Falling Enrollment : Test Makers Now Search for Answers

At the handsome, 400-acre campus of Educational Testing Service, the nation’s most influential designer and manufacturer of standardized tests, officials face a predicament.

More students than ever--1.7 million, most of them high school juniors and seniors--took the most popular ETS test, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, last year. An additional 1.2 million, mostly high school sophomores, took the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT), which helped to prepare them for the SAT.

Yet the chief purpose of these tests--to help admissions officers make difficult decisions among many qualified freshman applicants--is disappearing as higher education enrollment falls.

Decline to Continue

Total enrollment in higher education institutions dropped 2% in 1984-85, and because the “baby boom” has ended and the number of potential college students is headed into a steady decline, further drops are expected until the mid-1990s.

“The northeastern states will drop 40% in high school graduates in the next few years and there will be similar declines in the Midwest and South,” said Solomon Arbeiter, associate director of research and development for the College Board, the organization of colleges and secondary schools that sponsors the SAT.

Although an estimated 100 colleges and universities remain highly selective, and about 300 others are somewhat selective, most of the nation’s 2,500 higher education institutions now accept any student who appears to be breathing and can afford the fees.

Outlook is Not Bright

This suggests a gloomy future for testing organizations such as ETS and the American College Testing Program, of Iowa City, Iowa, whose ACT examination was taken by another 1 million students last year.

But ETS officials are encouraged that the number of test-takers increases each year, even as the pool of potential college applicants grows smaller.

They are not sure why this is so, but think that it is because more students are taking the test several times, and because many students who previously did not consider themselves college material now think that the doors may be open.

ETS also insists that the SAT serves other useful purposes--for instance, to help potential students and their families “self-select” colleges and to decide which students to admit to overcrowded programs such as engineering and computer science.

But just in case these alternative uses of the Scholastic Aptitude Test do not take hold, ETS is looking for other things to do.

Since taking over as president of the organization five years ago, Gregory R. Anrig, former commissioner of education in Massachusetts, has been searching for new business.

For example, he has urged the professional and occupational licensing division, which accounted for about 10% of ETS’ revenues of slightly more than $180 million last year, to look for new professions to test.

This division already produces tests for about 50 occupational fields, ranging from podiatry to real estate to the entry-level exam for the CIA.

Recently, it came up with a new test for aerobic dance instructors. “They’re trying to professionalize the field,” Jules Goodison of ETS explained.

Since Anrig’s arrival, ETS also has taken over supervision of the closest thing this country has to a national report card--the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tests youngsters aged 9, 13 and 17 across the country in such basic subjects as English, mathematics and science.

Anrig’s most ambitious new effort is Project Jessica, a five-year, $30-million computer-based effort to develop “diagnostic tests” that would help students master a field of knowledge, not simply test them on what they have learned.

The project was named for the 5-year-old daughter of an ETS official. By the time Jessica is 10, Anrig hopes, the organization will be producing tests that “help students learn better and teachers teach better.”

“This is an area of tremendous potential,” said George H. Hanford, former president of the College Board.

So far, however, Project Jessica is little more than interesting talk and a few press releases. Progress has been slow and Anrig is frustrated.

“What I didn’t fully realize was that R&D; (research and development) people are slow to move and have to be convinced it’s all right to take risks,” he said during an interview. “This is not really an organization that feels comfortable with risk.”

Thomas O. White, president of Law School Admission Services, which broke away from ETS several years ago and now designs and administers a separate Law School Admission Test (LSAT), said Project Jessica “is still pretty vague.” He also expressed doubt that Anrig will be able to lead ETS into many new fields.

“Trying to diversify and yet stay in the educational testing business is a very hard job,” White said. “Educational testing hasn’t really changed for at least 30 years. The niches and the players are in place. It’s hard to find new business in those circumstances.”

But ETS has been helped by the enthusiasm for testing that has accompanied the educational reform movement of the 1980s.

There is much wider use, for example, of ETS’ National Teacher Examination (NTE). Twenty-eight states now use NTE for teacher certification, according to Robert Altman, vice president for higher education programs and teacher evaluation at the testing organization.

“The sudden growth in interest in teacher evaluation has put this test in the spotlight,” Altman said.

But with the increased business have come new problems.

Some states want to use the National Teacher Examination not to screen potential new teachers, but to evaluate those already on the job, which ETS considers an improper use of the test.

