Columbia goes test-optional
But your kid should still take a standardized test
Columbia and William and Mary have announced permanent test-optional policies; they will not require standardized test scores for undergraduate admission. Many colleges had temporary test-optional policies in place during the pandemic, when standardized test availability was spotty. These two schools and others have decided to adopt that approach, whereby applicants can but are not required to submit test scores, for good.
(Test-blind policies, like the UC system has, are a different story. The UCs won’t look at your test scores even if you submit them. We’re not talking about those in this post.)
So, should your kid take a standardized test? Yes.
I think test-optional policies are a smokescreen. They allow colleges to look DEI-concerned while still doing whatever they want. And what do they do? They let in applicants who do submit test scores at higher rates.
Here’s a table from one of the two test prep services I recommend, Compass.
The admission rate for score-submitters vs. not is more than double at some schools!
What about Columbia and William and Mary, the colleges that just became permanently test-optional?
Both colleges issued press releases with a lot of nonsense buzzword salad about holistic considerations, flexibility, valuing the whole student experience, etc. That’s what they claim to do.
What do they really do? I don’t have the admission rates for score-submitters vs. not for those two colleges, but we can infer a bit from what the colleges publish in their Common Datasets. In 2021, the most recent data available, 73 percent and 70 percent of freshmen enrolled at Columbia and William and Mary, respectively, had submitted test scores.
So, what do Columbia and William and Mary actually do? They let in a lot of kids who submit test scores.
Your kid should take a standardized test. Let’s talk about how to prepare most effectively and least painfully. You can book a one-on-one consultation here.
P.S. Substack is going to insert a blurb below asking you to offer me some money. Please don’t do that! I’m not planning to paywall any posts; I just haven’t figured out how to turn that message off.
My oldest child is a senior in high school. In applying to schools, he went by some internet wisdom that suggested he only submit his test score if it was above the mean for that school. I wonder if that was just an invitation for them to assume the worst. His results are not all back yet. Is there any data that controls for GPA? The claim I've heard is that standardized tests are bad (for various reasons) and that GPA is the better predictor of success anyway. So are the schools actually weighting GPA more for no-test applicants? Or are they just punishing the no-test applicants? I fear that the actual answer is that they punish the no-test applicants that whose identities they are not interested in, and reward those whose identities are more desirable. I suspect the data to sort that out would be very hard to come by.