Standardized tests aren’t the problem and GPAs aren’t the answer

As college admission deadlines approach, the debate surrounding standardized testing intensifies. 

In recent years, the shift towards test-optional and test-blind admissions has garnered significant attention and has been heralded by college admissions counselors and anti-test advocates. 

I am the assistant director of outreach for the National Test Prep Association, a contributing author for the ACT’s Official Guide and Official Mathematics Guide and the owner of a test-prep business. The common argument I hear against the ACT and SAT is that they don’t measure anything more than how well you can take the tests. Whether that is factual or not (it isn’t), this is merely a rephrasing of Campbell’s Law by social scientist Donald T. Campbell:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

In terms of SAT testing, this results from the fact that students can fixate on unintended features of the tests like common trap answer choices and patterns in the test writer’s question design (what is disparagingly called “tips and tricks”) rather than the content itself, which undermines the tests’ value. Also, these tests impact college admissions and scholarships which, in turn, incentivizes the use of these strategies to inflate results. This incentive is what Campbell refers to as “corruption pressure.” 

The conundrum that anti-testing advocates have is that by promoting test-optional policies and striving to remove the test from the admission process, grades themself become subject to corruption pressure.

The first example of corruption pressure is that the tips and tricks that undermine the intent of the ACT and SAT similarly affect class grades. Students can learn the language of the teacher’s tests, utilize study guides and summary tools rather than master the source material, know whether questions tend to come from the book, class discussion, or the study guide and exploit the grading system with test retakes. While the goal of test retakes is to encourage mastery of the material and not punish when it is mastered, it is difficult to assess whether score improvement on retakes is due to an increase in mastery of the content or mastery of the test itself. 

Secondly, the manipulation goes further when looking at the entire GPA as a quantitative metric. Simply to earn a boost to their GPA, students will opt for honors or AP classes without any interest in the subject and anticipate a lower overall grade. Merely taking the AP class provides a boost of “course rigor” for their college application, regardless of how the student performed on the AP exam. The game is about maximizing the number of AP classes even though research shows that taking more than four to six AP classes does not significantly improve predicted first-year college GPA or graduation.  

Finally, this corruption pressure extends to the schools themselves. Under No Child Left Behind, student test scores and graduation rates were a part of a school’s adequate yearly progress and impacted the school’s funding. This has led many schools and school districts to lower learning expectations, manipulate score data and even provide coaching during the test. 

The Every Student Succeeds Act replacing No Child Left Behind placed greater emphasis on graduation rates while also giving schools greater leeway on how to assess their students. As Campbell’s law predicted, the increased significance of graduation rates and GPA has increased its manipulation. 

We have skyrocketing grade inflation as now roughly 60 percent of college freshmen graduated high school with a GPA equivalent to an A- to A+. Meanwhile, other measurements like the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s 12th grade Mathematics and Reading Assessment, National ACT results, and the remaining states with End of Course exams show no increase and even a slight decrease in student performance over the years. 

None of this is to undermine the value of grades and GPA as a means of assessing a student’s college readiness. Campbell’s law is a warning against an overreliance on any single metric for social decision-making. Removing the ACT and SAT from college admissions would swing the pendulum from one extreme to another. 

Studies show that the prediction of first-year GPA and graduation is best done, not with GPA or test scores alone, but with both of them combined. This coupled with a holistic review of both the GPA and test score in context, such as scoring a 1300 SAT when the school average is 980 or having “only” a 3.75 GPA at a notoriously challenging school, will yield improved college GPA and graduation predictability. 

Opponents of testing like to use Campbell’s Law as an intellectual gotcha, but if they kept reading they would see that he offers a solution: 

“Many commentators, including myself, assume that the use of multiple indicators, all recognized as imperfect, will alleviate the problem.”

Adam Snoza is the assistant director of outreach for the National Test Prep Association and is the owner of Aim High Test Prep based in Omaha, NE. He is a contributing author for the ACT’s Official Guide and Official Mathematics Guide.