(New York Times) By Kate Zernike. The SAT and the ACT, bugaboos of generations of college applicants, were supposed to shrink in significance as more colleges and universities moved away from requiring standardized test scores for admission. Instead, the companies behind them have pushed into the nearly $700-million-a-year market for federally required tests in public […]
Read More »(The Washington Post ) By Nick Anderson. Admission rates for super-selective colleges are headed in one direction: Down. Stanford, with the most competitive admissions in the country, this year edged below the 5 percent mark for the first time. Harvard’s rate, second-lowest among major colleges, hovers right above that threshold. [See a selected list of college […]
Read More »(The Atlantic) By Jill Barshay Tracking, the practice of putting a small group of higher achieving students into separate advanced or honors classes, isn’t popular with progressive educators. Previous research has pointed out that it exacerbates inequality in our schools because higher income and white or Asian kids are more likely to get tracked into the elite […]
Read More »(US News & World Report) By Bob Morse. The methodology for the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings has long used entering students’ test scores as one way of measuring how schools compare in terms of their students’ academic prowess. This reflects the reality that a substantial majority of U.S. colleges and universities accept the ACT or SAT as an indicator of academic quality and […]
Read More »(The Atlantic) By Alia Wong. In 2011, close to 200 higher-education professionals from selective institutions across the country gathered at the University of Southern California to come up with a plan to reshape college admissions. “The values and behaviors this system signals as important, and its tendency to reward only a narrow band of students,” a report on […]
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