.” The adversity rating has already been used by 50 colleges in 2018, but will eventually extend to significantly more colleges. Every student who takes the SAT will receive this adversity score, according to the Journal, but the students and parents won’t know what it is. Of course, how something as subjective as “adversity” can actually be boiled down to a number for each person is already dubious. Worse,…

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Joe Carter Commentary: Make America Smart Again

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by Joe Carter   Over the past week America has been fascinated and appalled by the latest college admissions cheating scandal. Much of the attention has been focused on the bribing of coaches to get kids into school with fake athletic credentials. But the even more absurd part of the scandal is that parents were paying between $15,000 and $75,000 per test to help their children get a better score on the SAT. The parents seem to believe that the SAT was a mere hurdle to be overcome by whatever means necessary. Once the child was admitted to the college, they would be swept along into a life of wealth and prestige. That’s not entirely wrong, of course. As economist Bryan Caplan says, “If you can get your less-than-brilliant, less-than-driven child admitted, he’ll probably get to impersonate a standardly awesome Ivy League graduate for the rest of his life.” It’s true there’s a correlation between scoring well on the SAT and getting into a good college, as well as a correlation between a college degree and social mobility. But the cheating parents seem to think there is a direct line between “score well on the SAT” and “economic security.” The reality is the…

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EXCLUSIVE:  Rep. Sheila Butt:  Bill Focuses On The Success of Our Students

Laura Baigert

Rep. Sheila Butt (R-Columbia) told The Tennessee Star in an exclusive interview on Capitol Hill that HB 617, a bill she has sponsored in the current session of the Tennessee General Assembly, will improve options for high school testing in math and English language arts. “HB 617 is a bill which would allow local school districts to have the option of using the ACT or the SAT suite of testing in lieu of the end of course test, the TNReady test and the TCAP test, in the State of Tennessee,” Butt told The Star’s Laura Baigert. “This is a bill that focuses on the success of our students and this is a tried and true measurement of college readiness and college success.  And all of our districts should have the option of being able to use these tests for their students,” she added. “Local Education Agencies – As introduced, authorizes LEAs to use the ACT, ACT Aspire, or SAT suites of standardized assessments instead of the TCAP, TNReady, and end-of-course exams to test the subjects of math and English language arts for grades nine through 12,” the Tennessee General Assembly website says of HB 617 (introduced in the Senate as SB…

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