Wake Forest Gets the Best of Both Worlds
On May 27th, Wake Forest University joined the ranks of over 700 colleges and universities that no longer require applicants to submit an SAT or ACT with their application. As Scripps News points out, Wake Forest is the first US News Top 30 University to make standardized test scores optional, making this announcement a bit of a shocker. Or at least more interesting than most general college announcements at the end of May.
While it's become common for small, Northeastern liberal arts colleges to to make the tests optional, Wake Forest is a Southeastern school that doesn't fit the "optional test" model and probably hopes to lead the way for a bigger movement across the country. Their website already has a neat landing page that explains the school's new policy and lauds itself a bit for "Leading the Way."
However, none of the Ivies have taken the plunge into "test optional," nor are they likely to do so in the future. Test scores provide schools like Harvard with another way to tell students "No" as admissions officers attempt sift through 20,000 applicants to find 2,000 students worthy of admission. (To be fair, if you had to eliminate 90% of the awesome applicants that show up on Harvard's doorstep, you'd want as many ways to say "No" as you could find too.) With that fact in mind, it's hard to see a movement sweeping the country that the most prestigious schools don't support.
But back to Wake Forest.
At first glance, I have to congratulate them. The pressure to reward high test scores is enormous and I would personally love to see every school in the country focus on the indicators of success that mean something: High School Grades, Recommendation Letters, and Personal Statements. There's more than enough info in the average application to judge a student; a test score is just another number that masks a student's true abilities. Wake Forest deserves a huge pat on the back for trying to make a difference!
But like so many other test optional schools, Wake Forest may be seeking the test score benefits of optional reporting more than a truly diverse body of students. The factor that determines whether or not a student reports isn't how they feel about testing, it's what score they got. If you scored in the 99th Percentile, I'd bet my bottom dollar you will affix that number to your college application regardless of the optional testing requirements. If you scored poorly, you probably won't send your scores whenever you can get away with it.
That means that optional testing schools tend to see higher test score averages as students who would normally bring down the average simply don't report. Because only students with "good" scores are turning their scores in, Wake Forest gets to lead the way AND raise it's average test score, a number that US News and other organizations use to judge school placement in the all important college rankings. (However, Bruce Feldman at ESPN notes that the NCAA is still requiring Wake Forest's athletes to have ACT/SAT Scores.)
So kudos to Wake Forest for taking a bold stance. Last year, their Average ACT Score was just below a 30 and their US News rank was a 30. If they see higher ACT scores and climb in the US News rankings, it may have a lot more to do with the number of students reporting their scores than any other factor...