by Jed Applerouth, PhD on 11, 2018 in Admissions, Jed Said june

The SAT and ACT essays are now actually hanging by way of a thread and therefore are likely to their way to avoid it. The Ivy League is abandoning the essay, and without its critical help, there clearly was chance that is little SAT or ACT essays will remain appropriate within the domain of university admissions.

As soon as the Redesigned SAT arrived in March 2016 having its considerably overhauled essay, brought in straight through the AP Language and Composition research Prompt , everybody within the training area joined a time period of waiting.Will it is a robust predictor of freshman grades or at the very least freshman English grades? There clearly was absolutely nothing to do but wait and view exactly exactly what the information would expose.

As soon as the SAT that is redesigned ACT essays were announced, many universities in the nation, including Ivy League organizations such as for instance Columbia, Cornell, and Penn , do not need them for admissions. Penn’s manager of admissions, Eric Furda, cited the poor predictive energy of the” that is“old essay since the rationale for dropping the essay dependence on both tests. However an amount of admissions workplaces desired to run their own analyses on the revamped SAT and ACT essays before carefully deciding. They might need the essays of these pupils, letting them create a dataset that is robust. Analysis with this information would need to hold back until springtime 2018, whenever freshman grades for the class that is inaugural be accessible.

A much better predictor, but would it not be great sufficient?

The redesigned SAT essay appeared to be a much better predictor of college performance than the much maligned SAT essay of 2005-2015 on its face. The SAT that is old allowed students to produce up facts whole-cloth, which seemed misaligned with college-level writing and analysis. The faculty Board decided to go to its AP cabinet to locate a replacement essay, and selected the AP Language complimentary Response Question 2. This essay could be a fitness in careful reading, critical reasoning, and writing.

An AP essay would clearly be an even more robust predictor of freshman grades, specially as a lot of universites and colleges give college credit for high AP Language performance. If an AP rating correlates positively with college grades, would an essay pulled directly from an AP exam maybe maybe not produce a comparable correlation? The ACT, Inc. responded with an improved essay of its own, increasing the number of perspectives a student had to critically evaluate to receive a high score as the College Board went to great lengths to improve its essay. This redesigned ACT essay additionally seemed an improvement that is significant the main one it replaced.

Spring 2018: the beginning of the finish

2 yrs after the first redesigned SAT essays were administered, much talked about colleges began to abandon their SAT and ACT essay demands, not constantly as a result of difficulties with the essays’ legitimacy.

March 18, 2018: Harvard falls the essay requirement

Harvard announced it absolutely was eliminating the SAT and ACT essay requirement, instead of account of problems with val > College spokesperson Rachael Dane announced “Harvard encourage the ACT/SAT with or without composing, you start with the course of 2023…This modification will include a component customwriting that is additional the comprehensive outreach for the Harvard school funding Initiative (HFAI), which seeks outstanding pupils from all financial backgrounds.”