Students, Rejoice — Standardized Testing May Soon Be Dead

A 68-year-old child is a hot topic in higher education today. And why not? Multiple studies show that this sexagenarian is discriminatory against women and minorities and does poor start-up work.

Meet GRE - or, if you are a former graduate student, revisit some wet nightmares. The Examination of Graduate Examinations, a verbal and quantitative test widely used, takes heat several quarters. Yale and Vanderbilt's research shows that the test is only a modest predictor of success for undergraduate students. Other studies reveal enormous disparities related to gender and race. In response, an increasing number of colleges and universities have dropped the test of their needs, and the trend shows no signs of slowing down. In a 2014 article titled "A Test That Fails," academics at Vanderbilt University and the University of Southern Florida included this blunt assessment: "GRE is a better indicator of gender and color the skin than the ultimate ability and success ".

"If it was not a long tradition, it would be considered scandalous."

Ouch. Is this a way to talk about a pillar of the retirement age of standardized tests? Apparently, say critics. On average, women earn 80 points less than men in quantitative physical science scores, according to data from the Education Testing Service (ETS), the company that administers GRE. African Americans record on average nearly 200 points and 150 points less than Asian Americans and White Americans, respectively.

David Payne, vice president and chief operating officer of ETS, defends the review, arguing that the disparity in test results does not mean that the test is biased. Rather, this underscores a greater inequality in education and resources.

GRE could soon have a company in the form of the SAT and the American College Test Exam (ACT) because the relevance of standardized tests in general is questioned. More than 500 schools and colleges accredited in the United States no longer use SAT / ACT scores, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing. "The appeal of standardized testing was popular decades ago," says Professor Joshua Hall, Director of the Post-Secondary Education Education Program (PREP) at the University of North Carolina. Hall adds that this turns out to be a defective notion.

The exam also charges students financially. The application fee is $ 205 and includes the filing of marks in four schools; it costs $ 27 to send them to each additional school. Katherine Medina, a Honduran-American scholarship student who sometimes juggled three jobs while studying philosophy and linguistics at Sarah Lawrence College, dreamed of becoming what she calls the best teacher of female secondary school. She used a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for testing and relied on free online preparation tools. (Kaplan's course options start at $ 699 and amount to $ 2,499.) Ultimately, his offer for a seat at a US American training school proved unsuccessful.

GRE's shortcomings have not been overlooked by the Admissions Committees, which in recent years have pushed to reduce dependency on exam results. Even the ETS encourages programs to highlight GRE scores and not use them as break points. Some programs at the University of California, the Berkeley Institute of Technology, Massachusetts and Georgetown University have recently eliminated GRE requirements. In 2015, the president of the American Astronomical Society wrote an open letter asking the presidents of the field departments to rethink the role of GRE. In response, several astronomy programs, including those at Harvard, have eliminated the test of their physics requirements.

The last on bail is the University of Michigan program program in biomedical sciences (PIBS). "For a long time there was no interest in discussing it," said Professor Scott Barolo, director of PIBS, as students needed the score for pre-doctoral fellowships from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. But in 2010, the NIH abandoned its requirements for ERM, and the NSF followed its agreement in 2015. "It therefore appeared that there were no institutional or funding barriers to reconsider this decision, "said Barolo. After debating the issue at a town hall meeting, PIBS

While many faculty members across the country are in favor of leaving GRE, there is also a tendency to hang on to the test, or even bankruptcy. "Having quantitative parameters is very attractive [for some faculties] and makes sorting through hundreds of applications much easier," Hall says. Dropping the GRE can appear to remove a safety blanket, he adds. Nor does it contribute to the fact that it has existed for so long. "If it were not a long tradition, it would be considered scandalous," says Barolo.

It may take years before the GRE becomes obsolete. But "the dam has broken," says Barolo, adding that universities will realize that even good students could choose not to take the GRE and apply only to schools that do not require it.

Medina is not content with knowing when this will happen. She is initiating a postgraduate program in gender and education in Honduras - on the right path to becoming the best sex education teacher in the world.

* Correction: The original version of this article has been mis-post-doctoral for pre-doctoral fellowships.