The latest tally by FairTest, a group seeking to dismantle the misuses and flaws of standardized testing, reveals that more than 1,900 U.S. colleges and universities aren’t requiring SAT or ACT scores for fall 2023 admissions. More than 200 colleges have made this decision since the fall of 2020. The current statistic represents 83% of four-year institutions.

At least 78% of higher education institutions have already extended these policies through the fall of 2024 in anticipation of the pending U.S. Supreme Court decision surrounding affirmative action.

“Admissions offices increasingly recognize that test requirements, given their negative disparate impact on Black and Latinx applicants, are ‘race-conscious’ factors, which can create unfair barriers to access higher education,” FairTest Executive Harry Feder said in a statement. “They also know that standardized exams are, at best, weak predictors of academic success and largely unrelated to college-ready skills and knowledge.

“If the Supreme Court bars affirmative action, we expect that very few schools will continue to require the ACT or SAT. And it is likely that many more graduate programs will eliminate requirements for exams such as the GRE, GMAT, LSAT and GMAT.”

Colleges began removing GRE requirements as early as 2019, like Yale, which cited its potential to “skew” an applicant pool. Similarly, The New York Times reported that Boston University’s Black and Hispanic student demographic grew when it removed its GRE requirement and did not experience any loss in student performance.

Coincidentally, Educational Testing Service (ETS) recently announced its decision to cut the GRE in half to improve the test takers’ experience and reduce anxiety and fatigue. ETS did not mention how the pending decision on affirmative action or colleges’ concern with student equity molded the revamped GRE. However, Alberto Acereda, the associate vice president for global higher education at ETS, argued how important quantitative metrics are to streamline a changing admissions process and its contribution to student diversity.

“For institutions, the shorter GRE will continue to empower admissions professionals with critical data on a candidate’s graduate-level skills, as the only truly objective measure in a holistic admissions process,” said Acereda in an email. “The shorter GRE General Test will also help programs and schools choose diverse candidates who have the foundational skills needed to enrich their programs and have a successful graduate, business or law school experience.”

Conversely, FairTest Public Education Director Bob Schaeffer believes institutions’ transitions to test-optional policies are a race-neutral solution to enhancing campus diversity.

“Though not a full substitute for affirmative action, they are important tools in a robust set of holistic missions strategies to improve access for under-represented applicants.”

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Per the data, there’s no sign of these strategies slowing down. Here’s an in-depth tally provided by FairTest that reflects the growing number of four-year institutions adopting test-optional policies since the start of the pandemic:

• 1,075 ACT/SAT-optional schools pre-pandemic (March 15, 2020)
• 1,700 schools did not require scores for the fall of 2020
• 1,775 schools did not require scores for the fall of 2021
• 1,825 schools did not require scores for the fall of 2022
• 1,904 schools don’t require scores for the fall of 2023

The long-awaited Supreme Court decision may very well be “the death knell” for standardized admissions tests, said Schaeffer.

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As quickly as artificial intelligence models develop, so, too, their impact across different facets of higher education. It may be dizzying, but here are some of the most prominent ways AI affects your school.

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Admissions

Artificial intelligence is poised to streamline the workload of both the applying student and the receiving admissions officer.

Students today can ask ChatGPT to create a 500-word response to an open prompt that they’d otherwise feel paralyzed to complete themselves. They can direct the bot to write a dramatic story about an adolescent overcoming a significant life event that includes references to a city of the student’s liking. Admissions officers already struggle to detect college applications’ authenticity, and the prevalence of AI language modeling will make plagiarism that much more difficult. While new software aims to combat applications littered with AI, some leaders believe the next step forward is introducing video prompts instead.

However, AI technology might be an antidote to the  increasing workload and turnover rate for admissions officers. Colleges have begun employing technology that can sift through student transcripts and create preliminary assessments on students’ acceptance likelihood. Allowing software such as Student Select or Sia to do the legwork of review helps officers manage their time and compartmentalize their priorities. Colleges to embrace AI software in admissions include Rutgers, Rocky Mountain College and Maryville University.

