Hundreds of thousands of young post-secondary students across Canada will soon be heading home for Christmas break. Many of those in first year will tell their parents about how much fun they’re having in university and all the new friends they’ve made. Some may admit to struggles with handling their workload. Few will want to confess they’ve found out they aren’t as smart as they thought they were.
The average Canadian student sees their marks drop by 10 points in first-year university compared to high school. A recent study shows almost half of students experienced a full letter grade’s decline, with 23 percent having their grades fall by two letters or more. There are a number of reasons for this – the academic work is more difficult than high school, university life is full of distractions, the “kids” are away from home for the first time – but there is also this uncomfortable truth: high school marks are not always an accurate reflection of a student’s abilities.
Differences in academic rigour mean an 85 percent average from one school is not the same as one from another school. Years of rampant grade inflation mean that a huge number of young people head to university with the mistaken belief that their 90 percent average makes them an academic star. Even more troubling is the flourishing of “credit mills,” private businesses that anyone can access (for a fee) to take a credit-earning high school course and come away with a high mark. They’ve been a problem for years, one that politicians and education bureaucrats have shown little interest in solving.
Yet universities in Canada have been relying almost exclusively on high school transcripts to decide who gets in and who doesn’t, even when the marks on those transcripts are unreliable.
Many of these issues could be fixed by implementing a standardized test for university admissions in Canada. Such tests are a staple in much of the developed world, a simple way to assess the academic competence of applicants. They are a defence against wealthy families gaming the system and a way to ensure that more than lip service is paid to merit. Canadian provinces not only don’t use them, however, they are so far off the radar that virtually no political leader or educational organization even advocates them. Even Universities Canada, the self-declared “voice of Canadian universities,” has no policy on standardized testing.
The Canadian education establishment has long been hostile to standardized tests in general. Elsewhere, some schools – most notably in the U.S. – are moving away from them in the belief that they are elitist and even racist. Increasingly, such schools are implementing “holistic” admissions policies that include everything from personality tests to personal essays, a practice that promises to embed subjective assessments and woke identity politics into the university application process in place of objective measures of intellectual capability.
Gaming the System
To get a sense of how broken the admissions process is, consider credit mills, one of the most pernicious but effective ways students can manipulate high school grades. Despite having names like Alpha Star High Schooland North Toronto Private High School, they aren’t schools that enroll full-time students. They are businesses that charge hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars per course to students who need to lift their grades. Reportedly, credit mills often provide students with grades that are 20 to 30 percentage points higher than what they would earn at a proper high school.
Academic standards are also reportedly lax. A CBC investigation in 2020 found that many credit mills do not penalize students for spelling errors or handing in work late. One student was quoted saying, “They would just give you the mark for free. For English, I barely showed up but ended up with a 90. Almost everyone ended up with a 90. It was a joke.” (In a similar report back in 2011, the Toronto Star found that credit mills were increasing grades upon request, removing difficult questions from tests, and allowing students to rewrite tests for $100, without supervision and with full access to the Internet.) North Toronto Private High School in Thornhill, Ontario, meanwhile, confessed to giving a 98 percent grade to a student who didn’t attend a single class.
Private schools in Ontario operate independently of the province’s Ministry of Education, which does not actively oversee their operations. They do need to pass a provincial inspection before they can offer high school credits, and the Ministry says they face inspection on a “recurring basis.” Some have had their credit-granting status revoked, but overall enforcement is considered very poor. Even if the Ministry takes the ultimate enforcement action – shutting a school down – the operator can simply reopen with a “new” school under a different name. People walking down Yonge Street in North York may have noticed just such a thing when the Toronto Nobel Academy appeared in the location previously occupied by the Canadian Nobel Academy, whose status was revoked in 2017 after a student received an 84 percent in biology immediately after enrolling. Toronto Nobel’s principal was also Canadian Nobel’s principal.
Credit mills allow students from more prosperous families to effectively buy high marks. They unfairly skew the admissions and scholarship processes, and punish intelligent, hard-working candidates.
In any case, business is clearly booming. The number of credit-granting private schools in Ontario has grown dramatically, from 160 in 1995 to 690 in 2023 – doubling in the last decade alone. By no means are all private schools credit mills, of course, but the numbers are clearly on the rise. Other provinces are not immune to the trend. Both Alberta and British Columbia have had similar issues with students paying credit mills to inflate their grades to get into competitive university programs.
The fundamental issue is fairness – for everyone. By allowing students from more prosperous families to effectively buy high marks, credit mills unfairly skew the admissions and scholarship processes. Because university programs have a limited number of spots, admissions are a zero-sum game: every student getting into a program with the help of a credit mill denies admission to an intelligent, hard-working candidate. A similar dynamic is at work in gaining scholarships. As the Queen’s Journal argued in 2020: “A student’s high school transcript should speak to their academic abilities, not their ability to buy their grades.”
Several universities have publicly acknowledged the difficulty in separating grades earned at credit mills from grades earned at ordinary high schools, and some students who took courses at credit mills have admitted that they likely would not have been admitted to their university program without paying for high grades.
