{"id":71660,"date":"2014-02-18T12:25:56","date_gmt":"2014-02-18T17:25:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=71660"},"modified":"2024-10-02T12:13:43","modified_gmt":"2024-10-02T16:13:43","slug":"npr-standardized-test-hiss-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2014\/02\/18\/npr-standardized-test-hiss-report\/","title":{"rendered":"NPR reports on &#8216;first-of-its-kind&#8217; national study challenging the value of standardized tests"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What was deemed a &#8220;bold step&#8221; by the Bates faculty in 1984\u00a0\u2014 their vote to make standardized tests optional for admission\u00a0\u2014 has become a national march 30 years later.<\/p>\n<p>NPR&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/2014\/02\/18\/277059528\/college-applicants-sweat-the-sats-perhaps-they-shouldn-t\"><em>Morning Edition<\/em><\/a> reports on a new study of 33 U.S. colleges and universities that yields more evidence to support what Bates instinctively knew back in 1984: that standardized tests do not accurately predict college success.<\/p>\n<p>And at their worst, NPR reports, standardized tests can narrow the door of college opportunity when America needs to give students more access to higher education, not less.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Dean of Admission Leigh Weisenburger: Your high school transcript &#8220;is a much bigger story&#8221; than standardized test scores:<\/h3>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Dean of Admission Leigh Weisenburger: Your high school transcript \u201cis a much bigger story\u201d than standardized test scores\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/87138521?dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p class=\"size-medium wp-image-69237\">The study&#8217;s principal investigator is Bill Hiss &#8217;66, former Bates dean of admission and now retired from the college. Valerie Wilson Franks &#8217;98 is the study&#8217;s co-author and lead investigator.<\/p>\n<p>Hiss tells NPR&#8217;s Eric Westervelt that &#8220;this study will be a first step in examining what happens when you admit tens of thousands of students without looking at their SAT scores.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>What happens, Hiss says, is that if students &#8220;have good high school grades, they are almost certainly going to be fine&#8221; in college, &#8220;despite modest or low testing.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In terms of college access nationally, the authors pose a rhetorical question, asking whether &#8220;standardized testing produces valuable predictive results, or does it artificially truncate the pools of applicants who would succeed if they could be encouraged to apply?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The answer &#8220;is far more the latter.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Specifically, requiring standardized tests for college admission can narrow the door of college opportunity for otherwise capable students who choose submit test scores: &#8220;low-income and minority students, as well as more young people who will be the first generation in their family to attend,&#8221; reports Westervelt.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nacacnet.org\/research\/research-data\/nacac-research\/Documents\/DefiningPromise.pdf\">The recent study,<\/a> &#8220;Defining Promise: Optional Standardized Testing Policies in American College and University Admissions,&#8221; looked at 123,000 student and alumni records at 33 private and public colleges. Submitter GPAs were .05 of a GPA point higher than non-submitters&#8217;, and submitter graduation rates were 0.6 percent higher than non-submitters&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;By any standard, these are trivial differences,&#8221; write Hiss and Franks.<\/p>\n<p>Roughly 3,000 four-year U.S. colleges and universities make SAT or ACT submissions optional.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_73632\" style=\"width: 210px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/02\/Hiss-Smaller.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-73632\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-73632\" src=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/02\/Hiss-Smaller-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"Study author Bill Hiss '66.\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/02\/Hiss-Smaller-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/02\/Hiss-Smaller.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-73632\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Study author Bill Hiss &#8217;66.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Bates has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/admission\/optional-testing\/\">studied its policy on a regular basis since 1984<\/a>, so the new study is welcomed but not surprising to Leigh Weisenburger, dean of admission and financial aid.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Prior to this 30-year study, Bates had done its own research, tracking the performance of submitters and non-submitters,&#8221; she explains. &#8220;Students who submit scores at the point of application and those who do not perform almost precisely the same at Bates.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We know that the best predictor of college success is the high school transcript,&#8221; she says.<\/p>\n<p>Reciting a sentence that she says is practically a &#8220;Bates bumper sticker,&#8221; Weisenberg says that &#8220;while standardized tests are useful, we have found that three and a half years on a transcript will tell us much more about a student&#8217;s potential than three and a half hours on a Saturday morning.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Annually, approximately 40 percent of Bates applicants do not submit any standardized test scores.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Standardized tests were sometimes &#8220;unhelpful, misleading and unpredictive for students in whom Bates has always been interested.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>When the Bates faculty voted to make test scores optional on Oct. 1, 1984 \u2014 with Hiss as admission dean \u2014 then-President Hedley Reynolds said that action was &#8220;a bold step by the faculty, reflecting deep concerns with the effectiveness of the SATs.&#8221; (Bates became test-optional in 1984 by no longer requiring SAT I. In 1990 <i>all<\/i> standardized testing became optional.)<\/p>\n<p>A 1990 <em>Bates Magazine<\/em> story reviewing why Bates made the change noted that standardized testing by the 1980s was producing a kind of &#8220;mass hysteria&#8221; among high school students and their parents, &#8220;an unholy amalgam of passive surrender and frantic coaching for the test.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It was also &#8220;a growing sense&#8221; that SATs were sometimes &#8220;unhelpful, misleading and unpredictive for students in whom Bates has always been interested,&#8221; including students of color, rural and Maine students, and first-generation-to-college students.<\/p>\n<p>In 1984, the Faculty Committee on Admission and Financial Aid offered three reasons for recommending the policy change<\/p>\n<p>1. SATs were an inaccurate indicator of potential.<\/p>\n<p>2. Prospective applicants were using median test scores published in guidebooks as a major factor in deciding whether or not to apply to Bates. &#8220;The faculty realized that Bates should be seen first-hand,&#8221; said a story in the January 1985 issue of <em>Bates Magazine<\/em>. &#8220;Numbers cannot describe the tenor of a campus which has never had fraternities or sororities, a campus where students are respected as individuals.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>3. The relationship of family income to SAT success &#8220;worried the committee and conflicted with the mission of the college.&#8221; Noting the rise in SAT prep courses, the college worried that if coaching was successful, &#8220;it means that students with economic resources will enjoy undeserved advantages in admissions evaluations.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In fact, the story said that Bates had studied the relationship of SATs to academic success for <em>the prior five years<\/em>, concluding that &#8220;the quality of the high school preparation (rigor of courses included) was consistently the best measure of the student&#8217;s potential at Bates.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The study, by Bates alumni authors with long experience in Bates Admission, questions the predictive value of standardized tests and argues that they narrow the door of college opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":73440,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[44,11009],"tags":[11048,10043,11051,9223],"class_list":["post-71660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-enewsletter","category-the-college","tag-accessibility","tag-admission","tag-bates-in-the-news","tag-william-c-hiss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71660"}],"version-history":[{"count":39,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":165637,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71660\/revisions\/165637"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}