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In recent years, the reliance on standardized tests lessened, and more focus grew on identifying efforts to face adversity and disadvantaged students. During the pandemic, half of the 4-year colleges in the nation didn't require test submissions and that number grew years following. Now there is a divide with some schools eliminating the option entirely and some reinstating the requirement.

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"As is, many teenagers say they are confused. They are uncertain about whether to take the tests and what scores are high enough to submit."

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New York Times article with a lot of research.

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Colleges have fled standardized tests, on the theory that they hurt diversity. That’s not what the research shows.

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What effects do standardized tests have on the college admission process?

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What effects do standardized tests have on the college admission process?

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MIT has become an example and case study for how standardized tests can help with diversity during admissions. The scores are not the main factor, but they are useful in finding applicants from less advantaged high schools that are likely to succeed, said the admissions dean. They found that after covid, “Once we brought the test requirement back, we admitted the most diverse class that we ever had in our history,”.

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There are score gaps in the standardized testing data based on race and class. The data supports that the higher the parents' income, the higher the test scores. Critics of testing are scared that schools becoming test-required again will plummet diversity, and the affirmative action decision strengthened this.

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Background Info - pandemic, the history and controversy 

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Background Info - pandemic, the history and controversy 

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The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 368 pp. $27.00

College-admissions testing remains a very big deal in America, perhaps a bigger-and more contentious-deal than ever before. Test scores, which help apportion places on high-status campuses and sway access even to less prestigious schools, have a huge effect on the prospects of millions of individuals, thus shaping the contours of society. Some people swear by testing as the fairest, surest way to gauge talent, allocate opportunity, and sustain a meritocracy within a democracy. Others regard it as the work of the devil, an arbitrary and discriminatory selection system that reproduces privilege, dashes hope, and keeps entire groups in subjugation.

Because few issues cut closer to home than the rules by which life's chances are distributed, testing has become the focus of civil-rights agitation, political grandstanding, and intermittent government regulation. At the same time, it is a large and lucrative private business, with all the accoutrements thereof. The best-known and richest test maker by far is the nominally nonprofit Educational Testing Service (ETS), which itself has had an enormous impact on American life.

Until recently, the operations of this Princeton, New Jersey-based institution have been shrouded in an almost CIA-like secrecy. But some of ETS's secrets have now been laid bare in a long-awaited book by the journalist Nicholas Lemann. The Big Test not only provides an absorbing institutional history of ETS, based in part on the voluminous papers of the organization's founder, Henry Chauncey, but also looks at the role that this institution has played in the broader national debates over merit, testing, and affirmative action.

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Chauncey, now in his nineties, was an obscure assistant dean when the president of Harvard, James Bryant Conant, tapped him in 1933 for a special assignment. Conant wanted to award scholarships to a handful of extremely bright candidates from all over the country, but he needed an instrument by which to gauge their talent. Chauncey's task was to find a test that would enable the university to appraise the intellectual promise of young men from modest circumstances, outside the cozy cluster of northeastern prep schools that supplied Harvard with most of its students.

Although Conant was thinking primarily of Harvard, something larger was also growing in his mind, as Lemann recounts. A Jeffersonian who believed in a natural aristocracy of talent, Conant had come to believe that, instead, a "hereditary aristocracy" was arising in America, menacing both opportunity and democracy. The way to combat it was greatly to widen access to education by building (as Conant wrote in a never-published book) "a new type of social instrument whose proper use may be the means of salvation of the classlessness of the nation." Toward that end, Conant believed, universal testing would play an essential role.

Once launched on his mission, Chauncey soon encountered the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), created by a Princeton psychologist named Carl Brigham. Brigham, as it happened, was dead set against creating an organization that would be responsible both for researching and developing the test and for administering and marketing it. But Brigham conveniently died in 1943, and five years later ETS opened its doors in Princeton, with Chauncey installed as president and Conant as chairman of the board. Chauncey was to remain in the driver's seat until 1970, retiring just as testing began to be the subject of major political controversy.

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By then, however, Conant's ideas had spread far beyond Cambridge, Massachusetts. The enormous growth of higher education had become, just as Conant hoped it would, America's foremost vehicle for expanding social and economic opportunity, and, as he also hoped, tests and similar meritocratic measures were now widely used to determine which students ended up where. Both strands of Conant's thinking were to converge on a vast scale in the master plan for higher education in California that was developed by University of California president Clark Kerr, the story of which amounts almost to a second book alongside Lemann's history of ETS.

