Nonacademic criteria in US undergraduate admissions improve student diversity and retention.
the verdict
INSUFFICIENT LEANING
refutedsupported
the weight of evidence
2 sources for · 0 against
The evidence partially indicates that holistic admissions and nonacademic criteria are used to expand access and diversity for marginalized students, but the specific impact on undergraduate student retention is not established by these sources.
Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs) are a cornerstone of holistic admissions in U.S. and Canadian medical and health professions programs, designed to assess crucial non-academic professional characteristics alongside traditional cognitive metrics. The two primary instruments utilized are the Computer-Based Assessment for Sampling Personal Characteristics (Casper, Acuity Insights), an open-response test, and the AAMC PREview Professional Readiness Exam, a fixed-response test. Research consistently demonstrates that SJTs measure important professional competencies, such as empathy, ethics, collaboration, and resilience. They offer incremental predictive validity for non-academic performance later in training, specifically signaling "non-academic risk.” However, there is significant debate over their ability to mitigate demographic bias. While the AAMC reports that its fixed-response PREview exam exhibits smaller group differences compared to academic metrics, independent studies concerning the constructed-response Casper test have repeatedly identified significant performance disparities where underrepresented in medicine (URiM) applicants, including Black and Hispanic candidates, and International Medical Graduates (IMGs) score significantly lower than their counterparts. Given the post-2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling restricting race-conscious admissions, the equitable implementation of these ostensibly "race-neutral" SJTs remains a critical area of scrutiny.
The Role of Selective College Admissions Criteria in Interrupting or Reproducing Racial and Economic Inequities: The Journal of Higher Education: Vol 92, No 1
## ABSTRACT
Selective colleges have increasingly considered a variety of factors, such as academic rigor, extracurriculars, essays, interviews, recommendations, and background characteristics, alongside traditional academic factors in determining who is admitted. These efforts have been hailed as a strategy to expand access to selective higher education for talented students from racially and economically marginalized backgrounds. But such efforts introduce ambiguous admissions criteria—excellence in extracurriculars, subjective assessments of character and talent gleaned from essays, interviews, and recommendations—that may favor students from socially privileged families. We draw on nearly a decade of data on selective college admissions processes to examine how the importance of various admissions criteria relate to enrollment among racially and economically marginalized students. Using panel data from 2008 to 2016 and random effects analyses, our findings indicate ambiguous criteria that often comprise a more comprehens
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