Can We Have a New Middle Ground for Standardized Tests?

On the American left, standardized tests are seen as anti-diversity, working against the admission of Black and Brown students into elite spaces, and a very problematic metric to measure students. Over the past several years, the left in America has been anti-standardized tests and that has been reflected in admissions practices at elite colleges, where many have gone test-optional, especially in light of the pandemic making test-taking difficult.

John Rosales and Tim Walker at the National Education Association document the beginnings of standardized testing coinciding with the Eugenics movement in America. The creator of the SAT believed in the superiority of the “Nordic race group” compared to African Americans and Eastern European immigrants.

As such, standardized tests have been seen as anti-left, anti-equity, and anti-diversity. Most of the left-wing intelligentsia and academia as a whole have turned against standardized tests. Recently, there has been a huge movement to make standardized tests optional, to the point where 80% of four-year colleges did not require standardized tests for admissions in fall 2023.

There is a movement to see that standardized tests don’t matter and are not predictive of future success, and shouldn’t gatekeep who can or can’t have access to our most elite colleges. Grades and GPA, the critics say, are more predictive of success in college than standardized tests like the SAT and ACT.

This narrative has come under some questioning in left-wing spaces, including universities and the New York Times. David Leonhardt in the New York Times notes the picture has grown a lot more complicated in recent years of college and especially since the pandemic. Leonhardt points to the president of Brown University, Christina Paxson, who says Brown faculty members have seen that SAT and ACT scores are better indicators of success than grades, especially with a huge increase in grade inflation across the country. Paxson expresses ambivalence about whether schools should or should not return to testing or not, but keeps the question open for future admissions practices when defending not making a permanent decision.

Leonhardt notes that students from underprivileged backgrounds who have solid standardized test scores do see academic success at elite universities, but that students from both affluent and underprivileged backgrounds with high GPAs and lower standardized test scores do not see the same correlation. He points to a study from Opportunity Insights that finds high school GPA to not be super predictive of college success, but standardized tests to be highly predictive. A faculty committee at the University of California made similar conclusions in 2020. The SAT and ACT are stronger indicators of attending an elite graduate school, working at a prestigious firm, and college performance than high school GPAs for students at both advantaged and disadvantaged schools.

This predictiveness is paired with the affluent parents gaming other parts of the admissions process and these parts being more unequal, including extracurriculars, essays, recommendations, and grades. The wealthy have more time and money for extracurricular activities like travel sports teams and instruments. They can receive more editing on their essays from very well-educated parents. They have counselors who have more bandwidth and smaller student populations and can hence write more thorough recommendations. A 2017 Harvard study also found that grade inflation was most egregious in private and wealthy suburban schools, a fact likely driven by pressure from very aggressive parents, some of whom were paying very high tuition.

Yes, Leonhardt, says: affluent students can pay for test preparation classes, but a wealthy student can take a lot of classes and still not do well compared to the other metrics. Raj Chetty, who is one author behind the Opportunity Insights study, states that the SAT is not a cause of inequality, but a symptom of it, as other standardized tests like the NAEP similarly show similar racial and economic gaps as the SAT, and the NAEP is not a test where kids typically take test preparation courses due to the test not having any stakes or implications for the child’s future.

“To put it another way, the existence of racial and economic gaps in SAT and ACT scores doesn’t prove that the tests are biased. After all, most measures of life in America — on income, life expectancy, homeownership and more — show gaps. No wonder: Our society suffers from huge inequities,” Leonhardt says.

To be fair, Leonhardt does not argue that standardized tests are an equalizer, but that standardized tests are less unequal than all the other metrics. Nor is Leonhardt suggesting that standardized testing should be everything, but that they should have a bit more weight than they currently do at test-optional schools and in overall progressive discourse. If they are the most predictive metric for student success in college, then it’s hard not to see the implication that standardized tests should have some kind of disproportionate weight compared to GPAs or other metrics.

Leonhardt notes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was a school that reinstated the SAT requirement after two years of not suspending it for two years during COVID-19. The school did find that SAT scores were the biggest predictor of success at the school, and when they brought the test requirement back, the school admitted the most diverse class in its history, with 20% of students receiving Pell Grants, 15% of its current class being Black, 16% being Hispanic, 38% being White, and 40% being Asian. The SAT allowed high-performing students at unknown schools to stand out.

The pessimistic argument, then, is what can be an equalizer, if grades, extracurriculars, and essays all seem to disproportionately advantage wealthy White students more than poor Black and Brown students? With affirmative action outlawed by the Supreme Court, is anything that is designed and intended to be an equalizer going to be gamed? Is there any alternative college admissions offices have to admit diverse classes in this post-affirmative action era?

There is a part of me that feels like there’s a bit of a messaging problem. There’s a part of me that feels like the more we on the left message that standardized tests are anti-DEI, anti-left, and racist, the less a lot of students will take them seriously and maximize their chances of scholarships and having high performances on these tests when it could advantage them.

