Go on, try to explain this.
I’m a college admissions officer, and I’m as eager as everyone else to see the end of the covid-19 pandemic. The coronavirus has thrown campus life into chaos, and the college experience for many students has been bleak. And yet, for people in my line of work, the pandemic has come with one silver lining: the near decimation of the SAT and ACT.
In spring 2020, with limited availability of standardized tests, my university, Temple, and many others were forced to quickly reimagine their admissions processes and reevaluate what we value. By the time applications started rolling in that fall, we had models in place that weighted test scores much more lightly, which leaned more heavily into evaluations based on overall academic performance.
Temple University had in recent years already begun experimenting with “test optional” admission, fueling a more holistic process. But the pandemic rapidly accelerated growth in the number of students submitting applications without testing. Before the coronavirus shutdown, more than 8,000 students applied without submitting test scores; for fall 2021, that number surged to just shy of 23,000 students.
The result: Temple’s class of 2025 arrived last fall slightly larger and with virtually the same GPA (3.46) as our previous class (3.48), and with very little change in first-generation students (nearly 30 percent) or the population of students on Pell grants (a similar percentage). But strikingly, students of color took a significant leap in representation.
Freed from using SATs to make decisions, and without using any affirmative action measures, Temple’s student of color community grew to 45 percent — up from 42 percent just a year ago and 39 percent the year before that. Both Black and Latinx students were admitted in record numbers.
How did we accomplish this?