The Maryland college already ditched SAT scores back in 2007, so why not take it a step further?

Jonathan Marks at Minding the Campus has the story:

Goucher to Applicants: No High School Transcript, No Problem!

Goucher College is lowering its application standards even further. Having dispensed with the SAT requirement in 2007, it’s now making transcripts optional, too. Students can now apply to Goucher by sending in two assignments from high school, at least one of them graded, and a video, of no more than two minutes, explaining how the applicant will fit in at Goucher. As Goucher’s new promotional video, touting its “totally unique way of applying to college,” says, “We want to know how you want to change the world.” The jury is still out on this approach, but so far it sounds misguided.

The debate over going test-optional pitted those who thought that colleges were simply trying to increase their applicant pool, and hence their selectivity and U.S. News rankings, and those who thought that colleges were reaching out to a population of applicants who could not afford an SAT or ACT coach but had otherwise performed well in high school. Those who favored the test-optional approach had at least this going for them: there was some reason to believe that standardized tests did not add much to high school GPA in predicting college success. A Bates College study, for example, found no significant differences in graduation rate or GPA between those who submitted scores and those who did not. A more recentstudy of “123,000 students at 33 institutions” had similar results. Whatever you make of such studies, at least those who favor SAT-optional can claim that they are concerned not only with drawing in applicants but also with drawing in applicants who are likely to graduate, rather than applicants who will rack up debt and fail to graduate.

Goucher simply has not addressed the glaring problem with their new policy: that there is some good reason to think that high school G.P.A, is our best predictor of college success and no reason to believe that the capacity to put together a two minute video is a predictor of success at all. Indeed, President José Antonio Bowen concedes that high school grades are predictors of how well a student will fare in school but adds: “they are predictors of how well you will do in school, not how well you will do in life.” Similarly, Scott Sibley, associate professor of chemistry and chair of the faculty  told me in an e-mail that Goucher will “continue to admit most students through the more traditional application process,” but that  “transcripts and GPA don¹t always tell the full story, and there are many reasons why a student may have a blip on their academic record.” He thinks that faculty, who have had an opportunity to weigh in about the new system, are “supportive of the video application,” in part because faculty “will work closely with the admissions office to evaluate applications for this alternative process.”