Dear Commons Community,
As the coronavirus pandemic spreads, there is a growing unease that Educational Testing Service’s online GRE exam is heightening equity concerns. Jane C. Hu, a journalist in Seattle, has an article in this week’s Science that looks at this issue. The entire article is below.
Tony
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Science
Online GRE test heightens equity concerns
Jane C. Chu
As COVID-19 swept across the United States, standardized testing centers closed and the GRE General Test—an exam that’s required for admission to many U.S. graduate programs—went online. The Educational Testing Service (ETS), which offers the GRE, “completely revamped its delivery model so [aspiring graduate students] can test from the safety of home,” it declared in May. Since then, though, scores of academics have raised concerns about the equity of the online version of the test, arguing it disadvantages prospective students from rural and low income backgrounds. “If I were … a student trying to take this exam, satisfying [the online testing] criteria would be extremely difficult for me,” says Emily Levesque, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Levesque wrote about ETS’s testing requirements in a Twitter thread this month, detailing what she sees as “a shopping list of hurdles.” Test takers must have access to a computer with a webcam—“tablets and smartphones won’t cut it,” she wrote—as well as a private room in a home with a stable internet connection. Libraries and other public spaces are out. “We already know from virtual teaching this spring that not all students/prospective grads have access to [computers] in their homes,” she wrote.
On top of that, test takers must have a whiteboard if they want to take notes, sit in a standard—not “overstuffed”—chair, and ensure that no one enters their room for the duration of the 4-hour test. In a statement, Alberto Acereda, executive director of higher education at ETS, wrote that the rules are “necessary to ensure the testing experience is similar to that in a test center, as well as to maintain the security and integrity of the test.”
Yet to some academic departments already questioning the value of the GRE, the burdensome requirements of the at-home test are a tipping point. Levesque’s department decided to temporarily suspend requiring GRE scores. “It was simply a question of access,” she says. “If we require the exam this year, that puts an excessive burden on folks we want to encourage to apply.”
Other departments have decided to forgo the GRE for good. “We’ve been thinking about [eliminating it] for a long time,” says Chrissy Wiederwohl, assistant department head for engagement and graduate affairs for Texas A&M University, College Station’s oceanography department, which voted to stop requiring GRE scores earlier this month. “COVID is what helped front-burner it.”
Levesque’s and Wiederwohl’s departments join a growing list of U.S. graduate programs that have moved away from the GRE in recent years. In 2018 alone, 44% of the country’s top molecular biology programs dropped the GRE as an application requirement, according to an investigation by Science (31 May 2019, p. 816). Dubbed “GRExit,” the movement has been fueled by concerns that the GRE doesn’t predict student success in graduate school, and that its use in admissions decisions disadvantages applicants from underrepresented groups.
Delia Shelton, a Black psychologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, says when she was applying to graduate schools, taking the GRE was a hardship; it was expensive and she had to drive 2 hours to her testing location. Her scores prevented her from applying to some programs that specified a cutoff for applicants. Yet she’s done well for herself in academia, winning a prestigious fellowship from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and an assistant professorship at her university. She and her colleagues voted earlier this month to eliminate the GRE from admissions requirements. The scores “don’t speak to how well you can do in graduate school,” she says. “
The socioeconomic constraints [of] standardized testing … [are] well documented, and I think this at-home test exacerbates some of those,” agrees Joshua Hall, director of admissions for the biological and biomedical science program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who maintains a list of roughly 300 life science programs that have joined GRExit. Hall estimates that 15 programs have contacted him since the start of the pandemic asking to be added to his list.
Acereda emphasized that GRE scores can be valuable as part of a holistic review process, one that looks at reference letters, essays, and other application materials. He acknowledged that some prospective students might be unable to take the test online, but he added that more than 1000 test centers have already reopened. “As the world continues to reopen after COVID, test takers will have greater choice regarding where they would like to test.”
This year, however, some simply gave up. Natasha Hodges says she ran into problems when she couldn’t install the proctoring software on her Apple laptop. “No matter how many people I chatted with, or how many times I’ve called or emailed them, no one can explain to me or even address [my problem],” she says. But after failing to resolve her technical issues, she was pleased to discover that many of the microbiology Ph.D. programs she wants to apply to have waived the GRE as an application requirement. “It ends up working out that I don’t end up having to take it anyway,” she says.
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