Cybersecurity

The education industry experienced a 576% increase in phishing attacks in 2022, according to recent Zscaler research. While phishing attempts could once be easily detected by grammatical and spelling mistakes and an awkward tone, communication written by ChatGPT appears more natural, and by extension, easier to trust.

Additionally, hackers are finding ways to leverage ChatGPT’s coding capabilities to hack security systems, tricking the AI into creating malware strains. However, just as bad actors are using the emerging technology maliciously, cybersecurity teams can use AI to test their defenses faster.

Student Exams

Not only can ChatGPT ace the SAT and AP exams, but it’s also stunning scholars in its performance on licensing exams. It passed the Uniform Bar Examination by a “significant margin,” approaching the 90th percentile of test-takers. Additionally, ChatGPT passed three exams associated with the United States Medical Licensing Exam with a 60% accuracy rate. GPT-4, on the other hand, answered medical licensing exam questions with a 90% accuracy rate. “I’m stunned to say: better than many doctors I’ve observed,” said Dr. Isaac Kohane, the test administrator, according to Business Insider.

The accuracy of ChatGPT is prompting professionals to explore how students can use the software to augment their work. The America Medical Association’s medical education innovation unit has begun exploring some foundational AI modules, and it is also collaborating with the National Academy of Medicine to host a workshop on AI in health professions education this spring.

Class curriculum

Allowing ChatGPT to do the legwork of writing preliminary drafts frees up time for professors to judge the content of a student’s work by their content and ideas rather than by their ability to communicate via proper grammar, style and structure.

“I’m changing all of my assignments to involve more high-level concepts and more integrative knowledge,” said Adam Purtee, an assistant professor of computer science, according to the University of Rochester.

It is heightening the level of work students can do, but it’s also streamlining professors’ administrative responsibilities.

“ChatGPT can be used to help professors generate syllabi or to recommend readings that are relevant to a given topic,” said Manav Raj, co-author of the study that discovered college professors’ high exposure to AI language modeling.

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Hampshire College is now set to welcome more than 300 students, its largest class since 2018. With 285 first-year students and 21 transfers, it follows four years of improving enrollment since its nearly fatal 2019 crash. Its Fall 2023 admission numbers are a 17% increase over last year, according to a statement.

The Massachusetts-based college is benefiting from a promising fundraising campaign, an attractive academic curriculum and a diversified recruiting strategy. These improvements are in small part due to the contributions of Hampshire College President Ed Wingenbach.

Shortly after assuming the presidency in August 2019, Wingenbach launched an ambitious $60 million fundraiser. As of January, the college has raised almost $40 million, nearly two-thirds of its target with a 2024 deadline, according to the Daily Hampshire Gazette. One of its most notable donations was $5 million from an anonymous source.

With the pandemic further catalyzing student interest in social activism, Hampshire College revamped its curriculum to address such topics as climate change and white supremacy, according to Mass Live. Its “radical approach” to education is a chief factor pushing enrollment, said Wingenbach in the statement.

“These numbers offer compelling proof that as students and families make their college choices, they’re drawn to an experience organized around the generation of new possibilities, new questions, and new solutions to the complex challenges our future presents,” said Wingenbach.

Additionally, the school has spread its recruitment class across 37 states. About 24 students are international and nearly 100 are of an underrepresented minority race or ethnicity.

New College, new students

Following Ron DeSantis’ revamped vision for a conservative-leaning institution at New College of Florida, Hampshire College pledged to match the Florida students’ current tuition if they transferred. Consequently, three of its incoming students hail from New College, while another 20 are pending.

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Penn’s previous wording regarding its legacy students was that they were “given the most consideration through Early Decision,” according to internet archives collected by The Daily Pennsylvanian. Penn has also quit its exclusive admissions information sessions for legacy families.

As subtle as the rewording seems, it marks a resounding change in philosophy in how Penn carries out its admissions process. It’s also the latest big-brand university to dig at the once-common practice of easing a cutthroat application process for legacy students. With Johns Hopkins recently joining rank and Harvard amid Supreme Court rulings, Penn’s decision might be the first sign of a massive shift.

