At Hope High School in Providence last year, the average SAT score was 349 for math and 356 for verbal – and just under half the students took the test in the first place.
Among Providence College’s applicants, however, 98 percent submitted SAT scores, and the 50 percent in the middle of the applicant pool scored between 560 to 650 points for math and 550 to 630 for verbal, College Board figures show.
The gap between the Providence high school’s students’ scores and those of typical PC freshmen can be enough to keep them from applying, Hope counselor Jimps Jean-Louis said.
“I think they get scared when they look at the school’s profile and see the average SAT scores,” Jean-Lewis said.
Now, in an effort to increase the diversity of its students, the college has announced it will no longer require that entering students submit either SAT or ACT test scores.
“There is a lot of research that students who have English as a second language and students from lower-end socioeconomic backgrounds are not strong test-takers,” said Christopher Lydon, associate vice president for admissions and enrollment planning at Providence College. “Both students and parents seem to fixate on test scores and test-score averages – and if the scores are low, they don’t consider college. Our hope is that additional students will consider Providence College because we don’t use the scores.”
Jean-Lewis said “there’s no question” that Hope students tend not to do well on the SATs.
“It’s because of the setup of the test,” Jean-Lewis said. “Even though the College Board changed the test, they are still biased to socioeconomic background. Some of the things on the tests are just not part of [our students’] day-to-day life, where a student from the suburbs deals with those issues every day.” Yet that doesn’t mean the Hope students couldn’t succeed in college, both Lydon and Jean-Lewis said.
The financial aspect of test-taking is another problem for many Hope students and their peers, Lydon said. “They may not have the money for prep classes or to retake the test over and over,” he said.
The Rev. Brian J. Shanley, president of Providence College, “is concerned with the moral imperative,” Lydon said, and with “whether the test is unfair.”
“This reality has created an inequity that reveals itself in the correlation between family income and standardized test scores,” Father Shanley said in a news release announcing the new policy. “As an institution founded to increase opportunities for first-generation immigrants, we find this troubling.”
Although the policy was instituted as a four-year pilot program, Lydon said, the college doesn’t expect any great change in student performance.
“We don’t feel we’re putting ourselves at risk for those first four years,” he said. “We are confident that we can select a class that’s prepared to succeed at Providence College without those scores. The quality of courses and grades in high school is the most important factor to admissions.”
Even when selecting students based on high school success, PC is very careful not to discriminate against those who may have attended lower-quality schools.
“Most schools provide us with a profile of what classes were available to choose from, and we stress with parents that our review has always been relative to what their high school has offered them,” said Nancy Eagan, PC’s associate dean of admissions. “Context has always been important in the review process.”
A study done by Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, after 20 years of making SATs optional suggests the impact on students’ college performance is minimal. Bates found college GPAs of test submitters and non-submitters differed by five-hundredths of a point, and graduation rates differed by one-tenth of a percent.
Though Bates also found that the policy also nearly doubled its applicant pool, Lydon said that doesn’t mean PC is “desperate for applicants.”
“For the class of 2010, we considered 8,800 applications for 975 spaces,” Lydon said. “We are not at all concerned about whether PC is a school the kids are considering. The hope is just that students that [previously] have self-selected out will consider us.”
