The End of the SAT Essay and SAT Subject Tests
A few weeks ago, the College Board announced that they will remove the optional essay from the SAT and end the administration of SAT Subject Tests. While these are large-scale changes for the College Board, they will have little to no impact on the overall college admissions process.
The optional essay was rarely required by colleges, and often ignored even by the schools who did ask for students to complete the SAT with the essay. While I have never had a substantive conversation with a college admissions officer about the reasons for this, which is partially emblematic of how insignificant it was to them, I have my ideas as to why they would ignore it. First, a timed essay is not a good facsimile for how writing is actually produced in college or the real world. I am certainly not on a timer as I write this, nor was I ever on a timer while writing anything for a college class. Why would a college admissions office be concerned with how well a student can write on a time crunch if that is not what writing on their campus looks like? Second, writing is nearly impossible to grade in a standardized way. What constitutes good writing is inherently subjective, and though the College Board has long made a living on grading students on writing in AP exams, they are not particularly adept at it. An essay that earns high scores on an AP exam is not necessarily one that would be published as an op-ed or graded highly by a college professor for its logical structure and strength of argument. The SAT essay had the same problem. No matter how robust the rubric to grade the essay was, the subjective opinion of the reader was always going to be an issue, and a college admissions office has no reason to trust the subjective opinion of a random SAT grader when their admissions officers, who are heavily trained by the school to look for the things the school cares most about, have other ways in the application to judge a student’s writing ability. Finally, a single prompt can be biased in ways that we may not understand immediately, as some students may lack cultural, religious, or educational context to effectively answer it, which has nothing to do with that student’s ability to write.
Writing is an important part of success in college, and the evaluation of writing is certainly a factor in admissions. However, colleges have and will continue to evaluate students' writing abilities through application essays. Personal statements, where the student has the flexibility to write about the things for which they care the most, and supplemental essays, where students can further show their character or at least have the opportunity to research and understand the prompt, provide excellent examples of a student’s ability and potential. Furthermore, some schools, most notably Princeton University, have required that students submit a graded essay from one of their classes as a way to further evaluate a student’s writing ability, which is a trend that could continue to grow.
The SAT Subject Tests were similarly ignored. As of last year, no colleges to which my students applied required SAT Subject Tests as part of the application. These tests have been repeatedly found to be flawed and have more correlation with a student's socioeconomic status than their abilities to be successful in college. For that reason, they were rapidly becoming obsolete. The admissions trend away from standardized testing is mostly about avoiding punishing students for things beyond their control. Students who can’t afford to prepare for SAT Subject Tests or who did not attend schools that offer rigorous courses in certain subjects were unfairly punished by SAT Subject Tests, while those who could afford to hire tutors to prepare for Subject Tests had an unfair advantage. Additionally, the average score on many Subject Tests was so high that the tests themselves were basically invalid. Quite simply, SAT Subject Tests were an unnecessary burden that gave colleges little to no new information about a student. Colleges will continue to evaluate students' abilities in particular subjects by looking at grades they have earned in classes that they've taken. Standardized exams will still be a part of the evaluation process in the form of AP and IB exams, but those scores are also not weighted heavily by most schools as they rely more on teacher quality than student ability.
While this was all big news, this represents more of a monumental shift in the College Board’s business model than in college admissions. As admissions offices continue to move away from standardized testing - a trend that has been rapidly accelerated by COVID-19 - the College Board is likely to undergo more changes like this as it fights to remain relevant in the college admissions process. I suspect that given the College Board’s footprint and reputation those changes will make a lot of noise without substantially impacting students, as it did this time.
