Taking the Measure of School Admission Tests

July 7-8, 2018 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Regarding your editorial “The War on Admissions Testing” (July 2): If standardized-test scores no longer are required for applicants to University of Chicago undergraduate programs, why not free the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago from the standardized-test straightjacket as well? According to the University of Chicago - and a growing list of its peers - standardized-test scores “may not reflect the full accomplishments are academic promise of a student.” If so, Medical College Admissions Test scores also may not reflect the skills of aspiring doctors.

An even better demonstration of college administrators’ true belief in the irrelevance of standardized-test scores would be volunteering as guinea pigs for health care from med-school graduates who had not been required to take the MCAT. While they are at it, perhaps they should also volunteer to be passengers on jets flown by pilots who did not have to pass Federal Aviation Administration exams.

Standardized tests allegedly are culturally biased, of limited value in gauging past performance and poor predictors of future performance - at least according to progressives in higher education, although not according to actual experience or common sense. Even so, the University of Chicago can take a giant leap for mankind by showing us the medical bona fides.

There is a lot of merit in the claim that standardized tests disadvantage low-income test takers. But it is also important to recognize that tests like the SAW are limited in that they evaluate only one type of learning: linear cognition, as in reading a book and then being quizzed on what you just read.

Linear cognition makes for great college professors. But this testing methodology has screened from top schools many brilliant kids who have a different type of cognition, those for example with borderline dyslexia, those afflicted with ADHD and a huge population of kids who learn best through visual stimulus. The latter includes poets, musicians and artists of every variety.

Thankfully, more college administrators are awakening to the limitation of testing. Take the president of leading Indian technical university, who was asked to what he attributed his school’s acclaim. He replied that they interview every single applicant. When asked how he could afford to do that, he replied, “How could I afford not to.”

If diversity really is a desirable objective, universities should abandon standardized testing in favor of these more personal methods of evaluation.