COVID-19 is proving to be a great help to those who want to get rid of standardized testing for college applicants. The push to suspend the requirement of an SAT or ACT score during the pandemic is creating herd momentum to dump the tests completely.
As Shannon Watkins explains in today’s Martin Center article, the UNC Board of Governors has voted to waive the state’s SAT requirement for next year.
That pleases testing opponents. One person Watkins interviewed, Isaiah Green, president of the UNC Association of Student Governments, “said he fully supports the waiver policy,” adding, “Students have been asking for this kind of policy for a long time at this point.” He also argued that UNC risks “losing very talented students because they can just go to other schools that don’t require the SAT or ACT.”
UNC is apparently going along with the stampede against standardized testing. Many other prestigious institutions are doing it, so UNC had better not buck the trend.
Watkins writes, “Boards and trustees are appointed not to simply fall in line with what everyone else is doing. They are appointed to make the best decisions possible by closely examining all the available evidence and ensuring that any decision aligns with the underlying academic goals of their institutions.”
How will colleges sort the wheat from the chaff once they have stopped using standardized tests?