Governor Pat Brown approved Kerr's plan in 1960, and, in short order, new community-college and university campuses were built all over the state to which every high-school graduate was assured access at virtually no cost. But some institutions enjoyed higher status than others, with the top of the pyramid being occupied by the campuses of the University of California system, especially Kerr's beloved Berkeley. It was an intricate, complex, rational system that sought to impose a fair and meritocratic regime-admission depended on high-school grades and test scores-in what was fast becoming America's largest and most polyglot state.

But, as Lemann shows, almost before this new system took effect it came under siege by rebellious students, civil-rights activists, and politicians, all of whom were striving to advance the interests of particular constituencies by carving different and less meritocratic pathways into higher education. The era of affirmative action had begun, with ETS playing a pivotal part in its evolution.

When the question of rigid racial quotas came before the Supreme Court in 1978 in the Bakke case, ETS and the Carnegie Corporation teamed up to produce a memorandum-cited twice by Justice Lewis Powell in his deciding opinion-that argued for peaceful coexistence between testing and affirmative action. As Lemann summarizes the document, schools

should look at a number of criteria (including test scores, of course) and make [their] own judgments. It would be all right for race to be one criterion, because that was a way of giving special help to applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds and of making student bodies more diverse.

This remains the central thrust of ETS doctrine today: an artfully balanced if basically contradictory position that attempts to amalgamate the not-at-all capricious quality of merit with the entirely adventitious one of skin color.

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But if ETS has inclined toward political correctness in its rhetoric and public posture, it has also, Lemann contends, acted vigorously to protect its market and the ubiquity of its numerical scores. Twelve years after Bakke, the staff researcher who had drafted the brief that caught Justice Powell's eye proposed a new test that would, in practice and not just in theory, meld affirmative action right into the psychometric process. The proposed "Measure of Academic Talent" (MAT) would have taken into account such factors as race and family wealth, explicitly adjusting scores to compensate for whatever influences might cause members of one group to do better than another.

Nothing doing, responded ETS, freezing the hapless employee's research budget and even denying him travel funds. The testing agency was not about to provide an alternative to the SAT, and certainly not one that would cause scores to plummet for the children of the upper middle class. Above all else, writes Lemann, ETS was terrified of

the hell that would break loose if . . . every lawyer's and doctor's kid in America got an envelope in the mail containing a score that had been adjusted downward to account for their parents' high socioeconomic status.

In other words, so long as the racial "score adjusting" was done by colleges, employers, or other decision-makers located far from Princeton, ETS could safely beat the drums for affirmative action. And so long as it continued to stage and to publicize its own efforts to purge tests of "biased" questions and to "recenter" scores-i.e., raising them across the board to give everyone a psychic boost-it could go on marketing its products as pure indices of individual talent and accomplishment.

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Lemann's unmasking of the hypocrisy of ETS is thoroughly enjoyable, even where it may not be entirely accurate. By changing test contents and recentering scores, the agency seems to have gone much farther toward accommodating the demands of affirmative-action proponents than Lemann admits. Moreover, even the concept behind MAT appears once again to be alive and well. According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, ETS is in the process of devising a statistical equation that will factor ethnicity and race into SAT scores, thereby helping artificially to close the persistent gap between minority and white test results.

In any case, when Lemann turns from institutional history to a broader discussion of testing itself, his book sheds whatever character it has as a fact-finding excursion and increasingly takes on the appearance of an ideological tract. Like a biographer discovering that he cannot abide his subject, Lemann turns out to dislike test-based meritocracy altogether, and to disapprove strenuously of a society that rations opportunities for status and wealth via education. He is, in fact, repelled by Conant's idea of a "natural aristocracy," especially one based on individuals' "youthful promise" as gauged by test scores or by attendance at a big-name college. To temper what he sees as the unfair and one-dimensional rankings of the SAT and kindred tests, he favors vigorous, quota-style affirmative action.

Among Lemann's heroes is Bill Lann Lee, the Clinton administration's acting Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Like Lemann himself (Harvard, class of '76), Lee, whose immigrant father ran a laundry in New York, is a prime beneficiary of test-based meritocracy (Bronx High School of Science, Yale College, Columbia Law School). Today, however, he is as aggressive a backer of ethnic and racial preferences as anyone in America, struggling valiantly against attempts by federal courts and popular initiatives like California's Proposition 209 to restore a level playing field. If he, and his peers at the Department of Education, prevail, the use of test scores in college admissions will be severely curbed.

That, however, is unlikely to happen. Despite Lemann's criticisms, periodic salvos from federal civil-rights enforcers, and the cavils of professional educators who do not believe in competition or comparisons, America is likely to retain strong meritocratic tendencies and to continue to make heavy use of testing. People believe in it. Institutions are used to it. And, most importantly, even as we recognize that testing has its drawbacks and limitations, the alternatives are either impractical, undesirable, or worse.

