A essential worry about SAT Optional policy is that whether colleges can still select qualified students without their scores. In SAT optional universities, they need to take into accounts more factors to predict students’ college academic performance and selecting the weights for these factors can be a more challenging task. Open criticism remains that SAT/ACT optional makes admissions decisions more subjective and non-submitters tend to have lower academic performances in colleges. Luckily, prior research results showed relatively optimistic results. According to Hoover’s research about Bates College (2004), the overall grade-point average was 3.11 for students who submitted test scores and 3.06 for those who did not, and the difference between the graduation rates for the two groups was one-tenth of 1 percent. Though there does exist a gap between the two groups in their academic performance, the difference is not very obvious. As for Mount Holyoke College (Robinson, 2015) case, Robinson made a conclusion that selective college admissions can indeed be carried out under an optional SAT score submission policy at an institution. His results showed that although non-submitters have lower first year GPAs than submitters, students’ first year college GPA and retention rate are not significantly influenced by whether or not they submitted
A essential worry about SAT Optional policy is that whether colleges can still select qualified students without their scores. In SAT optional universities, they need to take into accounts more factors to predict students’ college academic performance and selecting the weights for these factors can be a more challenging task. Open criticism remains that SAT/ACT optional makes admissions decisions more subjective and non-submitters tend to have lower academic performances in colleges. Luckily, prior research results showed relatively optimistic results. According to Hoover’s research about Bates College (2004), the overall grade-point average was 3.11 for students who submitted test scores and 3.06 for those who did not, and the difference between the graduation rates for the two groups was one-tenth of 1 percent. Though there does exist a gap between the two groups in their academic performance, the difference is not very obvious. As for Mount Holyoke College (Robinson, 2015) case, Robinson made a conclusion that selective college admissions can indeed be carried out under an optional SAT score submission policy at an institution. His results showed that although non-submitters have lower first year GPAs than submitters, students’ first year college GPA and retention rate are not significantly influenced by whether or not they submitted