Princeton University announced this week that it will be reinstating the requirement for undergraduate applicants to submit standardized test scores in the 2027–28 admissions cycle. It is only the latest reversal for an ill-conceived and poorly supported movement to achieve greater equity and diversity by eliminating standardized testing in higher education.
Years ago, I wrote columns on the move by many academics to eliminate standardized testing to achieve greater diversity in colleges and universities. I have long been a critic of this movement given the overwhelming evidence that these tests allow an objective measure of academic merit and have great predictive value on the performance of students.
The University of California system was an early supporter of this ridiculous move. Notably, academics in the California system came to the same conclusion as some of us who denounced the move. These tests not only have the most significant predictive value for performance but also play an important role in the advancement of minority students. University of California President Janet Napolitano, however, overrode those conclusions.
Napolitano responded to such criticism with a Standardized Testing Task Force in 2019. Many people expected the task force to recommend the cessation of standardized testing. The task force did find that 59 percent of high school graduates were Latino, African-American or Native American but only 37 percent were admitted as UC freshman students. The Task Force did not find standardized testing to be unreliable or call for its abandonment, however.
Instead, its final report concluded that “At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average (HSGPA), and about as good at predicting first-year retention, [University] GPA, and graduation.”
Not only that, it found: “Further, the amount of variance in student outcomes explained by test scores has increased since 2007 … Test scores are predictive for all demographic groups and disciplines … In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority Students (URMs), who are first generation, or whose families are low-income.” In other words, test scores remain the best indicator for continued performance in college.
That clearly was not the result Napolitano or some others wanted. So, she simply announced a cessation of the use of such scores in admissions. The system would go to a “test-blind” system until it developed its own test.
Ending standardized testing had an obvious secondary purpose in frustrating new legal challenges on the use of race in college admissions. Last November, Californians rejected a resolution to restore affirmative action in college admissions.
MIT, Penn, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, and other schools ultimately reverted to standardized testing. The fact that these schools even joined this movement shows how faculties and administrators jettisoned educational standards for popular causes.
While originally rationalized due to COVID, the move was widely heralded as a victory for equity and diversity. Notably, the policy outlasted COVID as many academics rejected standardized testing as racist. There have even been calls for random selection of students to achieve greater racial diversity.
In the case of Princeton, the faculty took years to give itself sufficient cover to return to standardized testing by studying the obvious. The announcement comes after a five-year review of data, showing that students who submitted test scores generally performed better academically at Princeton than those who did not.
Just as with earlier studies, a new working paper published on the National Bureau of Economic Research website finds that standardized test scores are stronger predictors of college performance than high school GPA, even after controlling for race, gender, and socioeconomic status.
GPA scores are notoriously unreliable due to grade inflation and varying standards across different schools. In San Francisco, “grading for equity” is a goal in public schools. The slipping standards recently became evident when Harvard had to create a course to teach basic high school math to its students.
Columbia remains the last Ivy League holdout in dispensing with mandatory standardized testing.
Princeton is private property and only the owners may “claim and exercise” dominion.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
“[Private property is] that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.”
– James Madison
Professor, thank you for the post.
Respectfully, one suggestion: Please stop referring to the euphemistic goals of advancing “diversity” and “equity.” In plain language, “diversity” refers to blacks, gays, and other groups favored by the left. “Equity” refers to advancing the interests of the left’s favored groups.
In context, academics favored the elimination of standardized tests to facilitate discrimination against whites, Jews, and other disfavored groups. They seek to provide preferential treatment to blacks, gays, and other groups that the left believes are members of their political coalition.
Thank you.
Diversity is bizarre because it’s racist. 😂
OT: I listen to talk radio. It’s or was conservation. It’s now AI. One show is Guy Benson. Benson was married to his husband Mr. Wise , a federal contractor recently. They now have two children.
The whirled is absolutely cuckoo but everyone thinks it’s beautiful, wonderful, fine.
Thanks PT for the entertainment. I don’t care if colleges have tests or not. Turn them into trade schools maybe. They’re rat mazes for loons.
Prepare to ROTFLYAO!!! Put your drink down before watching, or you might spew on your keyboard:
“Res Ipsa Floyd” – Coming Soon To The Internet
One can only hope.
No , but I am going to start putting cat pictures on my website and putting pictures of my pipes and discussing books and things period all of which will be of no interest , hardly to anybody
So, that will keep you busy there then?
And he won’t have to nonsense-commandeer this site!
There is a God!
Never fear. If I have time and energy to do my own blog, then it means that I am in a creative cycle, and thus will continue to provide information and insights here, too.
This return to sanity may be too late. It does little good to include the underprepared with those that are, when both are bedazzled and outclassed by Artificial Intelligence, AI. Colleges must show the way to teach in the presence of AI that it can do almost anything and is getting better. The K-12 grades cannot and will not.
There is hope with the everyday problems of humanity that are bedeviling to AI. See my brief article at https://usedideas.wordpress.com/2025/10/10/problem-solving-everyday-problems/ for details.
