The anti-testing movement came out of DEI and teachers’ unions. Its essential premise was to shred merit and standards and replace them with ‘you know what’. Quite a few colleges dropped SAT scores but now a well-known college is bringing them back after realizing that they actually help underprivileged students get in.
Dartmouth College has announced it will once again require applicants to submit standardized test scores, beginning with the next application cycle, for the class of 2029.
This comes after the Ivy League college, located in New Hampshire, opted to make test scores optional in 2020, citing the COVID-19 pandemic.
A new study conducted by the college found test scores could have helped less advantaged students, including first-generation students and students from low-income families, gain access to the school.
“We find ourselves missing out on some great students,” says Bruce Sacerdote, a Dartmouth economics professor and co-author of that study.
He says students from disadvantaged backgrounds submitted their test scores at far lower rates, but their scores were high enough that they might have helped the students get in.
“We can see in the data: Oh wow, that student, boy, they had a 1450 … or a 1500 … We didn’t even know that. And they were not admitted to Dartmouth,” he says. “That is a really outstanding score. And, it would have been a great piece [of information] to have.”
The study also found that test scores helped bring in students from high schools that didn’t already have a track record of sending students to Dartmouth.
Conservatives, liberals and libertarians have long made this argument. That’s why you can find it at the Free Press, National Review and Reason. The bottom line for most of these is that whatever the setup is, kids from wealthy and successful families are much more likely to be able to navigate it. Test scores introduce an objective standard of merit and they’re the only reliable way to move students up the social ladder. DEI however just means a generation of Obamas and Kamalas: rich kids who claim to be the oppressed and play identity politics.
(The Ivies are currently chock full of them.)
Or it brings in kids who are not capable of handling the material, pile up student debt and don’t graduate.
An interesting point from The FP’s article on a related subject.
In the 1960s, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara launched Project 100,000, which lowered the testing requirement for armed services entry. This allowed people at the tenth percentile (80~ IQ)—a standard deviation lower than the previous standard—to join.
Supposedly, the aim was to alleviate poverty. LBJ had recently begun his War on Poverty program. The story was that getting more recruits into the military would help them move into the middle class. And they needed more recruits for the Vietnam War. Lowering recruitment standards was an easy way to get them.
Recruits of Project 100,000 were nine times more likely to require remedial training and training took up to four times longer to complete compared to their peers who had entered under the higher score requirement. In Vietnam, men recruited under the lower testing threshold were 2.5 times more likely to die in combat.
Did the veterans who made it home achieve upward mobility? No. Compared to civilians with similar attributes who were not recruited, McNamara’s Morons (as they were later termed) were less likely to be employed, less likely to own a business, and obtained less education.
Going to Harvard isn’t quite the same as being too stupid to fight in a war, but it does have consequences.
DEI admissions lead to much higher rates of minority students who fail to graduate, or if they do graduate, struggle to function in the workplace. When you replace merit with political metrics, you’re not doing anyone any favors. You’re just Cloward-Pivening the system while using everyone in it as societal cannon fodder.