Good news: Dartmouth reinstates SAT/ACT requirement for undergraduate applicants

Bad news: Dartmouth will attempt to use it to evade the ban on race-based admissions

NOTICE TO OUR READERS: This will be my last post for about a week. I’m taking a break from writing, and from winter, and heading to warmer climes. Bill, will hold down the fort while I’m away.

Dartmouth’s president Sian Leah Beilock has announced that Dartmouth will reinstate a standardized testing requirement for undergraduate admissions. It will become the first Ivy League college to do so.

It’s scandalous that the standardized testing requirement was dropped in the first place. It has long been known that test standardized scores are the best predictor of academic performance. This truth was reaffirmed by a committee of Dartmouth professors (mostly from the college’s outstanding economics faculty) that reviewed the relevant data. Their study becomes the springboard (or pretext) for reinstating the test requirement.

Even left-liberal professors prefer to teach highly intelligent students who can perform well in their classes without the aid of grade inflation. Thus, reinstating the test requirement will benefit them.

It will also benefit America. It’s in the national interest to have the smartest professors teach the smartest students. Such a matching-up of intellect and talent promotes excellence. The American left isn’t so fond of excellence (i.e., merit) these days, but promoting it is essential if this country is to be successful in global competition.

Unfortunately, these realities take a backseat in Dartmouth’s announcement about standardized testing. In her memo to the Dartmouth community, Beilock focuses instead on equity.

She states:

Our holistic admissions approach to identifying the most promising students, regardless of their background, benefits from a careful consideration of testing information as part of their application package. In particular, SAT/ACTs can be especially helpful in identifying students from less-resourced backgrounds who would succeed at Dartmouth but might otherwise be missed in a test-optional environment. 

Beilock elaborated on this theme in an interview with the New York Times. Her committee, she explained, found that, under current policy some applicants withheld test scores that would have helped them get into Dartmouth. They 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.

There are two parts to what Beilock is saying. First, requiring the submission of test scores will help Dartmouth identify capable minority applicants who aren’t being identified under current policy. That’s fine.

But second, Dartmouth will judge the scores of certain applicants (mainly blacks and Hispanics) not in relation to the scores of all applicants, but in relation to the scores of other applicants who come from “a difficult environment.” Beilock is explicit about this:

Dartmouth admissions considers applicants’ scores in relation to local norms of their high school (so, for example, a 1400 SAT score from an applicant whose high school has an SAT mean of 1000 gives us valuable information about that applicant’s ability to excel in their environment, at Dartmouth, and beyond). In a test-optional system, Dartmouth admissions often misses the opportunity to consider this information. 

Absent from Beilock’s statement is any evidence that a student with an SAT score of 1400 who attends a high school where the average score is 1000 is likely to perform as well at Dartmouth as a student with an SAT score of 1500 who attends a high school where the average score is (say) 1300. Without such evidence, the inference arises that Dartmouth is manipulating its assessments of SAT scores for the purpose of admitting black and Hispanic students — the groups that are most likely to attend high schools where SAT scores are low.

In practice, Dartmouth’s policy resembles “race norming” — using different standards to judge people of different races. It also resembles the practice some state universities have of admitting the top ten percent (say) of students in all state high schools. This boosts black and/or Hispanic enrollment because many high schools are predominantly black or Hispanic, so that these students aren’t competing with many whites and Asians.

In its interview with Beilock, the Times rightly raised the question of whether Dartmouth’s multi-tier approach to assessing SAT scores is consistent with the law, now that the Supreme Court has found race-based admissions preferences to be illegal. Beilock responded that Dartmouth can legally admit a diverse class while using test scores as one part of its holistic admissions process. The Times reporter noted: “I’ve heard similar sentiments from leaders at other colleges that have reinstated the test requirement, including Georgetown and M.I.T.”

There you have it: The strategy of elite colleges to work around the law, laid bare. It makes me wonder whether the main motive for reinstating the standardized test requirement is, precisely, to work around the law.

What to make of this strategy? Here are some preliminary thoughts.

Yes, Dartmouth can admit a diverse class and it certainly can use test scores. But it impose “diversity” by reverting to the kind of “holistic admissions process” the Supreme Court struck down in the Harvard case.

It’s true that the Court did not foreclose consideration of applicant essays highlighting race. But Beilock isn’t relying on that loophole — at least not in her answer to the New York Times. She’s relying on a different possible loophole — manipulating the assessment of test scores for the purpose of admitting a “diverse class.” The Supreme Court did not authorize that practice.

It’s true that both loopholes purport to get at the same question — the degree to which applicants have overcome disadvantages stemming from race and economics. That may be why lawyers for Dartmouth, MIT, and Georgetown have given them the green light (as I assume they have done) — that, plus the fact that the multi-tier evaluation of SAT scores is racially neutral, albeit only on its face.

However, in the Harvard case the Court has made it clear that colleges cannot accomplish by indirection that which they cannot do directly. Colleges that work around the ban on race-based admissions preferences by manipulating the way they evaluate SAT scores should have to prove that the high number of extra SAT points they are adding to the scores of blacks and Hispanics from bad high schools is justified by empirical evidence about how such students actually perform in college compared to students from good schools with higher scores. They should also have to prove that they perform the same kind of norming consistently across-the-board — not just for applicants from bad schools that are mostly black or Hispanic.

If colleges like Dartmouth use this workaround to generate a student body the racial and ethnic composition of which resembles the one they have maintained over the years (or is even a more “diverse” one), I would expect the ploy to fail, assuming liberals don’t take control of the Supreme Court. If they use it to avoid a reduction of black and Hispanic representation to de minimis levels, they might get away with it.

Or so it seems to me on first blush.