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Affirmative action and legacy students

While the Supreme Court is getting set to strike down affirmative action this summer in the name of equity, many progressive state leaders are beginning to point to legacy standards as another practice worth stomping out, too. Regarded as “affirmative action for the rich” by one former admissions officer, some argue that providing legacy students leniency in the application process perpetuates the disproportional acceptance of wealthy, white students.

Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s recent entanglement in a Supreme Court case regarding its race-conscious admissions process also led the former school to release data on its alumni. It found that despite Harvard’s 4% admissions rate, 30% of its accepted cohort is made of legacy students, according to Times Higher Education.

Consequently, what was a court case considering how providing preference to race can skew an admission process, the judges subsequently began to consider whether ending legacy admissions would also create a more equitable application process.

“Legacy preferences are very difficult to justify under any circumstances,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a non-resident scholar at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and Workforce, “but they will become even harder to justify if universities can’t use race in admissions.” 

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“The Higher Ed Admissions Workforce: Pay, Diversity, Equity and Years in Position” collected data from more than 12,000 employees across 940 institutions, and it found that 71% of admissions officers and coordinators held their position for less than three years and averaged just two years at the position. With a median age of just 30 years, 76% of its workforce is under 40 years old.

Comparatively, only 44% of all higher ed professionals are under 40. Chief admissions officers and heads of admissions are on average 45 and 40 years old, respectively. They also had markedly lower rates of staff seasoned less than three years.

All in all, admissions coordinators and counselors—those responsible for recruiting, selecting and converting prospective students into a strong incoming class—are young and unlikely to stick around longer than what it takes for a student to finish a bachelor’s degree. These findings may not surprise you. CUPA-HR found in its 2017 report that 74% of coordinators and counselors held their positions for the same amount of time.

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Reconceptualizing the workforce

CUPA-HR believes that the changing higher education landscape should motivate institutions to reconsider their current modalities.

“Colleges and universities would benefit from considering how they could reconceptualize crucial admissions positions, particularly coordinators and counselors, to encourage higher retention,” the report noted. “As institutions become more reliant on tuition dollars and prepare for the looming enrollment cliff, the value of admissions employees’ specialized skillset will likely continue to grow. Without strong enrollments, colleges and universities cannot thrive.”

Boost diversity and pay equity

Asian and Hispanic admission officers are poorly represented in comparison to the proportion of their respective races holding a U.S. bachelor’s degree. While Black people are represented well, representation of all people of color drops significantly from counselor or coordinator to head of admissions.

While pay equity in admissions is strong overall, Hispanic/Latino men are paid only 87 cents on the dollar to heads of admissions who are White men. And while the majority of chief admissions officers are Black or White women, they are paid less than White men in the same position.

Implement AI tools

Recent innovations in AI and machine-learning technology can do some serious heavy lifting for admissions officers and allow them to make decisions faster and with more confidence.

Student Select, a data science company dedicated to streamline the college admissions process, utilizes its machine learning model’s language processing components to create psychometric assessments of students based on their essays and personal statements. It then ranks a student’s probability of being accepted based specifically on what an institution is looking for in a student.

“There’s a lot of pressure to get this job done fast. The longer you wait to get those acceptance letters out, the more it impacts enrollment and the planning all around that,” said Will Rose, chief technology officer at Student Select. “A lot of pressure to get that all done in a timely matter. I can understand why they experience a lot of turnover in those areas.”

With higher education steadily dropping test-score and even GPA requirements from their application processes, admissions coordinators have to adapt to a more holistic, qualitative assessment of students, which can be particularly hard for applicants they are on the fence about. These 50/50 students require greater critical thinking and judgement from admissions coordinators.

The technology isn’t meant to make the decision; it’s organizing the pool of applicants into different categories of acceptance likelihood to help coordinators manage their time and priorities.

Seven schools use Student Select so far, including Rutgers and Rocky Mountain College in Montana.

The post Here are 2 ways to curb high admission officer turnover rates appeared first on University Business.

