DePaul dumbs down by dropping exams

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Updated: November 9, 2011 2:18PM

Now that higher education has been reduced from the pursuit of knowledge to mere job training, it’s no wonder that college admission standards are dropping just as well.

Is it just coincidence that as the national debate rages over the worth of a college degree in the current marketplace, DePaul University has decided that standardized test scores are no longer important enough to consider in the admissions process?

Illinois’ high school class of 2011 ACT scores revealed that a mere 23 percent of those who took the test met all college-ready benchmarks in English, reading, math and science.

To be fair, DePaul officials told the Chicago Sun-Times that they’ve been considering this move for five years. But that hardly makes the lowering of the bar any easier to accept from one of the city’s high-profile universities.

Carla Cortes, an enrollment management special project leader at DePaul, told the Sun-Times that though national and state data consistently show a correlation between high incomes and high ACT and SAT scores, a decade’s worth of data found that those scores had little correlation with how DePaul students performed in the classroom.

This is a classic copout, often made by people who argue that standardized test scores don’t matter. Let’s be clear: Standardized test scores do matter. They matter a lot.

Neither the ACT nor the SAT is designed to predict whether a student will get good grades in college. No test can predict whether a student will be able to handle the freedoms and pressures that come with leaving the highly regimented and nurturing environment of high school.

Scores on standardized tests are meant to gauge whether a student is capable of tackling college-level material without remediation. Students with a college-ready level of proficiency in the core subjects of English, math, reading and science have a better chance of understanding the challenging course material required to complete a degree.

How could students without the bare-minimum skills in the core subject areas possibly be expected to help fulfill DePaul’s mission of pursuing the “preservation, enrichment and transmission of knowledge and culture across a broad scope of academic disciplines?”

Those are not lofty goals, they are the very point of education and cannot be accomplished on pluck and perseverance alone. Anybody who says otherwise is doing students a disservice.

This latest instance of dumbing down educational standards only reinforces the notion that increasingly college is a business where students no longer pursue wisdom but rather a piece of paper that entitles them to a job. Many universities are starting to see their students as customers, and as we all know, the customer is always right.

If students say they’re ready for college, regardless of what their test scores might indicate, well then who are the universities to argue? Never mind that tuition bills and student loans come due whether you graduate or not.

The cold facts tell you most of what you need to know about admissions rigor. While DePaul University and others are content to base admissions decisions on subjective, opinion-, experience- or emotion-driven essays, those schools that still command our collective respect for their ability to educate great citizens and leaders will continue to insist that objective, standardized indicators of college preparedness matter quite a lot.

Take a look at six-year college graduation rates. At Duke University, a highly selective private research university that takes ACT and SAT scores into account, 89 percent of freshmen graduate in four years and 93 percent within six years. At Northwestern, one of our local highly selective private schools, 87 percent of freshmen graduate in four years and 95 percent within six years.

At DePaul, only 50 percent of freshmen graduate in four years and 67 percent within six years. Buyers beware: If you want an easy school to get into, more power to you, but looser admission standards won’t guarantee you a degree.