To eliminate bias in college admissions scrap the essays, not the SAT
You and I both wish this piece was a lot shorter.
Every year between Christmas and Spring Break, I join a group of volunteers to help read and score a few hundred college scholarship applications for emerging community leaders who want to use their time in college to make a difference. The scholarship provides full-ride, 4-year college tuition at one of several private liberal arts colleges (coupled with a letter of acceptance to their chosen university) and leadership training for each cohort.
The program is geared toward diverse students, often first-generation college-goers, almost exclusively from low-income households. Students who are considered a good fit for the scholarship are racially and culturally diverse, have shown a dedication to service and leadership in their schools and communities, and have a clear vision for how a college education will enable them to fulfill their calling to help others.
To assess each student, the application asks for demographic and family data - race, ethnicity, country of origin, native language, the professions of both your parents and your religious affiliation. Plus, information on school honors and extracurriculars, 2 letters of recommendation, 3-4 essays, and a short video submission.
Applications are filled with family profiles you’d recognize from any public school in a multi-cultural, working-class neighborhood. The daughter of two Latino janitors whose leadership qualities come from helping to raise her siblings. A Muslim immigrant from Bosnia, the first American born in her family, wants to become a nurse in her community clinic. The son of a single father writes about surviving his violent, alcoholic stepmother to run away at age 10 and now wants a shot at law school. A Black teenager met his biological father for the first time when his older brother unknowingly joined the gang their dad was affiliated with. He wants a computer science degree to make tools for kids like him to succeed in school.
Every kid has an exceptional story. One that makes them uniquely suited to succeed in challenging environments. A background that informs their character and their identity. Every application shows a kid who has chosen to thrive despite their circumstances. Circumstances that often involve complex, overlapping barriers related to race, class, family legacy, bad timing, and bad luck.
The scholarship program I read for is directly aimed at closing the admissions gap for these non-wealthy, non-white kids to go to college and for them to succeed when they leave. This goal is increasingly shared by university admissions departments seeking to increase diversity on college campuses and prove their school’s commitment to antiracism.
While the call to integrate college admissions dates back several decades, the era of racial reckoning has added fresh urgency to an issue that didn’t exactly lack intensity. In higher education, where 87% of the kids entering college out of high school are Asian, while 67% are White, 60% are Hispanic and 54% are Black, diversity initiatives often center around those Black, Hispanic, and American Indian students at the lowest rates of admissions. In the last decade, college enrollment for Black students, in particular, has dropped 10% while most other groups have remained somewhat steady.
Affirmative action, which encourages universities to take a student’s race and ethnicity into account when considering their application, is the longest-standing attempt to correct the racial imbalance in higher ed. (Ironically, critics of affirmative action claim in two active Supreme Court cases that these admissions practices unjustly cause harm to Asian American students - the largest demographic on US campuses, by redistributing coveted admissions slots away from them and giving them to minority students.)
With affirmative action at risk in the Supreme Court this year, a new methodology for race-based fairness in college admissions has gained swift ground, boosted dramatically by Covid interruptions for high schoolers, and the aforementioned season of racial atonement. This is the movement to eliminate standardized test scores in favor of personal essays and demographic profiling on college applications.
The call to replace or opt-out of standardized testing had been building slowly in popularity for a number of years but remained relatively fringe until Covid restrictions made in-person testing all but impossible, forcing universities to seek alternatives to keep admissions rolling. In 2022, hundreds of schools including the entire University of California system, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale will not require students to submit SAT scores with their applications.
Instead, these universities will consider a student’s grades, extracurriculars, personal essays, and demographic profile to holistically evaluate them for college readiness and campus fit. A model almost identical to the scholarship program I screen for.
This is my third year scoring applications for this group and we’ve made two major changes to the application this year. The first is that the organization has stopped providing scorers with information about a student’s GPA which we used to be able to see. The second is that we’ve partnered with The Common App, a college application portal used by hundreds of colleges to streamline the application process for both students and universities via one universal application. One of the essays on our scholarship application is a Common App essay from the student’s other university applications.
The Common App uses a set of generic essay prompts that universities can ask students to complete. The 7 prompts made available read a lot like what you’d expect - “Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?” or “Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.” But the first question on the list is also the one overwhelmingly chosen by students above the others -
“Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.”
