This week, the Admissions Blog conducted an interview with Andrew Ho, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education whose research has focused on measuring student and school proficiency and on standardized testing metrics.
Admissions Blog: What is the value of standardized testing in college admissions?
Andrew Ho: There are at least three possible answers to that question. The first is that it can add predictive value above and beyond everything else in the college application—beyond the essay, beyond the high school grades, beyond teacher recommendations and your transcript and the kind of high school you went to. The second way is that it’s formative. Studying for the SAT and the ACT, arguably, can improve skills that are necessary for college and a potential career. The idea that studying for the SAT and ACT can be formative goes against sort of our old-fashioned—and incorrect, frankly—notion that we have a set of abilities in our head that tests measure but that can’t be changed. This kind of idea is not very useful in education, and so what we think of instead is this idea that we can improve our academic achievement and increase our proficiency by studying for exams like the SAT and ACT. The third answer is an extension of the first. Instead of thinking of the predictive value of a test score, we can think about its value to an admissions officer. Admissions officers don’t have equations, they work with context. For example, if an admissions officer knows that a particular high school has a particular grading procedure that doesn’t allow for much distinction at the top of the student ranking metric, then the SAT and ACT scores may provide valuable insight.
AB: How are standardized test scores evaluated in the context of a college application?
AH: I have never participated in an undergraduate admissions process and I don’t know the particulars of how they work, but it’s safe to say that if you take the readership of your blog and ask them to guess how much the SAT or the ACT matters, they are going to overestimate by a considerable amount. There are a couple of reasons for that. The first is that in general there isn’t that much variance in SAT and ACT scores among applicants to universities like Harvard. The second reason is that no matter how much you tell somebody that words matter and essays matter and recommendations matter, numbers tend to have a hold over the public and students and parents in general, in a way that makes them seem as if they are more objective and certain than they actually are. But it should be a relief to your readership that admissions officers I’ve talked to across the country are not as weak to numbers, and that the are interested in richer portraits of students.
AB: What is the difference between SAT and ACT?
AH: Historically, the ACT has been much more tied to the high school curriculum, and the SAT had its historical roots in IQ-like tests. The ACT meanwhile developed out of the Iowa Tests of Educational Development, so it was meant to provide useful information to teachers—high school teachers in particular. Now, currently there are fewer differences, and in the future I suspect there will be even fewer differences. They are both trying to provide value to colleges and their admissions decisions, but they are both also increasingly trying to be valuable to students. They are both getting in the game of trying to encourage students and parents and schools to focus on the skills necessary for careers and college.
AB: What is your opinion on the commercialization of test preparation?
AH: It is unsurprising and dangerous. It’s unsurprising because there is a market, so it’s not surprising that we have this industry. It’s dangerous if we value the idea of meritocracy where merit has a very low correlation with income or wealth. It’s a difficult problem to solve because again the degree to which people think these numbers matter exceeds the extent to which they actually do. Test scores are an imperfect predictor of career and college readiness. They are a proxy on which there are high stakes, and the extent to which they are high stakes causes them to be inflated, so they are no longer as good as indicator as if we could truly measure college readiness.
AB: What is your opinion on the College Board president’s proposal to change the SAT as to make it more relevant to high school and college curriculums and less coachable?
AH: I think it’s an exciting goal. This is a very exciting time for both the College Board and the ACT, as well as an opportunity to advance assessment and use it to provide value to high school students, teachers, and parents. There is also room to advance online assessments, to increase relevance, and answer questions about college-relevant skills. I think it’s a great proposal. It’s also extremely challenging to deliver on those promises, but he’s a good person to do it and he’s done good things in the past, particularly in his work on the national standards movement. As much as the public likes to demonize testing companies, these are generally well-intentioned organizations in my experience and they are trying to make a positive influence and open up college access to a broader range of students than previously.