High school students with low test scores, rejoice! Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. will no longer consider SAT or ACT scores in its admissions and financial-aid decisions.
As Inside Higher Education reports, there are about 800 schools in the U.S. where these standardized test scores are optional, but Hampshire is the first competitive, four-year college in the nation to completely reject them altogether.
Hampshire College said in a recent announcement they are now “test blind,” adding that their decision was based out of “concern for fairness in access to educational opportunity.”
It’s no secret that standardized testing favors students who can afford after-school tutors and assistance from testing centers — leaving behind low-income students who cannot afford these opportunities.
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Also, as the New York Times points out, you’d be surprised how many students don’t apply to college because they can’t be bothered to take the exam. It’s also why, earlier this year, the College Board made a stunning announcement they would redesign the SAT as part of an effort to make their exam more accessible to students with lesser means.
When jobs reports consistently show that people with degrees have much higher employment rates and much bigger paychecks, enrolling more low-income students in college can be a ticket to the middle class.
According to US News college rankings, it costs $46,625 a year to attend Hampshire, but 60.5 percent of full-time undergraduates receive some kind of need-based financial aid, with the average need-based scholarship or grant award at $29,910.
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Perhaps ditching the SAT and ACT just came naturally, since Hampshire runs its campus a little differently. Professors don’t give out actual grades to their students. Instead, they receive “detailed narrative evaluations” based on their classwork, discussions and projects.
“Tests aren’t part of Hampshire’s pedagogy, so why would we use a test to determine which students would thrive here? The SAT is essentially one test on one day in a given year,” said Meredith Twombly, the dean of admissions and financial aid. “Students’ high school academic records, their history of civic engagement, their letters of recommendation from mentors, and their ability to represent themselves through their essays trump anything the SAT could tell us.”
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Tag: ACT
Can Software Close the SAT Achievement Gap?
Dan Driscoll started City Football Club, a nonprofit soccer program for middle and high school students in Washington, DC. To play soccer, students had to participate in SAT tutoring and college counseling. Driscoll found that his tutoring techniques helped his students gain an average of 100 points on each of the three sections of the SAT. And while many of his students were heading to college, he wanted to find a way to give the same opportunity to other students. So he started Prepify, a cloud-based service that teaches students to take the SAT and ACT. The program adapts to students’ progress—for example, if a student misses a question, an easier version of a similar question will pop up next—and could close the gap in test scores between low-income students and their affluent peers. Prepify is a for-profit company, and Driscoll plans to reinvest all profits back into the software to create tools like a progress dashboard to connect low-income students with top universities.
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ACT Proves Small, Six-Dollar Measures Can Put More Low-Income Students in College
Among low-income families, less than 30 percent of students attend college. It’s a complicated problem, one that won’t be solved by any simple solution. But we’re getting a better idea of little things we can do to boost that low rate. Take the recent investigation of ACT score reports by Amanda Pallais of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Pallais found that after 1997, the year that the ACT decided to give test-takers one more free score report (from three to four), low-income students:
- applied to more colleges, and
- attended selective colleges in greater numbers.
It was a simple measure that cost the ACT just $6 per score report, but it had a significant impact on low-income college enrollment.