As U of M Twin Cities tries test-optional, expert says students will benefit
The University of Minnesota waives standardized test scores due to COVID-19
Students hoping to get into the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus won’t need to submit an ACT or SAT college entrance exam score when they apply for fall 2021. University leaders unveiled the change last week, saying they understood some students were struggling to schedule the tests amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
While officials say they’ll decide over the next few months whether to make the change permanent, it’s clear a national shift is underway.
Some 1,300 accredited four-year schools have dropped SAT and ACT requirements for fall 2021 applicants, part of a growing test-optional trend one expert says is improving access to the nation’s top institutions without compromising academics.
The U of M’s move is “a great step forward, particularly with a focus on access for students who may not have had these kinds of opportunities in the past,” Laurie Koehler, vice president of marketing and enrollment strategy at Ithaca College in New York, told MPR News.
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Koehler helped lead a 2015 test-optional effort at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. That university, she said, had done a great job recruiting white and higher-income students but not African American, Latino or Hispanic students.
Their research showed ACTs and SATs were a barrier for students of color — many can’t afford the test prep or get the test-taking help their white peers receive — but that those scores were not necessarily the best predictors of student academic success. Instead it was a student’s high school performance and the rigor of their classes that turned out to be stronger indicators.
Koehler noted that while students with higher standardized test scores performed slightly better in their first semester of school, that edge dissolved from the second semester on.
Making the ACT and SAT optional led to George Washington’s most diverse freshman class in the university’s history. And students who applied without submitting scores stayed for their second and third years at higher rates than those admitted with entrance exam scores, according to the university.
Koehler said that once they lifted the test requirement, the school saw an overall increase in applications, including those students who are African-American, Hispanic, Latinx, International, low income, Pell Grant-eligible and first-generation college students.
The test-optional movement has gained traction across Minnesota. U campuses in Duluth and Crookston recently announced plans to go test-optional. In the Twin Cities, Macalester College and Hamline, St. Thomas and Augsburg universities are among those shifting to test-optional.
“If they approach it properly,” Koehler said of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus, they’ll see what other institutions have seen — “any differences that might kind of appear in the first semester, those fade away pretty quickly. And what matters then is what the quality of the experience is while they are on your campus.”