Green shoots are emerging in American academia. Yale University is now the second Ivy League school to reinstate standardised testing in admissions, noting that “test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grades”.
Unfortunately, a separate announcement has taken some of the gloss off Yale’s decision. This week, the Supreme Court turned down a challenge from the admissions policy at a prestigious Virginia high school over its removal of standardised testing. After the “racial reckoning” of 2020, the high school had attempted to raise the number of black and brown students by abandoning standardised tests in favour of a more “holistic” process.
This resulted in the Asian American proportion of admissions dropping 19 points under the new system, from 73% to 54%, while the number of Black and Hispanic students roughly quadrupled. The latest ruling will now leave this new policy intact. Another example of the Supreme Court’s “two steps forward, one step back” approach to academia…
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