"That is a tectonic change for many schools," said Rob Franek, editor in chief of the Princeton Review, a test-prep company based in New York City.more than 1,000 colleges had made the tests optional.
The benefits and risks of testing — real and perceived — have fueled an ongoing, roiling debate among educational scholars, admissions officers and college counselors, and the year of canceled tests gave both sides plenty to chew on. But others, including test-prep tutors and many educators, are apprehensive about the loss of a tool to measure all students the same way. Standardized tests, they say, differ from high-school grades, which vary from school to school and are often inflated."There is a place for testing in higher ed," said Jennifer Wilson, who has years of experience as a private test-prep tutor in Oakland, California.
In the 1920s, the focus of admissions tests shifted from assessing learned material to gauging innate ability, or aptitude. The idea for many, Schaeffer said, was to find those young men who had smarts but couldn't afford a prep-school education. That led to the 1926 debut of the College Board's original Scholastic Aptitude Test, which was spearheaded by Princeton University psychologist Carl Brigham. Across-the-board equality wasn't exactly the goal.
KnowableMag A brain is no longer required to get into college. No one sees the problem with this?
KnowableMag this is terrible news