The decision for high-stakes exams to be a core part of the admission process has not been without controversy. Current literature on standardized tests has focused on the bias associated with high-stakes exams and how Black students have historically scored low on these tests. Insufficient research exists on how a post-affirmative action and…

We use student-level administrative data from Delaware for 43,767 high school students across five 12th grade cohorts from 2017 to 2021. We apply Item Response Theory (IRT) to high school transcript data, treating courses as items and grades as ordered responses, to estimate both student transcript strength ([theta]) and course difficulty. We…

The problem was that testing instructions were normally presented as gains were more advantageous for promotion-oriented individuals, while testing instructions presented as losses were more advantageous for prevention-oriented. The purpose of this quantitative comparative study was to compare the performance on a measure of achievement for black…

Recently, Nissen et al. argued in this journal for the use of Cohen's d, in place of the more commonly used normalized gain, in the analysis of preinstruction and postinstruction scores on concept inventories used to measure the effectiveness of instruction. Their reason for advocating such a change is that they say normalized gains are…

The United States must expand the STEM pipeline in order to meet the growing demand of the STEM workforce and maintain our nation's prosperity and competitiveness in the global economy. The urgency of this need has been proclaimed by policymakers, business leaders, politicians, and educators. Despite the growing demand for STEM professionals,…

Fifteen years ago, Frey and Detterman established that the SAT (and later, with Koenig, the ACT) was substantially correlated with measures of general cognitive ability and could be used as a proxy measure for intelligence (Frey and Detterman, 2004; Koenig, Frey, and Detterman, 2008). Since that finding, replicated many times and cited extensively…

Over the past 20 years, elite colleges in the US have seen dramatic increases in applications. We provide context for part of this trend using detailed data on Harvard University that was unsealed as part of the SFFA v. Harvard lawsuit. We show that Harvard encourages applications from many students who effectively have no chance of being…

Men significantly outnumber women in physics, engineering, and computer science (PECS) majors, with a recent male-to-female ratio of approximately 4:1, a stark contrast to the near parity in other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines (1). This gender disparity in PECS carries wide-reaching implications for equity,…

In the past few years, there has been a surge of interest in expanding the scope of high schools. Shifting away from an earlier era that focused primarily on graduation rates and achievement tests, states have built a range of college- and career-readiness measures to track things like whether students are taking and passing advanced courses,…

Affirmative action critics argue that race-conscious admissions policies are keeping Asian American enrollment numbers unfairly low because Asian American students are held to higher admissions standards than applicants of any other race or ethnicity. "Selective Bias: Asian Americans, Test Scores, and Holistic Admissions" evaluates the…

The purpose of this document is to identify and dispel rumors that are frequently cited about the SAT. The following is a compilation of nine popular rumors organized into three areas: "Student Demographics," "Test Preparation/Test Prediction," and "Test Utilization."

Academic achievement in American high schools is increasingly defined in terms of quantifiable values. Despite being designed to produce favorable data, explicit standardized-test preparation has an insignificant impact on scores and is counterproductive to the cultivation of attributes necessary for success in higher education and effective civic…

One of the major claims of the report of University of California's Task Force on Standardized Testing is that SAT and ACT scores are superior to high-school grades in predicting how students will perform at UC. This finding has been widely reported in the news media and cited in several editorials favoring UC's continued use of SAT/ACT scores in…

Affirmative action in education is once again in the media and cultural spotlight. The Trump administration, along with a decidedly rightward shift on the Supreme Court, signal a bleak outlook for affirmative action policies in higher education. However, as educators, we can also use this historical moment to have robust and critical conversations…

On May 21, 2020, the University of California (UC) Board of Regents unanimously approved the suspension of the standardized test requirement (ACT/SAT) for all California freshman applicants until fall 2024. UC plans to create a new test that better aligns with the content the University expects students to have mastered for college readiness.…