When it comes to getting into a selective university, high school GPA and test scores typically play the most important role. More...

By Scott Jaschik. Testing agency acts because of the "illegal theft" of materials. More...

By Scott Jaschik. The last academic year, about 21,000 students took a college entrance exam that was not the SAT or the ACT. They took the Classic Learning Test, an alternative to the establishment tests. More...

By Scott Jaschik. ACT announced scoring reforms on its ACT exam last week. The changes are effective September 2020. More...

By Scott Jaschik. Brown follows Princeton in letting departments decide whether to require the admissions test. Twenty-four of them opt out. More...

By Scott Jaschik. Cornell University's College of Arts and Sciences has dropped a requirement that all applicants take two SAT Subject Tests. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Questioning the Admissions Assumptions
On the subject of measuring learning, you'd think that if grades could be used to predict anything, it would be future grades. Nope. While the grades are the best predictor of future grades (forget about those hopeless SAT scores) the bulk of variance in future grades - 70 percent of it - remains unexplained. "Why are we emphasizing prediction [of college success] as the central value in admissions if we do it so poorly?" Most of the emphasis, of course, will be on the uselessness of the SAT scores - so much so that it will be almost completely overlooked that grades, while better, are also pretty ineffective. More...