‘A Growing Concern’

“We realize there is a growing concern in a lot of quarters about the quality of incumbent teachers,” Altman said, “but there are mechanisms already in place for evaluating teachers on the job and school districts ought to be using them, not depending on this single test.”

ETS has refused to allow Arkansas and Texas to use the NTE to test teachers already on the job. Both states responded by hiring another testing company.

So the attempt to diversify faces serious obstacles, but ETS, aware that its bread and butter tests--the SAT, PSAT and related work for the College Board, which account for more than 40% of overall revenues--may no longer be in great demand in a few years, is determined to try.

This has been one of Anrig’s main concerns since assuming the presidency. Another has been improving the organization’s shaky public relations.

Organization Under Attack

When Anrig arrived in September, 1981, ETS had just been through the worst period in its 34-year history.

The organization was under attack from critics who said the SAT and other standardized tests discriminated against women and racial minorities.

“Truth in testing” laws in several states were forcing ETS to disclose test questions after they had been given and to provide correct answers, after the tests had been administered, to those who requested them.

The testing service had lost the lucrative law school admission contract when the nation’s law school deans decided to design and administer their own test. Partly as a result of that loss, ETS suffered the first deficit in its history. (ETS is a nonprofit corporation, but it still is not expected to lose money.)

Mistakes on SAT

To make matters worse, a series of mistakes appeared on the SAT and several other tests given in 1980 and 1981.

All of this brought the news media in droves to the quiet ETS campus, just outside the university town of Princeton, and plunged the psychologists, statisticians and other specialists who form the core of the organization into truculent despair.

“In many ways, ETS was a private company,” Anrig said. “It wasn’t used to that kind of examination. When the mistakes happened, they were hurt. They thought, ‘We’re good people, we’re trying to do good things, why are they beating on us?’ ”

In countless speeches and public appearances, Anrig has been a firm supporter of standardized testing in general and Educational Testing Service in particular. But he has also tried to open the organization to public scrutiny and criticism and to emphasize that ETS is an organization of people, not robots, and that people sometimes make mistakes.

Workshops Include Critics

He has invited critics to the workshops that the testing service frequently holds. He has even named two of these critics to the “visiting committee” that reviews all ETS programs.

“I tend to look at the scrutiny of educational testing as very positive,” Anrig said. “If we’re going to subject kids to these tests and their consequences, the more information people have about them, the better.”

Anrig also has tightened internal management, dismissing or demoting several vice presidents whose squabbling had become a burden to the organization.

The 1981 deficit of about $600,000 has been turned into a 1985 surplus of more than $5 million--money that the organization needs to finance Project Jessica and other new programs.

But better management and smoother public relations have not solved all of the problems at ETS.

After several years of relative inactivity, legislative critics of standardized testing introduced bills in California and New York state this year that would have subjected ETS and other test makers to tighter regulation.

The California legislation died in committee, but New York strengthened its “truth in testing” laws and came close to passing three stronger regulatory bills.

“Interest in the testing issue was rekindled this year,” said Robert Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing in Boston. “People are concerned because these tests are being used increasingly, not only for college admissions but also for admission to graduate and professional school and for licensing exams of various kinds.”

And the argument that standardized tests discriminate against racial minorities has not gone away.

Critics concede that a stringent internal review eliminates bias from most of the approximately 50,000 items that appear on ETS tests every year, but they say the nature of the testing process automatically favors white test takers over their minority counterparts.

“Item bias per se is not the most critical problem,” said Susana Navarro, former research director for the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). “A bigger problem is that middle-class white students have greater familiarization with standardized testing and they have more access to better high school preparation and to coaching” for the tests.

She criticized the use of ACT and SAT scores as “automatic cutoff points” that “arbitrarily exclude Hispanics” from many public colleges and universities in California and elsewhere in the Southwest.

“Tests have been used for channeling black students into ‘slow tracks’ and mentally retarded classes and screening them out of higher education and jobs,” said Beverly Cole, director of education for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

ETS Vice President Altman acknowledged that rigid application of the National Teacher Examination to screen teachers could, in some parts of the country, “lead to a shift in the nature of the teaching force--toward more whites and fewer minority teachers.”

But basically Anrig and other defenders of standardized testing argue that poor educational preparation, not the tests, are responsible for the lower average scores of minority test takers.

