Holly StewartIf you’re like most people, being accepted to McGill was a major relief. It didn’t just mean you could stop worrying about applications, stop tossing and turning every night over whether you had a future, and finally join the “McGill Class of 20–” on Facebook. It also meant—for those Americans out there—that you didn’t have to worry about the SATs anymore, and for everyone else, that you had skirted standardized testing for good. No more analogies, definitions, tutoring, or prep books. No more constant reminders of how your intellect was insufficient for the rigours of the College Board.
Then again, maybe undergrad isn’t the be-all-end-all of upper level education, and grad school is the place for you. In that case, welcome back to the world of standardized testing. But this time, there’s a lot more to it than memorizing word lists and remembering what pi is. And at McGill, standardized testing has a storied history.
Standardized tests are one of the components often required in graduate school applications across North America that are meant to apply the same standard to all students in order to offer a prediction of initial academic success. They are all administered by American organizations. The Education Testing Service administers the Graduate Record Exam (GRE), which tests verbal, quantitative, and analytical skills for candidates applying to academic graduate degrees and some business programs. It also administers the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), founded by the Law School Admission Council in charge of the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and the Graduate Management Admissions Council, which owns the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT). ETS also owns Prometric, which administers a host of other tests and certifications. Prospective medical students take the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), administered by the Association of American Medical Colleges. While standardized tests are designed specifically to avoid potential subjectivity or institutional differences giving some candidates an unfair advantage, some have argued that they have their own problems, particularly in biasing some students’ success over others.
For one thing, there are language and diversity issues. McGill’s medical school dropped the MCAT for Canadian applicants from Canadian schools just this year, because no equivalent test exists in French.
“We need to be cognizant of that fact, especially when the MCAT tests things such as verbal reasoning,” said Dr. Saleem Razack, assistant dean of admissions for the Faculty of Medicine. “We wanted to make sure that we were reaching out appropriately to all of the Canadian population, which includes Francophones.”
It is important to keep in mind, added Razack, that standardized tests are “always designed for a population. Some people think that because it is applicable in one it is transferable to another, and that is sometimes true, but not necessarily. The MCAT is designed with the American population in mind. Our students are not that different as a demographic, but you have to bear in mind the issue that population matters in order for tests to be really standardized.”
McGill’s law school has never required the LSAT for similar reasons. According to Ali Martin-Mayer, assistant dean of admission and recruitment for the McGill Faculty of Law, McGill does not require the test because no other Quebec law school does. The reason for this, said Martin-Mayer, is that the test is only offered in English.
“So the main reason the LSAT is not an eligibility requirement at McGill, is that it would put non-English speakers at a serious disadvantage.”
There are also issues regarding cost. Razack cited this as a smaller factor in Medicine’s decision to make the MCATs optional. Standardized tests themselves range from about $200 to $250. Then there are the books. Each testing organization has some free preparation material available on their websites, but many test-takers decide to supplement that with Princeton Review, Kaplan, or Barron’s materials, which can cost as much as $150 each. Students who take the premium route and enrol in a prep course offered by one of these companies to help their studies can dish out up to $2000, or more if they’re using private tutors. Many students take each test twice to boost their scores, and a healthy number of test takers won’t end up at a graduate program after taking the corresponding test.
These high costs have raised criticism from some groups. Consumer rights organization Americans for Educational Testing Reform (AETR) writes on their website that the “big 3 non-profit testing companies,” ETS, ACT Inc., and College Board, are “monopolistic corporations” that “consistently and shamelessly take advantage of American students and aspiring professionals for financial gain.” Using copies of ETS tax forms obtained from the IRS, AETR alleges that ETS earned $94 million in profits in 2007—155% of the industry average—and compensated their CEO with seven times the industry average: nearly $1 million for the year.
“Nonprofit companies,” writes AETR on their website, “are supposed to serve the public interest. In return, the IRS exempts them from paying taxes. […] But rather than uphold their non-profit promises, [the Big 3 test companies] would rather engage in misconduct including raking in big profits, hand out exorbitant executive compensation packages, and paying their governing board members.” These allegations are serious, but it is worth noting that AETR website says nothing about who they are. It is difficult to find third party publications mentioning the organization, and they did not respond to the Tribune’s requests for an interview.
According to Tom Ewing, director of press relations at ETS, concerns about both cost and diverse communities are misplaced. Speaking specifically about the GREs, he maintained that the operation is not for profit. The companies’ Revenues come from for-profit subsidiaries like Prometric. The high cost is due to the amount of people and time necessary to “come up with tests that are basically flawless.” The test is also administered on the computer, which requires a complex network with top-notch security. “Those costs have to be offset in some fashion,” said Ewing.
High costs may also be related to the rigorous process ETS undertakes to ensure its questions do apply to diverse communities. Ewing explained that the average question takes 18 months to make, from the drawing board to a student’s test. Gender and racially balanced test development committees, assembled from across the United States, initially craft each potential question. Problems are then sent through multiple stages of testing, including a sensitivity review that looks at “whether the question may or may not be offensive to a particular group, whether it might cover a topic that the average test taker may not be familiar with, or if it might have language that might not be familiar to all test takers.” Questions also go through a fairness review to ensure they do not “inaccurately or inappropriately portray one gender or racial group.” Eventually, questions are tried out on test takers, and then analyzed for how students performed on them by race, gender, and geographic location. If questions don’t work for one group, they are tossed out and everything starts again.
“The bottom line is that by the time we assemble a whole test full of these questions, they have been through a tremendous quality control process to make sure they’re fair,” said Ewing
And indeed, despite criticism, many educators still seem to have faith in standardized testing. Ewing said that over the last two years, the number of MBA programs accepting the GREs jumped from a
bout 50 to nearly 450. Though the test is optional, McGill Law requires people who have taken the LSAT to disclose their marks. “If a candidate has studied well for it, the test is designed to predict performance in first year law,” said Martin-Mayer. “It’s not a perfect test, but it is a good measure, a good indication, and still useful information for us to have.
McGill Medicine requires MCATs from all non-Canadian applicants or students from non-Canadian schools.
“You could look at this as a bit of a staged process. We decided to go cautiously because there is definitely more heterogeneity with students applying internationally,” said Razack. “We are not as able to know all the programs that are out there on a worldwide basis, so that’s why we kept it.”
Ultimately, though, Razack is satisfied with the means that McGill Medicine admissions uses to test the “non-cognitive” skills that are such an important part of being a physician including a new process called multiple mini-interviews, which can be conducted in either English or French. Whether that sort of system will ever replace standardized testing outside of Quebec, and whether test takers and critics would be kinder in their reviews of those sorts of processes, remains to be seen.
Whether standardized tests are biased or an accurate measure of academic abilities, change from the current system seems unlikely. Yet it is also unclear whether change is necessary or desirable. Upset about studying for the tests or not, most students will have to take one of them to pursue graduate studies. There may be serious problems when the majority of schools rely on a tiny number of private organizations to filter their applicants, but until somebody implements a better way of doing things, us grumpy test takers may just have to suck it up.
