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 Wake Forest Passes the Test by Eliminating the Test
by Tom Campbell
May 29, 2008
Wake Forest University created ripples in the higher education world by announcing it would no longer require standardized test scores as part of the admissions process. The school becomes the first major private research university in the southeast and the 41st in the nation to eliminate the SAT or ACT as a requirement.
Created in 1901, Harvard started requiring all scholarship candidates to take the SAT exam in 1935 and, by 1957 the number of students taking the test reached half a million. As baby boomers reached college age and competition for admissions grew, many universities started requiring the test, believing the results a predictor of how well a student would perform in college. Criticism of the SAT has steadily grown along with its importance, especially charges of racial and economic bias. Test results have a direct connection to family income.
This is a bold step for Wake Forest and an equally important statement that the admissions process is broken and needs fixing or at least need tweaking. Last year 1.5 million took the SAT exam. SAT and ACT scores have too much weight in admission decisions. Competition for slots in upper echelon colleges has become so fierce that too many students are tightly programmed, overworked, sleep deprived and highly stressed. Cheating, substance abuse, and even suicide are responses of some.
Wake Forest will put more emphasis on class rank, the strength of high school curriculum and personal interviews. Will Wake’s new policy ease the pressures and correct the ills in college admissions? Only time will tell for sure but other schools following a similar approach report progress, saying academic performance of those submitting SAT scores is not much different from those who do not . As a first step, Wake Forest administrators hope this de-emphasis of test scores will encourage a larger pool of applicants and improve diversity at their school.
Potential problems are foreseeable, as this new admissions policy puts more emphasis on human judgment and more responsibility on those who make those decisions. It will be more difficult to evaluate the difficulty of curriculum among various high schools or to measure the impact of grade inflation, things that testing organizations claim their standardized tests help reveal. No admissions system is perfect, but this new approach appears more personal and less likely to allow one test to determine a student’s future.
Wake Forest University has passed the first test, answering correctly that new and better solutions are needed in the way students apply and are admitted to college. Let us hope it is successful and instructive to other institutions of higher learning. |
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