The UNC Board of Governors (BOG) have begun evaluating proposals to change minimum college admission requirements. According to Association of Student Governments President Adam Schmidt, a fourth-year studying civil engineering, these changes would place more emphasis on students GPA scores, and less on standardized tests such as the ACT and SAT.
“Research has shown that GPA is a better predictor of student success than standardized tests are,” Schmidt said. “If students are able to do as well as their peers with a lower ACT or SAT score, can we change that requirement?”
In 2014, the BOG approved a pilot program at Fayetteville State University, North Carolina Central University and Elizabeth City State University to see how admitting students based on this new criteria would affect performance, according to a report from a November meeting of the BOG. In 2018, when those students graduated, those admitted under the pilot program performed just as well as those accepted under current requirements.
The report said the pilot test implemented a “sliding-scale” system. This system allows students with GPA scores higher than minimum requirements to offset SAT scores that did not meet MAR. For example, a student with a GPA of 3.0 (0.5 higher than the minimum) could have an SAT score of 750 (50 points below the 800 minimum). This allows students who struggle with the high pressure of college admissions testing the chance to show their intelligence based off of performance in the classroom.
Other states in the US have already adopted similar sliding-scale systems. Jon Westover, director of admissions at NC State, previously directed admissions for the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which uses a sliding-scale system.
“I believe that the best predictor of success is a combination of a student’s grades in a challenging curriculum along with their performance on standardized tests,” Westover said. “It is also important to judge the student based on the circumstances they come from to help put their achievements into context.”
While this proposal raises debate over the effectiveness of relying on standardized testing, the BOG’s ultimate goal is, as Westover put it, to take the varied circumstances of all students into context to make higher education more accessible to everyone and give students from low income backgrounds a chance to learn.
Several colleges in the UNC system have minimum admission requirements that are higher than the average ACT/SAT scores of surrounding counties, Schmidt said. The communities these universities fail to serve with high admission requirements are usually the ones who need the most help.
“The students that this really benefits are students from tier one and tier two counties, which are economically disadvantaged in North Carolina,” Schmidt said. “Those are the sort of students we want to bring to our colleges and universities to provide life changing higher education.”
By lowering admission requirements, many colleges could benefit from larger applicant numbers, snowballing into more enrolled students, greater funding and a more quality learning experience for the whole campus. According to the UNC Board of Governors research, changing the MAR would cause 6,000 to 8,000 more students to attend UNC schools, 4,750 of whom would not have otherwise been able to receive a higher education.
The board has already been discussing potential changes for several years, but their implementation could be a long way off. If GPA becomes a bigger factor in college admissions, high school students and counselors will need time to adapt. The missteps students make as underclassmen could have significant effects on their attractiveness to universities, Schmidt said.
“In conversations with students, college counselors will be able to say it’s really important that you start thinking about this early,” Schmidt said. “Your GPA is really going to be what people are looking at.”