There will be a small, but substantial population of Machiavellian students and parents who will engage in the same messaging outwardly and then pay for expensive test preparation and use their test scores to enhance the chances at college admissions. This subset of students and parents who see college admissions as a zero-sum game will likely revel inthe fact that the messaging has made so many students not submit their test scores, and they could stand out as a result if they submit theirs.

So defending standardized tests can be seen as anti-diversity, anti-left, and anti-admission of Black and Brown students. I am not a defender of standardized tests, although I do find Leonhart’s argument about standardized tests being the lesser of all the evils that advantage privileged and wealthy students compelling. I think overfocusing on test scores does incentivize kids to fixate on singular numbers over more creative or extracurricular pursuits, a frustration I myself felt when I was younger.

Based on the color of my skin and an oft-ignored segment of American society, the elephant in the room is Asian students. Why do so many Asian students and families seem to see standardized testing differently? Why do so many Asian students outperform White students? Why do so many working-class Asian families routinely outperform their middle-class White peers?

Personally, I’m a bit of a hypocrite. I might preach that standardized tests result in inequality and are problematic, but I myself go as hard as I can to prepare for the standardized tests in my own life. I received a scholarship paying half my tuition in law school on the back of a strong LSAT score. I studied for an hour or more a day, on most days, even if I didn’t pay for any test preparation courses. I got into my elite undergraduate university mostly on the back of an SAT score in the 99th percentile, and my parents did send me to test prep courses with other Asian kids in Flushing, which is the Chinatown of Queens, New York.

I think a lot of it was cultural and not all of it was positive. Yes, I was part of a super intense Asian family that prioritized academic achievement above all else. If there was a single A- on my report card, yes, it was a problem. Since I didn’t get a perfect score on the SAT, yes, it was a problem. I used to complain about this until I realized a lot of my friends’ Asian families were just as intense.

I’ve always seen Asians as a wrench and an inconvenience in the grander narrative about the inequities of standardized testing and college admissions. Asians are often grouped with White students as the side that we don’t want to benefit in the overall debate of college admissions and equity. We’re seen, by a lot of people on the left, as White-adjacent, and in light of many of the debates that surfaced when affirmative action ended, one common fact was that Asian American students regularly had to have higher test scores than White students, and one paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that South Asian students in the 99th percentile of test takers were 43% less likely to be accepted into a selective college than White students.

However, no matter how “White-adjacent” you think Asians are as a group, any implication that Asians take standardized tests seriously because they want to be White or emulate that model minority standard is ludicrous. It’s ludicrous because, in East Asian countries like China, South Korea, and Japan, these tests are held to an even higher standard and priority than they are standardized tests in America.

These standardized testing systems represent the other side of the spectrum where standardized tests not only matter, but are essentially the end all be all to college admissions.

Take China’s gaokao, for example, the equivalent to the SAT or ACT in China, only it has a lot more weight for college admissions. According to Alec Ash at The Guardian, a student’s three-digit score on the gaokao is singularly responsible for their placement in college. This has made the Chinese government extremely vigilant about cheating, using CCTV cameras, metal detectors, and drones.

The test obviously puts a ton of pressure on children, and a lot of wealthier people in China are sending their kids to study abroad as a result. “In the west, it is often seen as monolithic and rote; in China as tough but fair.” It is seen as a way for hardworking of students from poorer parts of China to gain elite access to the country’s best universities. Of course wealthier families get better access to tutoring, and there are many families who try to “game the system” as well — students in more highly populated provinces in China require higher scores, so some families have tried to move their families to remote provinces like Inner Mongolia just before the exam.

Students get one opportunity per year and can only take it again a year later. If they don’t do well, they’re screwed, a fact that Ash notes has led to many suicides: in 2014, a study found exam stress was a factor in 93% of suicide among school students. Standardized tests are similarly high stakes in Japan, where some parents start prepping their children for the National Center Test for University Admissions as early as Kindergarten. The Suneung, a series of eight-hour college admissions tests in South Korea, has similar weight over not only college admissions but also career prospects.

Standardized tests, after all, originated in China through the imperial examinations (the keju) during the Han Dynasty, which ranged from 206 B.C.E. to 220 C.E. They were designed to ward off rampant nepotism and implement a policy where your score on the exam was the most important metric for your entrance into the bureaucracy, not who you knew or who your family is. Whether today’s gaokao is meritocratic is certainly a good question because it has implications for higher education policy everywhere, and Trey Menfee, a lecturer at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, says most Chinese people consider it meritocratic because “it’s equally bad for everyone.”

“When it comes to more comprehensive reform, the general consensus among education scholars in China is that any alternative would be too easily manipulated by the rich,” Ash says.

People would try to bribe their teachers for higher grades and preferential treatment. I do, for reasons I can’t quite explain, find this propensity for bribery and nepotism to be more pronounced in the Asian culture than not. I distinctly recall that my mother would try to have us give gifts to teachers around the holidays and Christmas. My brother and I were not happy — the teachers would construe the gifts as a bribe, so we would try to hide the gift or try to find ways around it.

In a Confucianist society where family is everything, people naturally find ways to look out for their own even when doing so is not fair to general society. In China, standardized tests most certainly did level the playing field to safeguard against this tendency.

