SIUC administrators say ACT scores should remain a part of admissions criteria even though some policy analysts contend that the scores have become a barrier to college entry.

Charles Rooney, analyst at FairTest, a Cambridge, Mass.,-based organization that opposes the mandating of standardized tests in admissions policy, says the new trend in higher education is a move away from standardized test submission.

He said that institutions that still adhere to SAT and ACT scores as indicators of college success are erecting barriers to many qualified students.

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Using tests to distinguish between students isn’t working. It has become a barrier to entry into higher education, Rooney said. That’s not how the world works. The world isn’t flat. It’s round. We shouldn’t just lump everybody together.

Rooney is not alone in his contentions, but joins a growing number of administrators and policy examiners who have become critics of the system.

A new law in Texas guaranteeing applicants in the top-10 percent of their high school class admission to the state’s public universities, and a proposal in the University of California system eliminating SAT scores from admissions criteria, typify this trend, Rooney says.

According to FairTest, the number of schools that make test scores optional has increased from 189 to 284 over the last three years.

However, SIUC remains resolute in retaining the ACT requirement, citing the need for a complete system of measurement. SIUC’s admissions policy mandates that students must score a 20 or higher on the ACT. If an 18 or 19 is attained, the student must be in the top-50 percent of his or her class to be considered for admission.

Walker Allen, director of Admissions and Records, said there is a general acceptance of admissions criteria by University administrators and faculty, and that eliminating test scores would leave a gap in the system.

There would be fewer indices in predicting student success if you were to make the ACT optional, Allen said. There needs to be some combination of high school preparation of grades and test scores and other things.

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Allen did say, however, that there may be qualified students who are excluded from school because of low test scores.

There are students who could be successful in school even though their test scores aren’t high, he said. But, there still needs to be some sort of measurement.

Standardized tests originally were created to depict a student’s success in his or her first year of college. SIUC Chancellor Donald Beggs, a former standardized test developer, said ACT scores are legitimate indicators of this success.

ACT and SAT scores are valid tests for the purposes for which they were developed, Beggs said. The question is, how they’re used.

Beggs and Allen agree that test scores by themselves do not measure accurately academic merit, but in conjunction with high school grades and activities, they do. The two also adamantly reject the efforts in Texas and California.

I would not be in support of eliminating the requirement, Allen said. Scores are good measurements if they’re used with other factors.

Even the people of ACT and SAT that make the tests would agree that test scores cannot stand by themselves, but the combination with high school grades is the best combination of predictors for success in college.

Rooney disagrees with this analysis, saying that standardized tests are not good indicators of a student’s success in college because they exclude certain populations. He said several studies have shown students with relatively low scores have matched the success of students with higher scores in their first year.

(SAT’s and ACT’s) under-predict performance. They exclude disproportionately lower income and minority students, he said. There is also a gender gap with the tests.

Beggs said the cultural bias argument was disproved a long time ago, and that the tests can be taken in languages other than English.