Standardized Admissions Testing: A Better University Measure Than High School Marks

A file photo of students on a university campus. Students can apply for positions across Canada through the Federal Student Work Experience Program. Spiroview Inc/Shutterstock

Commentary

As thousands of first-year university students approach the Christmas break, many are facing a harsh reality: they aren’t as smart as they thought they were.

The average Canadian student sees their marks drop by about 10 points in their first year at university. A recent study shows almost half of students experienced a full letter grade decline from their last year of high school, with 23 percent having their grades fall by two letters or more.

There are a number of reasons for this—the academic work is more difficult, university life is full of distractions—but there is a deeper issue as well: high school marks often do not accurately represent a student’s abilities.

Differences in academic rigour mean that an 85 percent average from one school is not the same as one from another school. Years of rampant grade inflation mean that a huge number of young people head to university with the mistaken belief that their 90 percent average makes them an academic star.

For example, at the Toronto District School Board, Canada’s largest, Grade 12 student average marks have increased by more than 10 percentage points in the last 15 years. In the two-year period after the pandemic began, the average Grade 12 student’s mark in Ontario jumped 6 percentage points—at a time when school closures caused learning losses that should have meant lower average marks.

Even more troubling is the flourishing of “credit mills”—private schools operating as businesses that anyone can access (for a fee) to take a credit-earning high school course and come away with a high mark. They enable students from wealthier families to effectively buy high marks, unfairly skewing the university admissions process and putting intelligent, hard-working students without the same financial means at a disadvantage.

Despite all the evidence that high school marks are unreliable, however, universities in Canada rely on them almost exclusively to decide who gets in and who doesn’t.

Many of these problems could be fixed by implementing a standardized test for university admissions. Such tests—common in the developed world—would provide a more accurate assessment of academic competence, defend against wealthy families gaming the system, and ensure a genuine commitment to merit.

Canada’s education establishment has long been hostile to standardized tests. Valuing accessibility above all, university leadership has little interest in more demanding admissions requirements. They’ve also noted how schools in other jurisdictions, notably the U.S., are moving away from standardized tests, claiming they are elitist because wealthier families can afford to pay for tutors and test-preparation courses, and racist because of perceived bias in exam questions that lead to test results often differing by race.

History and the evidence show just the opposite, however. The first known standardized tests began in ancient China with its famous imperial examination, required to enter the civil service. It was a way to identify talented young men to run the country, no matter their family connections or wealth. In the U.S., standardized tests like the SAT began as a tool to combat social injustice and promote merit. Harvard adopted the SAT in part because its administrators had been actively trying to limit the number of Jewish students who got in.

A significant body of research suggests that standardized tests level the playing field between richer and poorer students. When made mandatory, they uncover academically able students who might otherwise be overlooked, especially among lower-income and minority groups. SAT scores are highly correlated with a student’s subsequent performance in college. They are an excellent predictor of success, in other words, which is surely what universities should be looking for.

Instead of embracing these results, higher education is steadily abandoning objective measures of capability for “holistic” admissions policies that include everything from personality tests to self-promotional personal essays. Such policies can enable discrimination—including the deliberate kind.

Some schools have used holistic admission to enforce maximum racial quotas on Asian-American students, who have the highest average SAT scores. According to an analysis of more than 160,000 student applications at Harvard, Asian-Americans had higher test scores, better grades, and stronger extracurricular resumés than applicants of any other racial group, but had consistently lower personality scores. Harvard used its holistic admission policy to limit the number of Asian-American students.

Despite the recent, resounding U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing racial discrimination in university admissions, such efforts will no doubt continue, embedding subjective assessments and woke identity politics into the application process.

Canadian provinces should move in the other direction, adding standardized tests to a university admissions process that currently faces a crisis in fairness and integrity. Such a move would create a defence against credit mills, help counteract rampant grade inflation, and give parents a more accurate sense of whether their high school is truly preparing students for university. And it would push back against the new-racist “progressivism” of the educational bureaucracy.

Standardized tests would mark a return to the valuation of merit—the compelling, moral, and humane proposition that hard work and individual ability are paramount.

The original, full-length version of this article recently appeared in C2C Journal.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.