These personal essays invariable focus on race and gender identity as a means to describe personal hardship. Essay after essay I read this year was watermarked with the slogans of identity politics in ways that felt less like the autobiography of a teenager and more like a dramatic reading of anti-racist TikTok.
When asked to define themselves by their racial and cultural identity to compete against other kids for college admissions, students overwhelmingly amplified the political implications of their race and gender, with a particular focus on harm, fear, oppression, and disempowerment.
The reason kids do this is because it works. Identity aggrievement has a lot of cultural value (much more so than identity pride which no one I read wrote about) and students would be stupid not to leverage that influence to make their applications more competitive. These essays are very good at surfacing students whose racial and cultural identities make them good candidates for the kind of leg up that holistic admissions criteria are meant to provide.
What the new era of college admissions is toying with (along with HR departments, political parties, Hollywood awards ceremonies, etc) is how to purposely leverage racial bias for good instead of evil. And these essays are really the only way admissions officers have to quantify something as subjective as “how much has being Black or Hispanic or Nonbinary harmed you so we know which kids to focus our limited attention and resources on.” In an environment where universities are under immense pressure to let in more kids who aren’t either Asian or White, students and schools are required to measure and then compete over benchmarks of minority status.
To further this point, the entire reason the scholarship program I read for prefers essays over grades is that the process is designed for bias. Selecting for subjective traits like how your racial identity influences your academic fitness is not a bug, it’s a feature.
The reason our scholarship program uses personal essays instead of academic benchmarks - to deliberately overcorrect for racial and cultural identity at the exclusion of less diverse candidates, is exactly why college admissions should not.
And not for the reasons you might think.
Unlike other critics of this movement, I’m not wringing my hands about the “harm” done to more privileged kids who might not get into every school of their choice so an overlooked kid can have a shot. I actually think there are plenty of reasons to holistically evaluate students in ways that encourage diversity of identity, yes, but also viewpoint, class strata (college is still really fucking expensive, after all, meaning lower class students are still woefully underrepresented), religious diversity and political diversity. I believe in the premise that to disrupt the momentum of homogeneity we have to do some hard readjusting which might be inelegant and ham-fisted but is worth it if it gets the job done. None of my issues with this system center around the fundamental premise that we ought to disrupt this system which, regardless of intent, has outcomes that kind of suck.
My issue with using bias as an objective assessment tool is that it’s impossible to measure and thus impossible to implement with any true assurance of accuracy, fairness, or success. And that it relies heavily on the cultural lens of the admissions officers scoring the almost 5 million college essays they receive every year to determine how exactly to differentiate the objective worthiness of a wealthy Black candidate versus a poor Hispanic one when all other things seem equal.
Subjective traits like race, gender, ethnic identity, and cultural background, especially when measured in expository writing like an essay, are slippery, immeasurable, and require the use of personal judgment (and identity politics) of the assessor. Every reader has the potential to come away with a different holistic understanding of that student’s relative merit based on their own preferences and biases, conscious or unconscious. And that can be the difference between getting into college or not, even if you can show you really belong there.
This is the exact allowable bias that affirmative action has been working to correct for decades when it previously favored white candidates.
What’s more, we’re finding in the scholarship program this year that by weighing applications more heavily toward identity and farther away from objective measurements of academic potential, we are actually missing entire sectors of a kid’s qualifications because we aren’t asking for them. By not asking for a student to show their scholastic aptitude, we are not only sending the message that school performance isn’t important or worth working for, but that even if your grades are exceptional, it’s never as important as your race or your identity. This works when you’re trying to assess a kid’s need for a scholarship but is a nonsensical way to assess a student for success in college.
I’ve seen several applications now where a student’s essays have been relatively poor but their letters of recommendation have referenced the student’s GPA and in every instance, those GPA’s have been quite high. High enough to counteract the effect of a weak essay.
One of the traits we assess kids for is college readiness. A picture that has a lot of nuance, and which becomes a lot clearer when you can see a student’s whole scholastic identity - grades, writing, extracurriculars, and aptitude.
Is it not patronizing and frankly, kinda racist to say “in order to uplift students of color we must eliminate any objective measure of their aptitude.”?
