Are College Standardized Entrance Exams Important?
US News & World Report recently released their 2024 US High School Rankings Report. Palos Verdes Peninsula HS (PVPHS) came in at #307 nationally and #37 in California while Palos Verdes High School (PVHS) came in at #977 nationally and #130 in California. There are several components in that ranking score including graduation rate and state assessment performance, but the largest component is college readiness, which they define as the “proportion of a school's 12th graders who took and earned a qualifying score on Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) exams.” In that component, PVPHS and PVHS scored a 70.4 and 58.2, respectively.
Notably missing from the ranking components is the number of students who took standardized college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT and the scores they earned on those tests. The reason isn’t very surprising: over the last decade, several colleges have been making those tests optional for application. In 2016, the SAT test was redesigned and in that same year an additional 32 institutions dropped their SAT/ACT requirements, which was the fastest annual growth of test-optional schools at that point. In May of 2020, as the reality of COVID set in, the University of California Board of Regents announced that they would suspend the SAT/ACT requirement. Universities across the country followed suit. In 2016, the number of test-optional schools was 870. Today that number is over 1900.
These national and statewide trends had a predictable effect on our local PV high schools: the number of students who took SAT/ACT exams dropped dramatically. As you can see from data obtained through a district public records request, the number of high school students in PV who took SAT/ACT exams has decreased from over 1400 in 2009-10 to just over 400 in 2023-24, with noticeably significant declines in 2015-16 and 2020-21.
In the meantime, California has continued to administer academic proficiency exams to elementary, middle, and high school students. The California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) measures students’ ability to meet standards for Math and English, and is one of the indicators used by the California State University (CSU) to determine students’ readiness for college-level coursework. The most recent CAASPP results for our district show that 17% of 11th graders did not meet the standard for English and 32% of 11th graders did not meet the standard for Math.
This year, the national trend seems to be reversing. In April 2024, Harvard joined fellow Ivy League universities Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown in reinstating the standardized testing requirement. The reason for the change in policy is based on reports that indicate that performance on standardized testing is the best predictor of student academic performance in college. Despite those reports, there is no indication that the University of California will reverse their decision. Regardless, with the growing list of schools relying on standardized testing, high school students will need to start taking those tests at increased numbers.
So the questions for our district regarding our high school students in Palos Verdes are:
Are the CAASPP scores indicative of SAT/ACT performance?
If so, what can be done to help our students currently not meeting the standards in English and Math?
Will the drop in standardized test taking over the last several years require a learning curve to get back to proficient status?
If so, how can we start now to get our students ready for those tests?
