The ability to write cogently, quickly and under pressure, helped me get into and through college. However, a growing list of selective universities have stopped requiring applicants to take SAT and ACT essay tests, reports  Nick Anderson in the Washington Post. Brown, Princeton and Stanford dropped the requirement this month, following Dartmouth, Harvard and Yale. The University of Michigan followed suit yesterday. The essay test unfairly burdens low-income students, who oft

At colleges that don’t require applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores, students admitted on grades alone are just as likely to graduate as those who submit test scores, according to a new study, Defining Access: How Test-Optional Works. Credit: LA Johnson/NPR In addition, researchers found that test-optional colleges “enroll — and graduate — a higher proportion of low-income and first generation-students, and more students from diverse backgrounds,” reports NPR’s Claudio Sanc

Test scores matter, writes Erika Sanzi on Good School Hunting. In deciding where to build its second headquarters (HQ2), Amazon is considering average SAT and ACT scores of potential sites, reports the Wall Street Journal. The company wants a strong local talent pool and to persuade employees to move to the city, writes Sanzi. “No parent, or future parent, wants to be transferred to a place with lousy schools and one objective and comparable measure of school quality can be f

California may let schools replace 11th-grade Smarter Balanced tests with the SAT or ACT, reports CALmatters’ Felicia Mello. That might encourage college-going, but erode accountability for the state’s high schools. More than 30 California districts offer a college admission test for free during the school day, to encourage students to apply to college. Some offer test-prep help as well. But they’re also required to give 11th graders the Common Core-aligned Smarter Balanced t

Test-optional college admissions tilts the playing field just a little bit more, writes Kelly Ochs Rosinger, a Penn education professor, on The Conversation. More than 1,000 colleges no longer require applicants to submit an SAT or ACT score. “Instead of expanding economic and racial diversity at American colleges, test-optional policies have actually served to make selective colleges even more selective,” she writes, citing an analysis of 180 liberal arts colleges, including

To get more smart, disadvantaged students into better colleges, all students should take the SAT or ACT free of charge, argues Susan Dynarski.Susan Dynarski is a professor of education, public policy and economics at the University of Michigan. “Even for students who perform well in high school, parents’ income strongly predicts whether they will attend and complete college,” she writes. We’re losing talent, because children of non-college-educated parents are getting lost in

To be considered “proficient,” Illinois juniors will have to “earn a higher score on the SAT than the one that’s correlated with college readiness,” writes Catherine Gewertz in Ed Week. The state board of education’s policy doesn’t affect students’ grades or graduation, she explains. But their high schools will lose points in the new accountability system if 11th graders score below 540 in English or math on the SAT. The College Board, which runs the SAT, has set the college-

Scores are up on the redesigned SAT, reports Education Week‘s Catherine Gewertz. That doesn’t mean students are better prepared: Apparently, it’s an easier test. Only 46 percent of students are likely to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing college coursework, College Board estimated. “In redesigning the SAT, the College Board aimed to build a more straightforward test that reflects the strengths students will need for college,” writes Gewertz. “It dumped obscure vocabulary

Many more students are getting extra time to complete the SAT, primarily due to learning disability diagnoses.  Is the SAT still valid?, asks Miriam Kurtzig Freedman, who blogs at School Law Pro, in Education Week. In 2003, the College Board, which runs the SAT, stopped flagging results of students with disabilities who used extra time and other accommodations. The number of requests soared, as did fears that affluent parents were gaming the system to boost the scores of thei

After helping to write Common Core standards, David Coleman moved to College Board, where he pushed a plan to align the SAT and PSAT college entrance exams to the standards, reports Renee Dudley for Reuters. The new Core-linked SAT, released this spring, is facing “harsh realities.” Within College Board, there were “pitched battles” over Coleman’s “timeline to create the new test,” writes Dudley, who had access to internal e-mails, memos and presentations. As Reuters reported