I remember an early 1990’s encounter with a university president who had an interesting take on higher education: He pointed out that there are really only a few institutions that have existed largely in their current form since the latter part of the Middle Ages: Some German breweries, The Catholic Church, and Higher Education. I […]
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we were experiencing a wave of colleges and universities going test-optional for freshman admission. And with societal change in California, and all the Ivy League institutions deciding they can make admissions decisions without the benefit of an SAT or ACT score (at least for one year), the wave has […]
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Boeckenstedt’s Nine SAT/ACT Tropes
Most colleges are still zodiac optional.
Now that California has put the ACT and SAT in the ICU, I suspect there will be many meetings in the coming weeks about how the companies remain viable going forward. The COVID-19 pandemic had already struck a body blow, of course, and there have been suggestions that the companies will have to dramatically restructure […]
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A Few Thoughts About Testing and COVID-19
News has just broken that College Board has decided to cancel the June SAT, and many people believe that ACT will follow suit. Just a few thoughts: Who cares? ACT and College Board are private companies who sell a suspect service to colleges, which colleges force students to pay for, via real costs (money) and […]
It took COVID-19 only a month to do what twenty years of research could not do: Start the landslide of colleges and universities going test-optional. I’ve written so much about the topic since my former institution went test-optional in 2011 that I won’t bother to rehash in detail all the reasons why test-optional is a […]
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We Don’t Know, So We Might As Well Guess
The auto-suggest feature on my phone’s keyboard learned “coronavirus” in record time, it seems, and now gives me “Corvallis” and “coronavirus” as the only two options when I type c-o-r. No wonder. It’s pretty much all we’ve heard on the news in the past few weeks, and with a long list of campuses curtailing in-person […]
A few things have been getting my attention lately (besides the impeachment of the president). One is the large numbers of colleges and universities that are making standardized tests optional or eliminating them all together. By the time March 25th rolls around, there will almost certainly be more, so I won’t even bother to mention […]
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Some final thoughts on the SAT and ACT
Most colleges are still zodiac optional.
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A Future with a Different CEPP/SPGP
We’ve sort of known this was coming: The Department of Justice has been looking at the NACAC CEPP (formerly the SPGP) for a while. But people were still surprised when, this week, NACAC announced that the DOJ had backed the organization into a corner, essentially telling them to eliminate some important, foundational provisions, or face […]
