Akil admissions, Admissions Tests, college admissions

Should You Take the SAT/ACT in 2025?

Slide the handle to see the second image.

Four years ago, I first answered this question, but since 2021 might as well be the Age of the Pharaohs an update is due. This question still looms large and seems particularly confusing given that more than 85% of colleges remain test optional but news outlets obsessed with certain highly rejective colleges, test prep companies with revenue goals, economists at Dartmouth trying to justify their president’s wishes, and far too many educational consultants keep screaming that “testing is coming back.” So let me step once more into the void and venture to give some guidance on whether (and when) to prepare for and take the SAT or ACT.

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Akil education

Large Language Models (misnamed AI) are Not Intelligent

AI is not intelligent.

At least not yet. The large language models (colloquially, and incorrectly, referred to as artificial intelligence) that we currently have are not Max Headroom, Skynet, Sunny, Data/Lore, Terminator, or CP3O. They aren’t even WOPR/Joshua (and if you don’t know all the listed AIs, you and I can’t be friends). They are not thinking machines. They are fancy google searches. If we think of them that way we’ll likely get better use out of them. If you make your students/children understand that, they will likely rely on them for more appropriate tasks.

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Akil admissions, media, Uncategorized

The Lionization of Testing and other weird metrics

Recently, the main villain behind the Operation Varsity Blues (OVB) scandal was released from federal custody after a brief 16 month stint in minimum security detention and has embarked on a reputation rehabilitation tour. With the cooperation of WSJ, ABC, and others, he’s attempting to relaunch a less illegal version of the same business that led to the massive federal investigation that exposed the networking, influence peddling, philanthropy laundering, fraud, and bribery that wealthy people use to get and keep advantages.

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Akil admissions, Admissions Tests, college admissions

Merit: Myths and Money

Many people believe that merit aid means aid awarded for students who are the smartest and most accomplished, but that’s not true. I just spent months reviewing state-funded “merit” scholarship policies and school-funded “merit” scholarships rules at flagship universities and what I found WILL SHOCK YOU!

All dramatics aside, my report found a few important, and somewhat surprising to me, things:

1. Metrics not merit.
Merit means nothing. There is no formal definition of merit. There is no formal determiner of who is meritorious and who isn’t. So getting a “merit” scholarship just means you met whatever criteria was set.

Many “merit” scholarships are given on the basis of random criteria, for example this one:

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Akil admissions, Admissions Tests

#HateRead: Admissions, testing and the media

Back in 2016 I wrote about the media coverage of college admissions and testing issue. I’d taken to fisking articles on Twitter under the hashtag #hateread and thought I needed to provide a bit more explanation of that and nuance. I’m updating it now because, with all that’s going on (waves vaguely at the world), finding good information is getting harder. So here goes . . .

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Akil admissions, Admissions Tests

Ben Simmons and Educational Testing

In a recent interview with Dr. Rawls-Dill, he mentioned Ben Simmons and an example of how what’s measured and who’s evaluating matters in determining success and quality. This really resonated with me and fine-tuned a sports analogy I’ve been making for years. Ben Simmons’s saga is the perfect example of how we’ve let standardized testing define students ability/aptitude/potential. 

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Akil admissions, college admissions

College Essay Trauma Porn

My sons make me hopeful about the future. My sons impress me with what they know and can do. My sons often surprise me. But most often my sons amuse me. Today, I share one of the amusements and surprises. My sons (Enid-Michele, my internet daughter wasn’t part of this so that’s why I’m not mentioning her.) have apparently been paying attention to pop culture and to my work. These boys, in 7th and 9th grades when this started, have been workshopping lines they claim are going into their college essays. They shared with me the beginnings of their joint effort: 

Growing up in the poorest borough of NYC, raised by a mother fighting addiction, and a father who couldn’t get a job.

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Akil Admissions Tests, college admissions

Standardized Testing: The Temporal Scan of Education

  • covid 19 coronavirus, hand holding infrared thermometer to measure body temperature, woman check with high temperature vector illustration design
    covid 19 coronavirus, hand holding infrared thermometer to measure body temperature, woman check with high temperature vector illustration design

As the pandemic rages and the issue of testing is discussed in a medical context, I’ve found myself increasingly noticing the parallels between the the ways in which America has discussed and politicized Covid testing and the way in which America has politicized and discussed educational testing. These parallels between medical and educational testing have me wondering if it’s a human or American failing that leads to the being so easily seduced by as Alfred Binet, father of IQ testing, put it “a simple, brutal number, which can have only a deceptive precision.“

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Akil Admissions Tests, Education Policy

College, Career, and Cremation Benchmarks

As the new school year begins, I am anxiously awaiting (read: dreading) the forthcoming SAT and ACT annual reports and with them the inevitable exaggerations, hand-wringings, misinterpretations, and statistical paralogisms that will follow. The College Board’s Total Group Reports and ACT’s Condition of College and Career Readiness Reports (or Profile Reports) will not only spark the annual “sky-is-falling because district scores have dropped .005 points” responses but will also likely lead to an uptick in the “SAT/ACT scores show students not ready to succeed in college, career, life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness.”

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Akil admissions, Admissions Tests, college admissions

Are Changes Coming to College Admissions?

We know it doesn’t feel like it, but it’s been less than 6 months since the Justice Department announced the indictments resulting from Operation Varsity Blues, so it’s no surprise that few universities have announced any substantial policy changes in their admissions procedures. If most big institutions move slowly, universities look at them and wonder, “What’s the big rush there?”  There are still committees to be convened in order to create sub-committees that can issue memos that can be circulated in order to be approved as official reports by committees who can then move items forward for approval by the faculty and/or Board of Trustees. In other words, don’t expect big changes in how colleges admit students anytime soon.

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