What If Colleges Used Only Test Scores to Fill Campuses?

Yeah...




So what about white privilege again?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-i...to-fill-campuses-11561282201?mod=hp_lead_pos5

As Americans debate the roles of wealth, race and access in higher education, researchers at Georgetown University wondered: What would the nation’s most selective colleges and universities look like if they admitted students solely on the basis of SAT scores?

Their answer: The most prestigious U.S. campuses would be wealthier, whiter and more male—leading researchers to question the role standardized testing plays in a fair, comprehensive admissions process.

More than half the students now enrolled at the top 200 colleges and universities would lose their seats to students who performed better on the test—and the median SAT score would rise by 70 points to 1320, the study found.

The biggest losers in this reshuffling were black and Latino students, whose numbers would be cut nearly in half, to 11% of all students from 19%. The share of Asian students would slip to 10% from 11%. The principal winners were wealthy white male students, whose ranks would increase. But a large number of white students would lose their seats and be replaced with other white students.

“The affluent have extraordinary advantages in college admissions,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, which performed the analysis. Until 2005, Mr. Carnevale was a vice president at Educational Testing Service, which is a client of The College Board and administers the SAT.

Many elite colleges consider a range of factors such as grades, extracurricular activities and teacher recommendations in what they call a holistic admissions approach. They also try to build a diverse student body and might look for students from underrepresented ethnic or racial backgrounds or geographical regions.

The holistic admissions process has come under fire following the disclosure this spring of the biggest cheating ring federal prosecutors say they have ever seen. In addition, pending lawsuits filed against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, among others, charge that the schools racially discriminate against Asian applicants.

“The SAT does not and should not measure excellence on its own. Data are overwhelming that grades and test scores together better predict college success than either does alone,” a spokesman for The College Board said in a statement. “Comprehensive research demonstrates that sustained commitment to an activity in high school outside of class further predicts success in college and beyond. Resourcefulness in response to challenges has long been honored in college admissions as a dimension of merit and success in life. A focus on a single score would leave so much talent unseen.”

The College Board, the New York-based nonprofit that oversees the SAT, is introducing an adversity score to accompany a student’s SAT results. The score is an amalgamation of socioeconomic data that measures factors like the crime rate, housing cost, family structure and school resources where an individual student lives and studies.

Researchers at Georgetown sorted admissions at the nation’s top schools as determined by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges. They took the 300,000 seats from those colleges and universities and filled them with top SAT and ACT scores earned by the 2.7 million high-school seniors who took the test in 2012. Then they compared who got the highest test scores to who got in by the actual admissions system, using Education Department data that didn’t include the students’ names.

The researchers used a composite score that standardizes both the SAT and ACT scores in terms of the SAT’s grading scale. Using that scale, the median SAT score of accepted students climbed to 1320 from 1250. The new bar for admissions meant that 159,000 students lost their seats.

The percentage of male students at the schools climbed to 54% from 50%. The most dramatic increase was among white students, who grew to 75% from 66% of the aggregated student body. The proportion of students coming from families in the top quartile of income distribution—where the median income is $122,000—increased to 63% from 60%.

“When used as part of a holistic strategy, standardized testing offers a check on opaque admissions, but it’s still no guarantee of fairness,” Mr. Carnevale said. “It’s time to find a better approach.”