Five years ago on March 25, 2020, all the public universities in Oregon announced that they had adopted a test-optional admission policy for first-year students. Although other institutions around the country were making similar announcements about the same time due to the onset of COVID and cancelled SAT and ACT administrations, the Oregon public universities’ announcement had been in the works since October, 2019, months before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19.

Unlike other institutions who were making their policies temporary, this was permanent.

Even though it was a coincidence (if you believe in coincidences), I was quite gratified that the announcement fell on March 25th, a day I had previously decreed as “Test-Optional Admissions Day.”

Why was March 25th meaningful?  It’s the birthday of a person you probably never heard of, even though he’s been called “the greatest human being that ever lived” and even though he won the Nobel Prize in 1970.  By some accounts, he saved a billion people on the planet from starvation.

That’s a lot to accomplish in one lifetime, and having Test Optional College Day named after you seems pretty paltry by comparison.

So why, from the long list of famous Iowans, and the long list of Nobel Prize winners, did I choose the birthday fellow Iowan Norman Borlaug when I created Test-Optional Admissions Day?

It was a line in the Wikipedia biography that jumped out at me. (If this has been edited, it’s probably someone at College Board or Dartmouth doing the dirty work.)

He failed his admission exam to the University of Minnesota.  (This was, of course, thirty years before any public university was using the SAT or ACT for admission). We’ll probably never know why, of course, but it could have been a lot of things. Certainly, the mostly-rural students at Cresco High School were not prepped for college the same way students at Exeter or Andover were, but it certainly wasn’t native ability.  It certainly wasn’t drive or determination (thankfully, he persisted), and it wasn’t a lack of empathy or compassion.

But think about it: That man, destined but not pre-ordained to such greatness, could have been stopped by a college entrance exam. A college entrance exam could have led to the death of a billion people.

The big question, of course, is this: How many more Norman Borlaugs have been stymied by the SAT and ACT?  How many more are being stymied right now?  The Diamond in the Rough rhetoric the College Board likes to spin about the SAT helping us find talent never mentions students like Norman Borlaug, or worse, those whose names are lost to history, and whose potential was never realized.

The relative unimportance of standardized admissions tests is well known to anyone who has done the research, even to those who leave out important variables to make their conclusions look valid, and even to people who maintain that a college GPA difference of one-tenth of a point proves their point, and even to those who are adopting the SAT simply because people who have benefitted from them, like them.

After fighting a fierce fight, claiming some victory, and seeing the benefits, some of us believed the issue had been put to rest; it’s resurfaced. If that sounds to you like anything else happening today, well, you just might be onto something, in more ways than one.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Borlaug.