USA Today (7/7, Peligri) reports in depth on the growing trend of “test-optional” admission in higher education, in which colleges eliminate requirements for standardized test scores. The article focuses especially on Hampshire College in Massachusetts; the school’s dean of admissions, Meredith Twombly, said the requirement for ACT or SAT scores was eliminated because they were a “very poor predictor of success.” USA Today also examines the positive and negative aspects of test-optional policies; while it deprioritizes one test’s effect on a student’s future, it can also increase workloads for admissions officers and damage the school’s ranking with US News.
California Panel Struggles To Define “College And Career Ready”
EdSource Today (4/18) reports on California’s Public Schools Accountability Act Advisory Committee, which is working on including both career and college readiness in the Academic Performance Index, “the primary measure of school effectiveness.” While the index has generally been based on standardized test scores, a state law passed in 2012 requires that 40% of the API score cover “measures of career and college readiness – an amorphous and poorly defined term that the committee is struggling to quantify.” The education group Linked Learning Alliance advocated before the committee for “programs that integrate academics with career experience,” arguing that students in these programs are better prepared for college and develop an array of “soft skills.” Committee co-chair Kenn Young, superintendent of the Riverside County Office of Education, said the newly reformed API “is not going to be a perfect vehicle.” David Conley, a University of Oregon professor who also presented before the committee, said reforming API would be “an evolutionary journey.”
New SAT Moves Toward Testing Analytic Ability
The New York Times (4/16, Lewin, Subscription Publication) reports that the revised SAT’s vocabulary questions “will no longer include obscure words.” Instead, the test will focus on what the College Board describes as “high utility” words that appear in multiple contexts across disciplines. The new test will also require students to interpret graphs for “analyzing science and social science texts.” College officials praised the changes which tested students on what they should be learning in high school, but Christoph Guttentag, Duke University’s admissions director, added that “we’ll still have to examine the evidence to see if there’s any change in the predictive validity within our context.” Many admissions officials questioned the College Board’s claims that the new tests would eliminate the gap between high and low income students’ scores.
Majority Of California Students Graduate Unprepared For College
Palm Springs (CA) Desert Sun (4/6, Leff) reports less than 40 percent of high school students in California are “completing the requirements to be eligible for the state’s public universities.” A senior fellow at the state’s Public Policy Institute estimates that if the trend continues, California will have a million less college graduates than it needs in 2025. John Rogers, director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, says when only considering those who graduate and do it in four years, the statistic drops to 30 percent statewide, 20 percent for Latinos, and 18 percent for African-Americans. As Latino children are now a majority of California’s public school students, many are “framing the problem as a civil rights issue.”
Krugman Argues That There Is No Serious “Skills Gap”
In his column for the New York Times (3/31, Subscription Publication), Paul Krugman that the belief that the nation “suffers from a severe ‘skills gap’ is one of those things that everyone important knows must be true, because everyone they know says it’s true,” but really is a “zombie idea — an idea that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die.” Unfortunately, Krugman writes, the “skills myth” is “having dire effects on real-world policy,” as there is little focus on “disastrously wrongheaded fiscal policy and inadequate action” by the Fed. Krugman says that by “blaming workers for their own plight, the skills myth shifts attention away from the spectacle of soaring profits and bonuses even as employment and wages stagnate.”
Study: Parents’ Help With Homework Counterproductive
The San Francisco Chronicle (3/28, Graff) reports that researchers studying NCES data have found that “parent help is mostly inconsequential, and sometimes can even hurt.” Researchers “looked at 63 measures of parental involvement in children’s lives, including helping with homework, volunteering at school, punishing kids with bad grades” and other factors, and found that “most had little affect on a child’s academic success.” Moreover, in middle school, “parental homework help had a negative effect, bringing down test scores.” The study found that “reading out loud to young kids and talking with teenagers about college” were the only factors that seemed to help academic achievement.
Higher Education Officials: High School GPA Better Success Predictor Than Standardized Tests
The AP (3/24, Edwards) reports that higher education officials say that standardized test scores aren’t “the best predictor of college success,” but instead “a student’s high school grade point average” is. The piece notes that Dr. Thomas Calhoun of the University of North Alabama “said research indicates a student’s performance in high school tracks better with that student’s college performance.”
Professor: Common Core Must Prepare Students For College Reading
In commentary for the Chronicle of Higher Education (2/4, Bauerlein), author and Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein writes that the Common Core Standards were developed in part to address high numbers of students requiring remedial courses because they entered college unprepared, noting that part of the impetus behind the standards is a push to increase the complexity of the textual material students are capable of processing. Bauerlein concludes that standards must remain focused on preparing students for the complexity of the texts they will face in college.