In the world of Asian culture, meritocracy might not be perfect. But it’s much better than the alternative of nepotism, which will proliferate from any other metric than standardized tests.

Most of us have experience with standardized tests. After all, most of us had to take them and struggle through them. But I have experience with standardized tests as both a student and an educator.

As an educator, I have administered standardized tests in one of my Title I, inner-city schools in Baltimore. I administered the PSAT to an extended time room as a special educator. I was under incredibly strict guidelines from College Board and our testing coordinator to not compromise the academic integrity of the test. No student was allowed to move onto a section prematurely. Only one student could leave to go to the bathroom at a time.

Above all, students had to turn in their cell phones. I had strict instructions to make several calls for their cellphones, and it seemed like most turned theirs in. One student, however, did not. I caught the student using her phone about two hours into the test. I don’t think she was using it to cheat on the test, but I had to disqualify her test nonetheless based on the instructions I was given.

The first section or two, I observed students working as hard as they could and engaging in best test-taking practices, from checking over their answers to the process of elimination. As the test wore on, however, I saw that many students gave up easily and started circling answers without reading questions or passages. A student expressed during a break they had never had to sit through a test this long before.

One or two students left before the test ended and their scores did not count. Most of the other students just wanted to get through the test as quickly as possible. I was only allowed to move the whole room to the next section if the time was up and everyone was done. I noticed that a few very impatient students were scanning the room to see who was and was not still working on a section. At breaks, this group of students started to pressure the rest to get through the test as quickly as possible and go home. I had to tell students that that messaging was wrong — that you should take all the time you need to do your best. Inevitably, peers were going to be a lot more persuasive than a teacher.

The second half of the test went by very quickly as students started to get tired, feel like the test was too difficult, and give up.

To be clear, I did not blame the students. I blamed the education they had received thus far for not preparing students to take standardized tests, as they would take standardized tests in college and beyond. I blamed teachers, like myself, who failed to teach our students to persevere through very difficult tasks, or at least failed to teach the endurance to persevere for an extended amount of time.

I found the whole experience very disheartening. Although I agree with the messaging on the left that standardized tests are problematic and not everything when it comes to a student’s success or capabilities, I encouraged students as best I could to keep trying their best and take it seriously. It wouldn’t hurt to try, after all, rather than just circle answers, to optimize the chances of getting a scholarship. And students would have to take tons of tests — they would have to take tests in college, take tests for a plethora of professions they were interested in.

Standardized tests may be problematic, but it was an example, for me, of how we still want to prepare young people for the world as it is rather than the world as we want it to be.

There are pros and cons to the Asian approach and, of course, they don’t account for the racial and cultural heterogeneity of the United States. I think we do have to face the fact some tests were not made for everyone. Some test questions are not culturally relevant to everyone, and my fellow educators and I often joke about questions about golf or fishing per se being written for an audience of upper-middle-class White people who live in the suburbs.

I do want to give the benefit of the doubt and say test writers recognize this and are trying to reform it. Priscilla Rodriguez, the VP of College Readiness Assessments at College Board, said the test was completely remodeled in 2016 to take out its vocabulary section and take out tricky math problems. It also took out the “weekends only” requirement for administration, and she says that every question takes two years to develop and that each question does not have a differential in performance based on student group.

But I also cannot blame people who have some kind of institutional distrust in College Board and other companies that make standardized tests, since these companies have been gatekeepers for so long and have incentives to defend standardized testing as much as possible.

I think the point is our understanding of standardized tests should grow a bit more nuanced. There is truth to standardized tests not being the most ideal equalizer to diversify our nation’s future elite and college campuses with clear divides in racial and economic lines. We cannot deny that the average scores of Hispanic and Black students lag behind those of White and Asian students on the SAT.

However, the fact is there is a ton of nepotism in the college admissions system that standardized tests have nothing to do with. There are the notorious legacy admissions where children of alumni of universities get preference in admissions, but something few people talked about that I saw several friends benefit from was children of employees of universities giving admission consideration and discounts, which in my opinion is only slightly less morally dubious qualm in our vision of universities as a diversifying equalizer.

These preferences make sense if colleges were just any ordinary organization or corporation that wants to offer advantages and benefits to employees and former employees. But higher education is not just any ordinary organization. These are institutions that not only gatekeep the nation’s elite and access to the middle and upper middle class.

I do have to agree with Leonhardt that standardized tests are not ideal, but they may just be the least bad. No, getting a bad test score should not be a death sentence to a kid’s dreams. Most of us have done poorly on one test, if not many more, myself included.

And I think the most compelling argument for bringing back the test at a lot of test-optional schools is thinking of an alternative metric for admission. With grades, essays, extracurriculars, and recommendations also being gamed by the wealthy and contributing to inequality, it is difficult to think of a better metric.

I don’t have an answer as much as I have a plea that we, as a society, take a more nuanced approach, with standardized tests not being the end-all-be-all of your worth like the Chinese gaokao and not completely done away with and eliminated either.

Most of us want a holistic approach, and someone’s standardized test scores are a part of that whole.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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