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 […]

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 […]

Most colleges are still zodiac optional.

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 […]

If you read this blog or have seen my presentations, you know I’m no fan of the College Board. There are lots of reasons, and I won’t rehash them here. So I was intrigued last week when the framework for the Environmental Context Dashboard (ECD) was released. I’m not a fan of the passive voice, […]

We in higher education enjoy an enviable competitive environment, probably unlike any you’ll find in other industries.  It’s not like when Komatsu summed up its entire strategic plan with two words: Encircle Caterpillar . We in higher education actually like when our rivals and competitors do well, and do good things.  This is, of course, provided […]

Yesterday, Bob Schaeffer of FairTest offered a stunning observation on the NACAC elist about lobbying efforts of ACT and The College Board to weaken “Truth in Testing” laws in New York and California.  For those of you who missed it, it is here: Withholding the July ACT test in California is part of a new […]

Intro Ok, I suspect you’re not surprised. Over the past few years, as more colleges do research on the value of standardized tests in college admissions, using their own data and thinking about their own missions against the context of access for students, more of them eliminate the requirement of standardized testing in the admissions […]