Keeping the Essay

A new front has opened in the ongoing battle over the efficacy and equity of standardized testing, and Harvard’s peer institutions appear to be leading the charge. The current issue is whether or not schools should require the essay portions of the SAT and ACT, which half of the Ivy League has now moved to make optional. Harvard is one holdout.

Though the correlation between general standardized test performance and income is troubling, Harvard is right to continue reviewing the predictive value of SAT and ACT essays instead of immediately scrapping them: Standardized tests have great practical importance that Harvard should not discount. Taken as a part of a larger application, standardized tests have predictive power, and serve as a key point of comparison between people from varied backgrounds. As long as colleges understand tests' limits and biases, the SAT and ACT will continue to be an invaluable part of the admissions process.

Standardized tests provide a dimension to the application that the transcript, recommendation, and personal statement do not: a common metric against which all students are judged. The SAT and ACT, including the essay sections, are measures of pure performance. Though the tests may be flawed, university admissions officers are aware of their issues and often evaluate the many ways in which they could improve. William R. Fitzsimmsons ’67, Harvard College’s Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, has had intimate involvement in the reform of the SAT, and the changes in the works for the SAT and ACT essay sections reflect a similar exchange of views between admissions administrators and the tests’ designers.

Standardized tests are also far from the sole arbiter of a student’s fate: The SAT and ACT give colleges a common system for determining where students are academically, and the other of the application tells them how the student got there. At a college like Harvard with a holistic philosophy of admissions, few decisions are made on the sole basis of test scores, and certainly not on the sole basis of the timed essay section.

It would be easy to criticize Harvard for appearing to follow rather than lead in this instance, given the number of peer institutions who have made the essay section optional. But there is little point in leading to the wrong destination. Though standardized tests alone are imperfect, so is any measure of student achievement. With more metrics, a college can get a fuller picture of an applicant. Harvard should want the fullest picture it can capture.