However, their search for students’ non-cognitive attributes does not come without hard work – too much hard work, even. Virginia Tech received almost 50,000 applications for its most recent admissions cycle, and it’s starting to affect his team’s ability to make clearly defined, quantifiable decisions on who gets in – and who gets left out.

“With some of these institutions that continue to get more and more competitive, in some ways it seems like the application process is getting more random,” said Espinoza during a Times Higher Education (THE) webinar. “You’re just not going to find an admissions team that thinks they have the perfect system. We’re all trying our best to make it as fair as possible, but there’s also the recognition because of the volume that it’s nearly an impossible task.”

Rick Clark, executive director of Georgia Tech’s undergraduate admissions, has seen college applications soar to 53,000, which is 18,000 more than five years ago. He kicked off THE’s webinar “University admissions: a flawed process?” by answering the question right out the gate: “It’s absolutely unfair.” Colleges undoubtedly survive off a healthy stream of first-year applications, but Clark argues that every admissions team has a threshold. A longer, more strenuous application review season has created a challenge to retain talented admissions officers at big schools.

“Those who are receiving lots of applications, more demand than supply is available, are now in a mode of having to so closely make delineations between students and consider so many different factors to make these decisions, that there are months where that’s really all they’re doing,” said Clark. “They are so bogged down in reviewing these applications, and they end up denying a sizable number of students. Very few people went into this work to say ‘no.'”

Clark identified the Common Application as a big contributor to the surge in applications. According to Common App data, first-year applicants now submit an average of six applications through this portal alone, two more on average than eight years ago. Clark now sees a tool that was supposed to boost equitable access to colleges among all students creating an opposite desired effect: the surge in applications has created a strenuous, oftentimes unpredictable application process that students and parents have no real understanding of. “The college admission rate is only going down, furthering the anxiety families have,” Clark said. “We as humans want to predict what’s going to happen with our kids, but each year that’s becoming more and more challenging.”

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Rethinking the application

Clark believes the application process can be re-tooled by introducing technological components. He alluded to modernized ways of capturing the student’s voice rather than relying on a cumbersome essay process.

“How can a student just do a quick 30-60 second video that’s not super produced, but shows off their voice: who they are, what they care about and what they want you to know beyond what they put on their application otherwise. I just think that’s what we should be looking at and focusing on to try to make it easy and inexpensive for students going forward.”

Espinoza, however, is wary of how we choose to move forward with technology. For example, he believes artificial intelligence, will “add more complexity to an already complex process,” but he is interested in its potential to boost enrollment equity. 

The haves and have-nots

Clark sees how lopsided the distribution of college applications is becoming, creating the “haves and have-nots” of higher education. While the haves struggle to meet the demand of their student applications equitably, the have-nots face a worse ordeal: They are closing down. Finlandia University and Iowa Wesleyan University are some recent examples that are choosing to shut down by the end of the current academic year.

He believes changing marketing strategies is contributing to this lack of interest among students in smaller private schools.

“Coming out of the pandemic, traditional ways of sourcing students have been deeply compromised. Schools haven’t been opening back up to allow university representatives to come into some of the schools that need to be there because their brands aren’t as strong.”

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The “dream school”

Without taking acceptance or cost into consideration, students and parents were asked what their dream school would be. Here are the results:

Students and parents agreed on seven schools: MIT, Stanford, Harvard, NYU, UCLA, Princeton, and the University of Michigan.

Students seek career readiness, academics an afterthought

The academic reputation of a school and the education students would gain from a degree proved to be unpopular priorities for most students and parents.

More respondents chose a “College with the best program for my (my child’s) career interests” (38%) than they did a “College with the best academic reputation” (11%) for an institution they’d most likely select. Additionally, almost half of the respondents believed the biggest benefit of a college degree is the potential for a better job and income while only 23% chose its educational value.

Financing school is the top roadblock for applicants, parents

In 2003, 52% of respondents chose “Won’t get into first-choice college” as their biggest worry while 8% chose “Level of debt to pay for the degree.” Twenty years later, the respondents flipped the survey on its heads.

