Kevin Carey has a piece in the Washington Post on the imminent demise of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) as the main metric used in college acceptance. I know that in some parts of the country people use the American College Testing (ACT) test instead of the SAT. If Carey is right, both are doomed. The culprit is “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs. They are simply better than standardized tests in predicting how people will do in college courses.
MIT, long a leader in education technology, has been one of the first universities to take steps in this direction. In 2012, a young man named Battushig Myanganbayar was one of only 340 students out of 150,000 worldwide to earn a perfect score in a rigorous online Circuits and Electronics course. At the time, he was 15 and living in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.
All Battushig needed was an Internet connection and a teacher with an eye for engineering potential. After excelling in the MIT class, he took the SAT, and he’s now enrolled at MIT. Another Circuits and Electronics student, Amol Bhave from Jabalpur, India, enjoyed the class so much he created his own online follow-up course in signals and systems. He, too, was admitted into the 2013 MIT freshman class.
Here’s the key:
These are not watered-down classes. I took a genetics course through MITx, the university’s branch of edX. It was the same class taught to freshmen in Cambridge, Mass. — the same lectures, homework assignments, midterms and final exam. MOOC success is much more likely to predict success in college classes than SAT scores, because MOOC success is, in fact, success in college classes.
Now, MIT presents a pretty high barrier because the course matter is so challenging that most people need to be born with an above average aptitude to do well in their classes. But if you know what the course material is going to be and you have years to prepare, it should be possible to ace at least some of their online courses. Rather than teaching for the test, you can teach for the course, which should be both more predictable and more effective. I’d think it would be pretty easy to ace a class in Jazz Appreciation at the University of Texas, for example, which is actually one of the classes that are offered online.
This could change everything. It will change how people do college prep outside of school, and it will change how schools prepare kids for college admissions. I can imagine taking a class full of kids from a poor performing school in North Philadelphia and training them to pass classes at universities in subjects that they show aptitude for, until the whole class can do well in an online college course and give themselves a leg-up on other applicants from the suburbs who haven’t been as focused in their preparations.
But it’s bad news for the children of alumni and the rich if they aren’t willing to capitalize on their advantages. Their connections and SAT prep courses may not get them into Harvard anymore.
It’s also good news for kids like me who could never hope to have the highest scores in my school or finish near the top of my class simply because I went to a school with one of the highest-scoring student bodies in the country. But, as part of growing up in that culture, I was well-prepared to do well in rigorous college courses and proved it once I had the chance.
This will change how merit is measured, and it’s hard to argue with a metric that measures exactly what people want to know. Of course there will be losers. It won’t be possible to make up for a lack of innate aptitude with an impressive list of extracurriculars, and something will be lost in that. Doing great in class isn’t the only thing worth considering, and people who have a drive to help others can contribute a lot to a campus. But as everyone has learned to game this system, students aren’t helping out at the food bank out of some genuine desire to help the needy anymore. It’s probably best to deemphasize this kind of oneupmanship from the admissions process.