Are we suggesting that minorities are better assessed by their identities than their intellect? Just tell us your race and why you want to go here and we’ll call that good?
Is that really the future we’ve been fighting for?
The reason grades and test scores can show a bigger, brighter picture of a student than writing skills alone is fairly obvious -
You can buy a better essay but you can’t pay someone to take a test for you.
When your college application essays are weighed more heavily than a test you can study for, guess where rich parents are going to spend their money? A good college essay consultant will help a student articulate their thoughts in their own words. A scrupulous one will do a little more than that…
The gap between students who have had help writing their essays and those who have not can be significant.
This fall while visiting family, my teenage cousin asked me to read her essays for the colleges she was applying for. My cousin is white, has the academic resume of a post-doc and comes from a wealthy family who have spared no expense getting her college-ready (she comes from means but she’s worked her ass off, don’t get me wrong) and yet her essays were notably lackluster. Proving again that even smart kids can be bad writers, but also proving that with some concentrated assistance from an adult, weak essays can be made substantially more competitive. I’m not saying my help is the reason she’ll get into the colleges of her choice, but that we were absolutely able to turn them from a liability into a strength which is the exact sort of coaching you can buy if you have the resources. (Editor’s note: She starts at Vanderbilt in the fall).
Ultimately, it’s not a stretch to see how a good coach can be an invisible hand guiding a student’s writing into something more palatable to an adult reader. What a coach cannot do, however, is sit in a room on a Saturday morning and take a test for you.
The SAT, like all standardized tests, is not a perfect tool but it’s one that any student of any capacity and intellect can study for, improve upon, and rely on to objectively display an important feature of their academic capacity. Even if the test asks questions in a way that doesn’t reflect the educational diversity of a dynamic learning environment (teaching methodology is constantly evolving as we learn more about how students learn), it is not so far removed from scholastic aptitude as to be totally useless.
What’s more, success on the SAT, for better or worse, belongs squarely to the student taking the test. This means that a student at a relative disadvantage economically but who still does well in school (the students applying for our scholarship, for example) can perform just as well on an objective test they can study for, as a student who didn’t experience the same cultural or economic barriers.
Students in our scholarship cohort are scoring lower on their applications than any previous year I’ve seen, largely due to a lack of information now that we cannot access their academic records, and a larger volume of expository material having been added to compensate. The exclusion of grades and the inclusion of extra essays and a video submission - two decisions made ostensibly to help provide a more human and holistic picture of a student, have seemingly worked against them more often than not.
An incredibly driven student with a competitive GPA but poor writing skills is at a significant disadvantage over the student whose inadequate essays can be softened by a look at their academic fitness via GPA.
Whether the SAT is a perfect tool or not, it is the closest thing we have to a level playing field.
Does teaching-to-the-test expose weaknesses in the way education is funded, accessed, and supported in diverse communities versus wealthier enclaves? Absolutely. Does evaluating those students based on a jumble of identity characteristics, background and writing skills correct this imbalance? Not even a little.
This is an argument to make the SAT fairer, more accessible, and better utilized, not an argument to give up on objective standards of student assessment altogether. Especially when it means relying on inadequate and impossible-to-define measures of social proof instead. Especially when the value of that social proof is subject to change based on political and cultural trends. A student can study to perform better at math, they cannot study to be more Black or genderqueer or have a worse childhood.
There’s an argument to be made, of course, that standardized tests are but one small data point in a much larger holistic assessment of a student which is true. The idea that a minority student who did poorly in high school can “test in” to a name-brand university seems to be largely a myth if you ask college admissions experts. So why does it matter if tests are optional or not? Why waste our breath defending a practice that may have a negative or negligible impact on minority admissions?
Because the argument that a student’s personal essays, essays which have been directed to highlight a candidate’s race and gender identity as an objective measure of their worth, is the exact same permission structure that we’ve been fighting against in the march for equality in the classroom.
When the political winds change, which they will, these permission structures can and will be used against students of color just as they are now used to their benefit.
The argument isn’t that the SAT is a perfect tool or that essays are a bad one, but that if the goal is to eliminate bias, leaning into areas where we know bias lives - personal judgment calls made by individuals about a student’s character based on their identity - isn’t going to solve our problem and may make it worse.