• 42% of respondents chose the answer “Level of debt to pay for the degree.”
• 27% worried that they “Will get into first-choice college but won’t be able to afford to attend.”
• Only 23% chose “Won’t get into first-choice college” as their top worry.

Similarly, 98% of respondents said financial aid will be necessary to support themselves or their child while 54% said the need would be “extremely likely.”

Access to scholarships and additional aid is one of the leading reasons students chose to take the SAT or ACT even though Ivy League schools and others no longer require standardized testing for admission consideration.

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Test-optional policies get mixed reviews

While access to scholarship money and other avenues of financial aid was the second-most quoted reason to take the SAT/ACT (33%), the leading reason was in hopes that standardized test scores could distinguish their application (43%).

Overall, schools’ test-optional policies aren’t creating such a hoopla. Nearly 70% of respondents reported that their policy didn’t affect their application decisions. However, 23% of respondents said they were more likely to apply to a test-optional college.

“Our hope is that all students bound for college can access resources to identify the school best for them, get accepted to it, get funding for it, and graduate to rewarding and successful careers,” said Rob Franek, editor-in-chief of The Princeton Review and director of the survey.

The post Survey: Students and parents stress cost and career prep when picking a college appeared first on University Business.

When David Rettinger, an accomplished academic integrity researcher, discovered the report, he was “disappointed, but not even a little surprised.” In reports he conducted through the International Center for Academic Integrity, 70% of students admitted to some form of cheating during their college career, compared to the 61% who admitted adding untrue information to some part of their college application.

With a student population prone to cheating, Michele Sandlin from the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers consulting extension is curious about what the real value of the essay is. She’s fielded complaints about the application essay for quite some time now, the reasoning always the same and completely legitimate: they’re vague, hard to score, and there are too many applications to sift through to verify the information. Large public universities can see up to 70,000 applications per year, according to Sandlin. Adding insult to injury, 34% of students claimed to write untrue stories.

“Do they have an enormous amount of time to check all this stuff? No, they don’t. They’re overwhelmed with applications,” she says.

This makes the essay portion ripe for students to take advantage of. There are second-review processes to check on things that don’t look right or don’t align with the rest of the application, but this happens rarely. And if a student does lie, what’s the consequence? Rettinger explained how students are motivated to lie because there is none.

“If you think about it from a student’s perspective, what’s their incentive for telling the truth? If they lie on their application, what happens when they get caught? The worst thing that happens is the thing that would have happened anyway: They won’t get in,” he said. “They’re not thinking of the bigger consequences—the cultural values.”

Rettinger, along with Michele Sandlin from the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers consulting extension, believes the best solution is to design a process that reduces a student’s ability to cheat or lie rather than just hoping they won’t.

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The remedy for the college essay problem that many schools are moving toward is asking shorter, more pointed prompts that test the experience a student listed. It’s not what experience they have, it’s what they learned.

“If you’re just getting a laundry list that’s not telling you how they’re involved, how they’re engaged, how they learned from it, those fake answers can get weeded out a lot more quickly,” she said. “A lot of the essay pieces have to do with how the questions are written, how descriptive they are, and the valuables you’re looking for in the response. We’re looking for deeper learning.”

Rettinger echoed something similar when he suggested applications should focus on asking questions that illicit what students can do rather than some checklist of what they’ve done.

Other portions of the application might be trickier to inhibit students from lying on though. For example, 39% of students confessed to misrepresenting their race or ethnicity, and Rettinger believes that may be due to students perceiving the application as unfair.

“Applicants have bought into this scenario that white people are being discriminated against in college admissions, and there are forces in our culture that are selling that story regardless of whether that’s true or not,” he said. “People are willing to excuse their own dishonesty when they believe the process is stacked against them. They see an exception to the rule about lying.”

Sandlin was surprised by the figures on ethnicity but found it important not to jump to conclusions.

“According to this survey, students are claiming they know they faked it or is it that our questions are too confusing and they’re picking the one that’s closest?” she said. “I would first ask ‘Are we asking the questions wrong? Can we be asking the questions differently?’ I would look internally.”

