[ModernMech]

> The political atmosphere following George Floyd and "defund the police", as there was a then somewhat fringe position that standardized testing was racist... came to the fore, which lead to the politicially easy and popular option of making standardized testing optional.

This is not it at all. The removal of SAT / ACT requirements has more to do about university pipelines and budgets, rather than social justice.

As with any metric, when you introduce it, people start optimizing for the metric rather than for what it's intended to measure. SAT and ACT scores had become so important, yet they are not actually a good indicator for what they're designed to measure (academic aptitude). They are also gamed, and people cheat. When colleges put too much emphasis on these metrics, it causes high schools to start aligning to teach them, rather than teaching broad skills colleges actually prefer.

What you attribute to social justice and the murder of George Floyd was really more of a pipeline problem caused by COVID. As someone who does undergraduate and graduate admissions, I can tell you the proximal cause of us dropping our standardized test requirement was that the many very good applicants to our school couldn't get tested, because it had been suspended. So we had a choice: don't admit a full class of students or drop the requirement. We dropped the requirement. It wasn't about social justice, or equality, or DEI, or whatever else you want to attribute it to. Rather, it was dropped because we needed students, and our applicants didn't have test scores.

That the requirement hasn't come back since is a matter of inertia; deciding to drop a requirement because it is impacting the short-term student pipeline is a decision the administration makes because they're losing money now. Bringing it back has to be justified by the lower ranks who are impacted by admitting unprepared students. Admin doesn't feel that pain. It's a much harder and longer process to show the lack of the standard is harming the university in the long term. Matters of social justice one way or another are not very persuasive to bean counters.

[porridgeraisin]

Not bringing it back is crazy though!

In India too many colleges didn't keep their entrance exams and used 12th standard marks to admit people that year. But the next year it was back to normal.

[alephnerd]

> What you attribute to social justice and the murder of George Floyd was really more of a pipeline problem caused by COVID. As someone who does undergraduate and graduate admissions, I can tell you the proximal cause of us dropping our standardized test requirement was that the many very good applicants to our school couldn't get tested, because it had been suspended. So we had a choice: don't admit a full class of students or drop the requirement. We dropped the requirement. It wasn't about social justice, or equality, or DEI, or whatever else you want to attribute it to. Rather, it was dropped because we needed students, and our applicants didn't have test scores

Thanks for the well thought out response. If possible, can you make this a post as well? It provides a lot of context I and others were not aware of.

I wish this was the messaging used by UCs back then. As an outsider, it felt like the primary driver was the "equity" portion. But maybe it was just an issue of the loudest voices being the most heard.

> Matters of social justice one way or another are not very persuasive to bean counters.

That tracks. I guess the messaging that evolved around equity may have just been coincidence due to the overlapping timelines, and the perception of a causal relationship formed.

> people start optimizing for the metric rather than for what it's intended to measure. SAT and ACT scores had become so important, yet they are not actually a good indicator for what they're designed to measure (academic aptitude). They are also gamed, and people cheat. When colleges put too much emphasis on these metrics, it causes high schools to start aligning to teach them, rather than teaching broad skills colleges actually prefer.

Sorry to start a separate conversation, but what other metric can you use then? SAT/ACT with academic achievement in HS in comparison to peers seems to provide the best bang for buck while ensuring some base amount of meritocracy.

Extracurriculars inherently skew towards those with money and free time, essays themselves skew towards those who have the time to edit and massage them (eg. My HS's AP Lang Class always turned into a college essay editing class during application season), and recruitment directly from feeder schools like 50-70 years ago as well as legacy admissions is inherently unequal.

Personally, I'd rather we leverage open admissions with weeder programs similar to what is leveraged in Germany because that at least allows us to sidestep sorting and gives everyone an equal chance to take a shot.