GAZETTE: When you say student work, what do you mean exactly?

WEISSBOURD: What I mean is a high school student’s sample of their writing or a piece of their music or art. There’s a lot of focus these days on performance assessment, meaning that what high school students should be sharing with colleges are actual examples of their work. The problem is that a lot of colleges don’t have the capacity to evaluate that work. So if there was a third party who could evaluate that material and give the information to colleges, that would be a great thing. And some of the deans are calling for that. And I think that could be really important in the era of coronavirus when information about grades is going to be compromised. It’s hard to evaluate grades when there’s been such unevenness in how schools have responded to this pandemic. I think the college admissions deans are going to have to get really creative about thinking about other ways to do this. And those other ways might turn out to be better in the end.

GAZETTE: In the wake of the pandemic, there have been some problems administering the SAT, and more and more colleges are choosing to make the test optional. Can you talk a little bit more about the SAT and its advantages and disadvantages?

WEISSBOURD: The SAT appears to be more useful in predicting success at some colleges than others. For example, at MIT your math score may be a good predictor of success. At other colleges, it looks like the SAT/ACT are really not helpful. I do think there’s a real danger that if you get rid of the SAT/ACT, affluent parents will just find other ways to game the system that won’t do anything to make the playing field any more level. They might even make it less level. You get rid of the SAT/ACT and the attention turns to the number of AP courses you have, or the number of high-profile awards you received, or the number of leadership positions you hold or the number of community-service organizations you started. That’s what you don’t want to have happen because wealthy families will have lots of advantages. They can pay for expensive tutors, and they’ll have greater access to these opportunities for their kids. So without standardized tests, I think it is on colleges to really develop forms of assessment that are more fair and equitable and less vulnerable to that kind of gaming. And that’s a hard thing to do. But I think this is the year to really think hard about how to do that.

GAZETTE: What other ways can college administrators assess student achievement?

WEISSBOURD: One is by understanding grades in context and weighting them accordingly. Many kids have serious family responsibilities or are working to support their families many hours a week. That’s part of the evaluation of the student and it’s weighted. You look at a B from that student differently than you would look at a B from a student who doesn’t have those kinds of responsibilities.

I think the other way to think about this is to look at student work when you can. And that’s just hard to do with the big state colleges where they’re spending about six or seven minutes per application because they have 60,000 applications. But again, if a third-party organization took that on it would be possible to do with that organization.

Then there are things like the Mastery Transcript Consortium. They’re trying to shift away from traditional grades and have assessments that are based on the mastery of certain skills and knowledge. I think more and more high schools are going to start to turn to those kinds of things. And my sense is that more colleges will start to use the Mastery Transcript as an alternative to grades.

GAZETTE: What are “soft skills” and how do they play a role in the college application process?

WEISSBOURD: I am not a big fan of the term because these are really not soft skills. There’s quite a lot of data that things like self-awareness, curiosity, diligence, perspective-taking, social awareness, collaborative skills, are all really important for college and career success. (Interpersonal, and social emotional, and ethical skills, and being a responsible member of your community and acting with integrity are also connected to work success.) So these are things that are really important to measure if you’re a college and you’re trying to figure out whether a student will be successful at your school. Many of these skills are tied to engagement in college and engagement in college is a strong predictor of work success. So these are important for schools to measure, and colleges really need to pilot a lot of different kinds of measures of these different skills and do a good job defining them and defining what constitutes evidence of them in an application. They need to think about different kinds of assessments, whether those are written assessments or brief interviews, or video prompts, a variety of things. And again, I think this is a year to experiment with a lot of these things.

GAZETTE: Are there other kinds of experiments that you think might be helpful in identifying these kinds of traits?

WEISSBOURD: There may be different types of recommendation forms and additional recommenders that will help colleges find out more about these traits. Maybe you reach out to other recommenders in addition to teachers, including peers or sports coaches, so you are getting multiple recommendations or just rating sheets from different people and looking at where there’s convergence on certain traits.

Part of the problem with recommendations is that they tend to be inflated. People rate things highly on every measure. But what if you said to recommenders, “Name the four characteristics that most describe this person,” so you have to choose between different characteristics? And then you look at which of those characteristics turns out to be most predictive of success at your college over time? So there are a lot of different ways to think about this. Another idea is to come up with an alternative to the SAT/ACT that doesn’t advantage privileged kids in the same way. I’m not advocating for any particular alternative. I’m just advocating for trying and seeing what happens. My guess is that we can do this in ways that are more just and more accurate and create less stress on students.