In 2020, many colleges suspended their requirements for standardized test scores as the COVID-19 pandemic forced testing centers to close. That same year, the University of California Board of Regents announced it would phase out its SAT requirement for prospective students in a bid to increase equity and diversity. At the time, Yale SOM’s Faidra Monachou was getting her doctorate in Stanford’s Management Science and Engineering department, and she and her fellow graduate students thought they could use tools from operations research to understand what trade-offs schools were making between losing the information they gained from test scores, and gaining wider accessibility for students who might face barriers to taking the test.
The decision to drop test scores looked very much like “an operational problem,” Monachou says. “We could develop a mathematical framework to formally study the trade-offs between information and access.”
They knew that colleges and universities typically have three goals when they design their admissions process: maximize capacity, ensure a high level of academic merit, and build a diverse cohort. Each component of a college application—say, a test score, grades, a personal essay, and a recommendation—theoretically provides information that can help achieve those goals.
Read more at Yale Insights.