We must remind ourselves that many of those Napolitano-era students are now teachers/professors in higher education who have helped pull us all down to these common denominator/expectation levels.
I guess we can call AI “The Great Leveling”
I guess we can say what survives , survives. We’ve found the missing link.
No…, no…, NOOooo. Say it isn’t so!! A return to objective standards and merit?? How will we survive???
As an economics teacher, I always wanted to say to the bottom 10%, “Have you folks ever thought of changing your majors to gardening?”
I like the way your mind works,
Apropos of nothing and speaking of the “bottom 10%,” if you’re such an expert in economics, why are you teaching?
What are you doing here, and why are you not in Davos?
Like King Charles?
So, how exactly does one do “equitable grading”??? AI said this:
Practical strategies
Separate grades for behavior: Keep grades for homework, participation, and other non-academic work separate from grades for content mastery.
Allow multiple attempts: Give students multiple chances to pass a test or demonstrate understanding on an assignment.
Focus on the best work: Base the final grade on a student’s highest level of achievement on assignments and tests.
Implement blind grading: Hide student names during the grading process to reduce unconscious bias.
Use different assessment methods: Offer a variety of ways for students to show what they know, such as presentations, projects, or essays, to accommodate different learning styles.
Provide clear communication: Clearly explain grading criteria, expectations, and how students can improve, and ensure students understand how to get additional help.
Address patterns, not just individuals: If a common concept is missed by many students, provide a class-wide intervention rather than writing the same feedback repeatedly to each student.
Use a modified grading scale: Instead of a 0-100 scale, consider using a 0-4 scale or a system where the lowest possible score on a late or missing assignment is not a zero, but a lower score like 50%.
—————
All of which seems stupidly complex to me. Sort of like teaching reading by the “whole language” approach to phonics. Mississippi switched back to phonics, as are many other states. Even California. Here is a good link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle
My favorite os a 50% grade on missing assignments.
So, do half the work, receive a passing grade.
Or… magic sheep dip them to make them Asian. They feel the hot breath of shame at their backs keeping their minds on the win.
Complete failure to turn in an assignment gets a 50 grade? And they used the word “mastery” — I can’t even.
That doesn’t mean they will actually use them at all.
It may be harder to get activists in place in the universities if they have to submit SAT or ACT scores.
With these moves, the Papa Doc School of Medicine and Science may have to be re-established in Haiti.
I don’t know how anyone expects to measure proficiency without testing, and standardized testing, at that. Students are expected to already be developed by the time they reach the university level. Entering as a complete novice is actually called ‘kindergarten’, and the modern left seems to have the two confused.
My wife had the fifth grade children of migrant workers reading and loving and reflecting on things literature and poetry – class and ethnicity are not determinants for anything whatsoever, unless one is prejudiced, intentionally or otherwise, themselves.
Our educational system is currently a woke disgrace that doesn’t serve ANY students.
That’s encouraging. It’s like flying IFR when VFR will get you killed.
I see this as a move similar to food manufacturers returning to stating on their packaging that their food passes FDA requirements for food safety.
Without the standardized scores plus the DEI hires, you had no concept of the qualifications of anyone waving a diploma and wanting to get hired or accepted at a school.
I would no more hire recent graduates (especially minority ones) than a person off the street as I would have no method of knowing their actual abilities, training or even if they were ( as in the Des Moines School District’s experience) legal and without felony records.
in NJ? They will just find another way to DEI
TAKE AWAY THEIR MONEY! Let them fund their own politics!
reminder TAXPAYERS should not be funding these liberals
End Federal Aid to colleges(including student loan backing), cities, states, non-profits
end public unions
Defund Democrats.
Congress has the power to tax for ONLY debt, defense, and general Welfare.
General welfare is defined as and limited to all, or the whole, well proceed—police, fire, and basic infrastructure—not some, one, or a few, not individual, specific, or particular welfare, favor, or charity.
Congress has no power to tax for or fund “Federal Aid to colleges, student loans, etc.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Article 1, Section 8
The Congress shall have Power To…collect Taxes…to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare…
Does anyone know more about the Act and was only discussed on Epoch Times? This new act would surpass the Patriot Act .
https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/trumps-order-could-mean-broader-terror-designations-5926034?src_src=CRNEWS&src_cmp=cr-2025-10-08&est=WHnxUSEDMqsJLXwik0riBv0NtgGdYAs4a2rCaII5Z2kbKnPic3HJ5rpQbvD0qoAp6t8%3D
Princeton still has its heavily staffed and funded “Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity” and “Office of Sustainability,” includings its virtue-signalling “Land Acknowledgments.” Tolerance for viewpoint diversity is, at best, tightly constrained. All three liberal justices of the Supreme Court have spoken there in the last two years. Justice Scalia did thirteen years ago. Justice Alito, an alumnus, has been on the Court for 20 years and has never spoken there. As you constantly note, Jonathan, these schools have no tolerance for the diversity that truly matters.
Who cares…
Diversity (i.e. color judgment, class bigotry), Equivocation, and Indoctrination (DEI) #HateLovesAbortion
That said, diversity of individuals, minority of one.