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The NCAA Eligibility Center once required students to earn a specific score on either their ACT or SAT to be qualified to compete, that score dependent on how strong their GPA was. The NCAA, along with several other colleges and universities, relaxed its testing requirements during the pandemic due to a lack of infrastructure and resources to support it. As more schools have chosen to permanently rescind testing requirements, the NCAA believes the exception is now the rule, too.

“As some NCAA member schools shift away from requiring standardized test scores for general student admissions, the Council felt it was appropriate to reflect those admission standards in eligibility requirements for incoming freshman student-athletes,” said Lynda Tealer, executive associate athletics director at Florida and chair of the Division I Council at the meeting on January 11.

Eliminating NCAA standardized testing requirements on the grounds of promoting equity equally drove the decision. The DI council said its decision was made at the recommendation of the NCAA task force, an organization that specialized in reviewing initial eligibility requirements inspired by the association’s eight-point plan to advance racial equity. Also, in July 2020, the National Association of Basketball Coaches said in a statement that testing should be “recognized as forces of institutional racism, which is consistent with their history, and they should be jettisoned for that reason alone.”

While testing requirements are now a thing of the past for most NCAA programs, both DI and DII programs still require minimum core-course GPA scores. DI schools require a 2.3 and DII 2.2. They must also earn 16 NCAA-approved core-course credits. For DI, ten of those credits have to be completed before a student’s seventh semester.

Some schools may still require standardized testing for scholarship eligibility and admission, so the NCAA advises student-athletes to check with individual schools when seeking to play at the next level.

Division III schools do not offer athletic scholarships, so they utilize a different method of granting scholarships.

More from UB: More colleges are doing away with test requirements for good

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When accounting only for students’ socioeconomic status, students in the top quintile were reported more than three times as likely to enroll in a 4-year college than those in the bottom quintile, which suggests that students of a higher socioeconomic status—with no other controls accounted for—are inherently more likely to enroll in postsecondary school.

The report strongly suggests that these students are more successfully enrolling due to their more robust academic preparation. Specifically, the report found a correlation between students of higher socioeconomic statuses and their more competitive records in academic GPA, math exam scores, and Advanced Placement course-taking. Simply put, students with higher GPAs, higher scores, and a better track record of rigor happen to be those students of the highest SES quintile.

The second-best quintile is the one directly behind the highest quintile, and it continues in that order, which infers students are more academically prepared the higher up the chain of the socioeconomic ladder they find themselves. Consequently, socioeconomically advantaged students are more likely to enroll in 4-year institutions than students “below” them due to their academic preparation.

Fortunately, when controlling for GPA, the gap between the highest SES and lowest SES shrinks compared to when there were no controls involved. Specifically, when holding for GPA, 55% of the highest quintile enrolled in a 4-year college within 18 months compared to 30% of the lowest quintile, a 25-point gap. This is a far better statistic when looking at no controls, which shows a 51-point gap between the highest quintile (74%) and lowest quintile (23%). The numbers are even better when controlling for general academic preparation: an 18-point gap between the highest quintile (49%) and lowest quintile (31%).

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The report indicates that, even when controlling academic preparation, the gap could not close between socioeconomic statuses. Disparities between race, for example, suggested improvement. Holding no controls, Asian students were the most likely to enroll in 4-year colleges at 59%, whereas Black students were the least likely at 39%. However, when controlling academic preparation or GPA, Black people were the most likely to enroll at 59% while Asian people were the least likely to at 41%.

The report concluded that it wasn’t enough for policymakers and researchers to pay closer attention to disparities in academic preparation. Non-academic factors must be addressed as well, such as the cost of enrolling in college and a lack of information.

As the number of first-year college applications continues to grow, according to Common App data, the disparity between college applications of different socioeconomic statuses becomes more apparent: 56% of applicants resided in the top quintile of most affluent zip codes nationwide, whereas only 6% of applications came from the applicants who resided in the least affluent.

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