Commentary: The future of college admissions tests

The article raises important issues regarding standardized selection tests for college admissions. However, their analogy relating testing for college admissions to corporate reactions of inattention to social responsibility misses an important aspect of the history of testing—that is, tests were originally introduced partly or mainly to effect social responsibility goals. In this commentary, I provide a brief review of the history of college admissions testing, along with additional considerations of Goodhart’s Law and potential remedies regarding which constructs to assess in the process of determining college admissions. Standardized testing with a one-size-fits-all approach is not so much misguided as mainly insensitive to a higher-education system that has changed its goals beyond predicting GPA and attrition/graduation. Both colleges and the testing industry have a responsibility to better articulate the criteria of “success” and the underlying constructs to predict the criteria, respectively.