Anrig pointed out that the gap between average black and white scores has been closing in recent years. However, that gap is still substantial.

In 1985, blacks scored 103 points below whites on the verbal part of the SAT, 114 points lower in math. (The two parts of the SAT are each graded on a scale from 200 to 800.)

“Is this the tests’ fault or society’s?” Anrig asked. “I don’t absolve the tests or the test makers. We have to continue to work on possible bias. But different kids, with different educations, will do differently on these tests.” MALDEF’s Navarro also contends that ETS and other testing companies “have a responsibility to see that institutions are using the tests properly,” and should refuse to provide tests to those who do not.

She was especially critical of the use of a “pre-professional skills” test, produced by ETS and usually administered to college sophomores, to decide who should be allowed to pursue teacher training in the state of Texas.

Latinos have done poorly on this test, which Navarro described as “technically indefensible.” MALDEF has sued to prevent the Texas Education Agency from using the test.

Anrig defended the validity of the test, but also said the question of possible discrimination against Latinos and other minorities is “a legitimate issue of debate--we ought to debate it.”

Anrig claimed that ETS, on several occasions, has tried to prevent misuse of its tests.

Both ETS and American College Testing Program have tried to discourage the use of college admissions scores as a means of comparing the educational achievement of various states, something U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett is fond of doing.

Both testing organizations also oppose the use of these scores by the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. to determine freshman eligibility for intercollegiate sports.

For the most part, however, both companies take the position that “the institutions have the information--they can do what they want with it,” as it was stated by Patricia A. Farrant, assistant vice president for public affairs at ACT.

But of all the problems facing Educational Testing Service, the most serious is the apparently diminishing need for its College Board tests: the SAT, the PSAT and the achievement tests that measure knowledge in specific subjects.

The problem is not simply that college enrollments have begun to decline. At the same time, some schools are questioning the value of the SAT and other college admissions tests.

For example, Bates, Bowdoin and Colby, three prestigious liberal arts colleges in Maine, no longer require SAT or ACT scores.

Harvard may also drop the SAT and ask freshman applicants to submit five achievement test scores, instead of the current three, because admissions officers have found the achievement scores to be better predictors of a student’s ability to do college work.

James Crouse, professor of educational studies and sociology at the University of Delaware, has argued in a series of articles in educational journals that freshman admissions officers, even at highly selective institutions, would make roughly the same decisions if they looked only at high school grades and ignored aptitude test scores.

Officials at ETS and the College Board dispute this, however, and also point out the other uses to which SAT scores can be utilized--to help students and parents select a college in the first place, and to assist in placement of students already admitted.

Richard Moll, former admissions director at the University of California’s Santa Cruz campus and now chief recruiter for a large New York City law firm, described the SAT as a “useful leavening factor--you can’t possibly know enough about every high school, and the test provides a reasonably objective way of separating them.”

Moll said even institutions that accept almost every student who applies like to brag about increases in their students’ SAT scores.

Some college administrators see the tests as a counterbalance to the “grade inflation” that they say has taken place in many of the nation’s high schools in recent years.

“As the grades in the high schools have become inflated, colleges and universities have put more and more stock in standardized tests,” said Thomas E. Lifka, assistant vice chancellor for student academic services at UCLA.

Lifka said test scores also help administrators select students for popular programs such as computer science when “we have to choose from a large pool of students, all of whom look very good.”

As long as this kind of strong support for the SAT comes from college admissions officers, Educational Testing Service probably will not have to lay off its experts and turn the campus into a hunting preserve.

But there is some doubt how long the support will last.

“There’s a plain difference of opinion as to whether the SAT serves a useful purpose or not,” former College Board President George H. Hanford said at the conclusion of a recent workshop. “Generally, admissions people think it does, but a lot of other people think it’s not worth the trouble.”

SAT SCORES BY RACE

1976 Comparison 1985 Comparison W/all W/all All Students Verbal 431 -- 431 -- Math 472 -- 475 -- Whites Verbal 451 +20 449 +18 Math 493 +19 491 +16 Blacks Verbal 332 -99 346 -85 Math 354 -118 376 -99 Asian Verbal 414 -17 404 -27 Math 518 +46 518 +43 Latino Verbal 371 -60 382 -49 Math 410 -62 426 -49