Ball State is changing its application criteria for those applying for the fall 2019 semester.
Submitting SAT or ACT scores will now be an optional part of the application process for prospective students.
“It is a very complex question that we were asking ourselves and a lot of thought and a lot of research went in to that because we want to make sure that we have students here who will graduate,” said Kay Bales, vice president for student affairs and enrollment services and dean of students. “We recruit graduates, that’s what we’re looking for. We’re not recruiting freshmen, we’re recruiting graduates.”
Now, Bales said the university will focus more on an applicant’s high school grade point average (GPA), academic involvement outside of the classroom, extracurriculars and how rigorous their high school curriculum was.
This decision comes after about a year and a half of research and work on the university’s enrollment plan. Bales said the data found shows the “best predictor for success of our students is looking at high school grade point average, as well as looking at the curriculum students followed in high school.”
Bales said test scores are an indicator that “demonstrates a student’s ability on a given day,” and looking beyond them will allow the university to look more “holistically” at a student’s overall academic performance.
“We’re looking at the performance of students over a five year period, and what we found is you can absolutely draw a grid of students who are retained and graduated based on grade point average,” Bales said. “If you looked at and tried to plot out the same for test score, you can’t. There’s no predictability to it.”
Bales also said this new approach will aid students impacted by the “inherent bias in standardized testing,” and hopes to see an increase in applications because of the change.
“We know from looking at the research that’s been conducted with other institutions across the country that have done this, that they had seen an increase in the number of applications to the university,” Bales said. “They have also seen an increase in the diversity of their student population and they also saw the quality of the academic profile of their class going up either slightly or remaining the same.”
Ball State is the first public four-year college in Indiana to become test-optional, and while Mitch Warren, director of admissions at Purdue University in West Lafayette, said there have been discussions about moving to test-optional at Purdue, the university has decided against the change.
“We like either the SAT or the ACT because each are nationally standardized so it gives us just one additional glimpse into the student’s academic profile,” Warren said. “The SAT or ACT are not stand-alone criteria as we review a student’s admissibility, but instead, we review the grade point average, the course rigor along with the standardized test.”
However, Bales said this change will only enhance Ball State and she is “proud” to lead the state in transforming the way colleges look at applicants.
Contact Brooke Kemp with comments at bmkemp@bsu.edu or on Twitter @brookemkemp.
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