Of course, no written exam can unfailingly discern an individual's true "potential," and no measure of intellectual aptitude is fully insulated from the effects of schooling and upbringing. Nor is any test score a comprehensive gauge of one's essential qualities as a person. But that is precisely why few colleges rely on test scores alone, and why such scores are seldom wholly dispositive in university admissions: too many young people who "test badly" demonstrate powerful redeeming qualities like tenacity and drive, while some who rack up dazzling SAT scores turn out to lack character, integrity, or energy.

Nevertheless, those numbers remain extremely helpful, not only as a broad if fallible gauge of talent but as a way of keeping a diverse democratic society from turning ugly and fractious. They work to retain the focus on individuals and their accomplishments rather than shifting it to heredity, wealth, or tribe. James Conant, though his view of testing may have been ingenuous, was insightful about the American polity. Even a less than perfect test offers a better way of allocating opportunity than decisions based on whom you know, how much money your parents have, what school you attended, or which demographic fraction you belong to.

What remains most troubling in the American context today is not testing but the educational discrepancies that no test-and no policy like affirmative action-can paper over. Some schools are vastly more effective than others, and poor and minority youngsters are most likely to be stuck in the bad ones. Changing that reality will be the work of a generation, and many obstacles lie in its path. Not the least among these obstacles is the ongoing and deeply misguided campaign against testing, a campaign in which Nicholas Lemann's engrossing but flawed book is already being enlisted.

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The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy by Nicholas Lemann Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 368 pp. $27.00 College-admissions testing remains a very big deal in America, perhaps

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"Administrators at Harvard, who pushed for the creation of the tests, saw them as a way to identify talented students from any background. The administrators believed that these students would go on to strengthen the country’s elite institutions, which were dominated by a narrow group of white Protestants, as Nicholas Lemann explained in “The Big Test,” his history of the SAT."

The tests were first used in admissions in the 1930s.

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This provides background and facts about standardized tests.

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Econofact | Key facts and incisive analysis to the national debate on economic and social policies.

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Standardized Testing and College Admissions | Econofact

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Can standardized testing help selective colleges identify talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds?

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The standardized testing creates an immense amount of stress on students in the college admissions process. They are already going through a very stressful era in their lives, so the test being a deciding factor of their future is just an added factor. Tests like the SAT take scheduling way in advance and are pricey, along with the fact they might have to retake it.

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Disadvantages of standardized tests in admissions

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Disadvantages of standardized tests in admissions

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Advantages of standardized tests in admissions

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Advantages of standardized tests in admissions

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Standardized tests, like the SAT and ACT, are actually designed to predict college grades and post-graduation success. Colleges started using these certain tests for the admission process to add diversity to colleges. Researchers have found that these tests can help identify lower-income students who will thrive. The President of Brown University said, “Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades,”. Good grades are not enough to know if the students are going to succeed or not.

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"Standardized test scores have traditionally been an important consideration in college admissions decisions. These tests were first used in the 1930s by Ivy League and other elite colleges as a way to broaden their applicant pools beyond students coming from privileged East Coast boarding schools."

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Since standardized tests started to be used in the college admissions process, the goal has been to create diversity among the admissions class. The main factors taken into consideration for some schools have shifted to evaluate the adversity overall they might've faced and overcome. Colleges can still create a diverse class with this strategy and eliminate the possibility of score gaps. This means that students with higher scores most likely are coming from a high income background. This mostly has been taking place in recent years, along with the shift of colleges to be test-optional completely, meaning students wouldn't have to admit their ACT, SAT, or any other standardized testing scores. This combination creates opportunities for students with less advantaged backgrounds and allows for diversity and equality at colleges to be the main goal either way.

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If colleges made the decision just based on the scores, the diversity would plummet, but now that is not the only factor, and the scores are used more to evaluate students from all demographic groups.

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In 2023, the Supreme Court case decided that making race-based decisions in the admissions process violated a clause of the 14th amendment. What this means is the policies that Affirmative Action sets as a remedy to help discrimination in processes like college admissions, mostly based on race, gender, or ethnicity, can not be a factor in higher education. Affirmative action was seen as almost reverse discrimination.

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Differences in the admission process are based on the type of college. MIT, for example, found that the test helps them with diversity in their admissions process. On the other hand, schools like the University of California eliminated accepting test scores entirely, “U.C. remains committed to maintaining a fair admissions process that reviews every applicant in a comprehensive manner and endeavors to combat systemic inequities.”. The bottom line is the colleges and elite universities want to educate students who will excel, and eventually benefit society. Standardized tests can help with the excellence and diversity if it is only one factor of the process.