Disadvantages Of SAT/Act Optional
The growing number of SAT/ACT optional universities represents a positive trend in the test optional movement. From students’ perspective, winners and losers are kind of different in SAT optional policy. Students with high SAT or ACT scores lose their absolute advantages, though high scores can still help them to get an offer from their dreaming schools. Traditional minority students might “take advantage” of this policy and have higher chance to be admitted than before. The negative influence of shadow education might decrease in this situation, based on the fact that school GPA is less sensitive to student economics background than SAT scores. However, it doesn’t mean that SAT optional policy can significantly reduce the inequality caused
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A essential worry about SAT Optional policy is that whether colleges can still select qualified students without their scores. In SAT optional universities, they need to take into accounts more factors to predict students’ college academic performance and selecting the weights for these factors can be a more challenging task. Open criticism remains that SAT/ACT optional makes admissions decisions more subjective and non-submitters tend to have lower academic performances in colleges. Luckily, prior research results showed relatively optimistic results. According to Hoover’s research about Bates College (2004), the overall grade-point average was 3.11 for students who submitted test scores and 3.06 for those who did not, and the difference between the graduation rates for the two groups was one-tenth of 1 percent. Though there does exist a gap between the two groups in their academic performance, the difference is not very obvious. As for Mount Holyoke College (Robinson, 2015) case, Robinson made a conclusion that selective college admissions can indeed be carried out under an optional SAT score submission policy at an institution. His results showed that although non-submitters have lower first year GPAs than submitters, students’ first year college GPA and retention rate are not significantly influenced by whether or not they submitted
A essential worry about SAT Optional policy is that whether colleges can still select qualified students without their scores. In SAT optional universities, they need to take into accounts more factors to predict students’ college academic performance and selecting the weights for these factors can be a more challenging task. Open criticism remains that SAT/ACT optional makes admissions decisions more subjective and non-submitters tend to have lower academic performances in colleges. Luckily, prior research results showed relatively optimistic results. According to Hoover’s research about Bates College (2004), the overall grade-point average was 3.11 for students who submitted test scores and 3.06 for those who did not, and the difference between the graduation rates for the two groups was one-tenth of 1 percent. Though there does exist a gap between the two groups in their academic performance, the difference is not very obvious. As for Mount Holyoke College (Robinson, 2015) case, Robinson made a conclusion that selective college admissions can indeed be carried out under an optional SAT score submission policy at an institution. His results showed that although non-submitters have lower first year GPAs than submitters, students’ first year college GPA and retention rate are not significantly influenced by whether or not they submitted