Posted on 06/14/2018 8:01:34 AM PDT by simpson96
The University of Chicago will no longer require ACT or SAT scores from U.S. students, sending a jolt through elite institutions of higher education as it becomes the first top-10 research university to join the test-optional movement.
Numerous schools, including well-known liberal arts colleges, have dropped or pared back testing mandates in recent years to bolster recruiting in a crowded market. But the announcement Thursday by the university was a watershed, cracking what had been a solid and enduring wall of support for the primary admission tests among the two dozen most prestigious research universities.
The private university in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood admits fewer than 10 percent of applicants and ranks third on the U.S. News & World Report list of top national universities, after Princeton and Harvard and tied with Yale. It has required prospective freshmen to take a national admission test since 1957. Before that, it screened applicants with its own tests.
U-Chicago is also expanding financial aid and scrapping in-person admission interviews, which had been optional. Instead, it will allow applicants to send in two-minute video pitches, in an effort to connect with a generation skilled at communicating via cellphone clips.
"Testing is not the be-all and the end-all," said James G. Nondorf, U-Chicago's dean of admissions and financial aid. He said he didn't want "one little test score" to end up "scaring students off" who are otherwise qualified.(snip)
With the change in admissions policy will come a significant boost in financial aid. The university is announcing a guarantee of free tuition for students from families with income under $125,000 a year. For most students with annual family income below $60,000, financial aid will cover tuition, fees, room and board. U-Chicago's full price for students without aid is more than $70,000 in the coming school year.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
The new qualifier will be to count tattoos.
Top ten research institution according to who?
Resume from University of Chicago? We’ll keep it on file. (Circular file, that is.)
My son is getting close to his college years. He is a sophomore but has taken the ACT and SAT already.
This past week, he took an ACT prep class, eight hours a day for five days.
He took past ACTs everyday plus the training. His score went up six points at the end of the week.
I felt like he had to do the training because kids up East will often take the test 10 or 15 times in their high school career. He has to get good at it just to compete.
Schools like University of Chicago probably have 25% or more of their incoming students get a perfect score on the ACT.
So, in some respects, the test is kind of worthless as kids who make these tests a priority slant the results, but there is no other way to get in the best and brightest.
I doubt they will keep this plan in place for too long!
It still is, and its comparatively high admission/applicant rate is due to the fact that it has a reputation for being a very tough school to graduate from, unlike the others in its class.
SATs are a two-edged sword, having gone through SAT prep with my kids some years ago. The problem with the SAT is that the answers are often ambiguous and the "best" answer is often flat-out wrong.
The grading on the English essay part was based not upon good writing practices of our best writers, but upon whether you followed a rote writing standard for sentence and paragraph construction meaning that everything read like it was written by the local department of motor vehicles
Promotion based upon high SAT scores is a way to guarantee the dominance of high performing mediocrities, meaning that real leadership will come from the so-called second tier universities that have consequently taken prime position.
A Teddy Roosevelt could never get into Harvard today.
“I felt like he had to do the training because kids up East will often take the test 10 or 15 times in their high school career. He has to get good at it just to compete.
What do you mean by “up East”?
.
It means Qualified for Student loans
Higher ed is in a mad race to see who can degrade the product fastest. I follow this closely and the heat is on big time, this used to be a reputable school, this to me takes the gun and fills it with bullets
Stupid and tacit admission that it is all about the money!
“A Teddy Roosevelt could never get into Harvard today. “
—
Sure he would,he was a Roosevelt.
.
He was a republican too.
From my POV you are correct. My profession originally required an AS, now it requires a BS. Fortunately my experience counts, but not always.
To the applause of the ill-informed.
From a political perspective (after all, this is U/Chicago) imagine putting sugar in the gas tank one grain at a time. (See tagline.)
They want people like Hogg to attend.
Now even more bozos can go to college. Debt slavery will go even higher.
Eliminating these tests will make admissions even more inscrutable, thus continuing the discrimination against whites and asians.
The only good thing to come out of this is that the College Board will be defunded.
Today, I would looking at colleges and their programs like they were a Mercedes Benz limo, and gazing at their real numbers...getting kids to useful degrees and getting a job within sixty days of graduation. Any place talking over their ‘party-status’ or bragging about cultural awareness? I’d skip them.
Requiring standardized test scores was a huge part of what made elite institutions strong academically. Harvard & Yale are still taking the best students from Andover and Exeter, but the SAT/ACT allowed them to replace the mediocre prep school kids with genius-level students from all over the country. Ditching standardized test scores means that the A student from Andover still gets in, but the 150 IQ public school white kid from Boise doesn’t because his good grades are indistinguishable from the good grades of the 105 IQ black girl from Chicago. And that’s the whole point.
The AVERAGE ACT score is a 34. The bottom 25% is 32. Top 75% is a 35.
Test high score is a 36.
Their Acceptance rate is 8%.
It would be interesting to their new evaluation tools!
> It means Qualified for Student loans <
Interesting take. But since the school admits less than 10% of all applicants, how would eliminating entrance tests increase their revenue? This seems more like a diversity play to me.
Universities adopting the Starbucks model, I don’t think it will end well for them.
This is like the banks offering huge loans to folks with terrible credit and/or no current income.
The college bubble.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.