As I did a presentation this morning for the President’s Council (the VP’s, Deans, and other important faculty and administrators at DePaul) on implementation progress of our test-optional pilot program, several things occurred to me: The whole test-optional discussion nationwide is really less about statistical r-squareds than it is about combating information cascades. But at the same time, […]
If you’re coming here, you’ve probably already heard that Claremont McKenna College has suffered a bit of a scandal: Dean Richard Vos has resigned after apparently admitting that he reported inflated SAT averages for the incoming freshman class for one or more years. This is not unprecedented, of course. In the interest of disclosure, I […]
I’ve written before about those who have criticized DePaul’s decision to go test-optional in freshman admissions. Much of the criticism is from people who believe that we’re doing this is to artificially increase the freshman average ACT scores we report. So I did some work to see how plausible that approach might be. And from […]
Been meaning to write about this for a while. Tempus fugit. With the launch of Tableau 7, now seems to be a good time. While we were doing research on our decision to become the nation’s largest private, not-for-profit university that is test-optional in freshman admission, I was doing some work studying patterns in ACT […]
A recent article in Bloomberg suggests test-optional colleges and universities are talking out of both sides of their mouths because we buy the names of students who take the SAT or ACT. Inflammatory and illogical posts like this are good to drive traffic to your site, but really, doesn’t some editor owe the reading public […]
We’re at that time of the year again, when Early Decision and [insert name of application type] admissions, denials, and defers start rolling in. And with the dawn of the new calendar year comes the resultant and predictable questions: How could they turn my kid down, with her GPA and her test scores? What does it […]
I’m going to break a rule of mine. I’m going to feed a troll. There’s this guy out there, Douglas Groene. He calls himself the Pencil Nerd, as if he’s never really looked up the definition of nerd. Or perhaps he has, and thinks that wishing can change the definition of words. Or perhaps more […]
This has certainly been an interesting week for scandals in higher education. While not minimizing the horrific things happening in the one you’re probably already thinking of, I’d like to focus instead on two others that may have not yet crossed your radar. Both seem eerily similar: One law school and one undergraduate college have […]
Now that we’ve begun to receive applications for 2012, a few interesting things cross my mind: First, so far, only about five percent of our applicants are choosing to apply test optional. That’s lower than I thought it would be, but perhaps it shows that people know we’ve always emphasized GPA more than test scores, […]
If you’re interested, you can view or download the presentation I gave to High School Guidance Counselors, explaining DePaul’s decision to become the nation’s largest private, not-for-profit university to eliminate an SAT or ACT requirement for freshman admission. Click here.
