Dartmouth, Objectivity, College Admissions

Thank you, Dartmouth. Dartmouth College just reinstated the SAT, leading America back to hallmark, merit-based admissions. But there is more to this story. Conservatives – those who believe merit matters in education – will like it.

In 2020, pandemic fears made SATs hard to administer, so schools dropped it. By 2021, half of America’s 2,330 BA-granting institutions had dropped it.

As the pandemic left, some schools – like the University of California – decided to phase standardized testing out permanently, saying it hurt lower-income kids.

Like not requiring kids to do math, reading, writing, history, civics, and science to complete high school, many colleges decided they could cancel the requirement.

Beyond lowering the bar, reducing expectations and performance, this approach assumed – in a racist way – lower-income students, those from less monied backgrounds, or lower-performing high schools, just could not cut it.

Before long, every Ivy League Institution had “waived” the SAT requirement for admission. Left-leaning media celebrated this turn, “selective” colleges changing, disposing of objective, politically incorrect indicators of admission. 

As one noted, even “before the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education leaders were increasingly voicing concerns that the SAT and ACT exacerbate racial and ethnic disparities in educational access.”

US News & World Report bought into the narrative and started “ranking test-blind” institutions, formerly excluded. This grew the narrative that objective tests hurt.

Now comes Dartmouth College – known for a Yankee independent streak – which has decided to go it alone, think “out of the box,” and restart using SATs.

In a New York Times interview – rare for a place famous for googling their facts – Dartmouth explained its reasoning.

Where does one begin? Imagine a college doing the right thing, then explaining its reasoning with facts to drive student-oriented, quality-centric decisions, dispensing with politics and “feelings.”

What Dartmouth did, to their credit, is a serious “deep dive” research to assess whether standardized tests – whatever they do not reveal – have predictive value. Turns out, they do. The data is rich and convincing.

Dartmouth’s president, Sian Beilock, is a cognitive scientist. She asked for an internal study, “evidence” with and without the SAT, and they “dug into the numbers.”

Here is what the Dartmouth study found. First, as expected, “Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades — or student essays and teacher recommendations — of how well students would fare,” the evidence incontrovertible.

Second, “evidence of this relationship is large and growing,” objectivity matters.  

Third, the not-required SAT policy hurt “lower-income applicants” because – perhaps a matter of confidence – lower-income students often did not submit scores. “They withheld test scores that would have helped them get into Dartmouth.”

As Dartmouth showed, the policy encourages “a strategic mistake,” as applicants “wrongly believed that their scores were too low, when in truth the admissions office would have judged the scores to be a sign that students had overcome a difficult environment and could thrive at Dartmouth.”

Details matter in life, education, and admissions. The study showed that while Dartmouth has an average admission profile of SATs 1440 to 1560 out of 1600, “hundreds of less-advantaged applicants with scores in the 1,400 range, who should be submitting scores to identify themselves to admissions” did not do so.

The data was clear. “Some of these applicants were rejected because the admissions office could not be confident about their academic qualifications.” Moreover, “The students would have probably been accepted had they submitted their test scores,” said the College.

This is stunning, not because Dartmouth carefully evaluates objective data in the context of applicant background, but because they proved objectivity matters, the left is wrong.

Said Dartmouth’s president: “We’re looking for the kids who are excelling in their environment,” and “we know society is unequal.” That said, “kids that are excelling in their environment, we think, are a good bet to excel at Dartmouth and out in the world.”

In other words, do not turn your back on objective data. It helps to assess the world – or, in this case, the prospects for success.

But the kicker is the candor spoken by this one Ivy League president. “Many critics on the political left argue the tests are racially or economically biased, but Beilock … said the evidence didn’t support those claims.” Period.

When asked if this shift might reduce applicants, Dartmouth said dropping the SAT did not make “a more diverse pool,” and they got 31,000 applicants last year for 1,200 slots.

What does all this really mean? Merit may be coming back, or perhaps self-interest by colleges in competing for and advancing the best students, together with ethnic blend.

Beyond that, truth does out. Maybe now, the 80 percent who have abandoned standardized tests may restart them. There is always hope. 

PS: There was hope for me, too, a kid whose father never finished college, whose mother raised four kids on a schoolteacher’s salary, who needed scholarships, work, and loans to get through college – and yet was admitted by Dartmouth. Thank you, Dartmouth.

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.