Giving Compass' Take:

• Jeffrey Selingo discusses why the shift away from standardized tests to more holistic college admissions criteria has not created a more equitable system. 

• What admissions criteria would be equitable?  

• Find out why some ways of improving college admissions are actually illegal. 

For generations, two numbers have signaled whether a student could hope to get into a top college: his or her standardized test score and his or her grade-point average.

In the past 15 years, though, these lodestars have come to mean less and less. The SAT has been redesigned twice in that time, making it difficult for admissions officers to assess, for instance, whether last year’s uptick in average scores was the result of better students or just a different test. What’s more, half of American teenagers now graduate high school with an A average, according to a recent study. With application numbers at record highs, highly selective colleges are forced to make impossible choices, assigning a fixed number of slots to a growing pool of students who, each year, are harder to differentiate using these two long-standing metrics.

Eighty percent of American colleges accept more than half of their applicants, but at the country’s most selective schools, there is something of a merit crisis: As test scores and GPAs hold less sway, admissions offices are searching for other, inevitably more subjective metrics.

More than 1,000 colleges nationwide have come to a similar conclusion about standardized tests, having dropped them as an admissions requirement. That number includes even some selective campuses such as George Washington, Wake Forest, and Wesleyan. There are good arguments supporting these schools’ decisions: for instance, that standardized test scores are highly correlated with family income.

Schools that minimize test scores, however, are often trading one inequitable measure of merit for another. Demonstrated interest has become a popular concept among admissions deans in recent years, but it too likely correlates with wealth—traveling for college visits isn’t free. And one of the best indicators of interest is applying early decision, a process that favors applicants who often don’t need to worry about comparing financial-aid offers from multiple schools.

Read the full article about college admissions criteria by Jeffrey Selingo at The Atlantic.