Grade inflation is another phenomenon that weakens an admissions system so reliant on high school marks. Grades have been edging upwards for years. At the Toronto District School Board, Canada’s largest, Grade 12 student average marks have increased by more than 10 percentage points in the last 15 years. Between just the 2018-2019 and 2020-2021 school years, the proportion of Grade 9 students in Ontario with averages above 90 percent nearly doubled – from 12 percent to 23 percent. In the two-year period after the pandemic began, the average Grade 12 student’s mark went from 71 percent to 77 percent – a time when school closures and other disruptions caused learning losses that should be reflected in lower average marks. Furthermore, data sourced from the Council of Universities shows that in 2020, the average grade 12 mark of students enrolled in several major universities was over 90 percent.
It has become difficult for universities to sort through this ever-widening sea of luminescent students to decide whom to admit, and more difficult for hard-working, intelligent students to stand out. Some say there’s a simple and effective solution, however. “The antidote to grade inflation is to require all Grade 12 students to also write standardized exams in their core subjects,” argues Michael Zwaagstra, a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute. “Not only would this discourage teachers from artificially inflating student grades, it would also ensure that at least a portion of each student’s final course mark is based on the same assessment.”
Having Some Standards
Standardized tests have a long history and, outside Canada at least, have been adopted broadly. They began in ancient China, with the famous imperial examination to identify talented young men to run the country. No one who failed it could enter China’s civil service, no matter their ancestry or family wealth. According to a paper from Columbia University, “A youth from the poorest family could theoretically join the ranks of the educated elite by succeeding in the examination system.” Shen Kuo, for instance, one of the greatest astronomers and inventors in history, was able to rise above his humble origins as a result of scoring well on the imperial examination.
Today, many universities and colleges around the world require high school students to write a standardized test in order to be considered for admission. In the United States, millions of high school students write the SAT or ACT. In the United Kingdom, students write either the A Level or Scottish Higher examinations. In Europe, French students write the baccalauréat, German students write the Abitur, and many Central European students write the Matura. As well, standardized tests are a prerequisite across much of Asia. In lacking a broad-based system of standardized exams for post-secondary admission, Canada is an international outlier.
Not that standardized tests are unheard of here. In the post-Second World War decades, provinces including B.C., Ontario and Alberta held “departmental” exams in various subjects. From 1948 to 1967, for example, final grades for chemistry in Ontario were based entirely on a province-wide exam. Today, two provinces, Alberta and Manitoba, have tests for Grade 12 students in certain subjects that make up 20-30 percent of a student’s final grade. Graduating Alberta high school students write what are called the diploma exams that count for 30 percent of their final mark (though that is down from 50 percent in 2015). Newfoundland and Labrador had what were called public exams that made up 40 percent of their final grade in several subjects, but the province stopped the practice during the pandemic and has now launched a consultation with parents and educators to come up with a different model.
But nowhere in Canada is there a single, standard province-wide test of knowledge and intellectual capacity that would help universities gauge the ability of applicants. (Any standardized test system in Canada would likely need to be provincial, given that provinces have constitutional jurisdiction over education.)
Canadian politicians and education officials seem to think our university system is superior to that of the U.S. because it’s more accessible, and would recoil against anything that seemed like a more American style of admissions.
Ken Coates, a fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, says departmental exams fell out of favour in part because teachers and schools didn’t like them – arguing they did not take into account socio-economic and cultural differences among students – and in part because there is little appetite for comprehensive, demanding admissions policies. Politicians, he says, prize accessibility above all when it comes to post-secondary education, which can run contrary to the impulse for academically demanding admissions policies.
“Our current system is cheap, fast, easy and difficult to criticize,” Coates said in an email exchange. “There would be a lot of push-back against an expanded admissions system. Governments, which emphasize accessibility over all other things, would be uncomfortable with an initiative that would quickly be seen as ‘elitist’.” Canadian politicians and education officials seem to think our university system is superior to that of the U.S. because it’s more accessible, and would recoil against anything that seemed like a more American style of admissions. “Canadian universities are very sensitive to the criticisms that American admission systems are highly biased and disadvantage the poor and minority groups,” said Coates.
This is the heart of the objection to standardized testing. It is considered elitist because wealthier families can afford to pay for tutors and test-preparation courses for their children, and because exam questions are often seen as favouring the upper middle class. And it is denounced as racist in part because the questions are seen as somehow biased, but mainly because test results often differ by race.
This is particularly true in the U.S. where the SAT has been criticized because black and hispanic or latino students on average score lower than white and Asian students. The objections are rooted in critical race theory, which holds that any difference in outcome between one race and another must be due to “systemic” racism. Ibram X. Kendi, America’s leading critical race theorist, has applied this illogical reasoning to standardized tests, claiming that, “Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black minds and legally exclude their bodies.” Difference in average standardized test scores across racial groups is “a racial hierarchy,” Kendi claims.
In light of these objections, many colleges in the U.S. have abandoned standardized testing. More than 80 percent of American bachelor-degree granting colleges did not require students to submit SAT or ACT results for admission to the 2023-2024 academic year. The vast majority of those schools were “test optional.” That is to say, students could still take the test, submit scores and have them considered as part of their application, but they weren’t mandatory. Most big universities – including the entire Ivy League – have gone this route.
Some notable institutions, like the entire California public university system, have gone even farther and are now “test-blind,” meaning they won’t even look at a standardized test score if it’s submitted. “These schools recognize that standardized test scores do not measure academic ‘merit.’ What they do assess quite accurately is family wealth,” claimed a triumphant National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a leading opponent of standardized tests.
A Tool of the Meritocracy
The abandonment of standardized testing is both ironic and wrong-headed, given that history and the evidence show testing is neither elitist nor discriminatory.
Standardized tests began in the U.S. well over a century ago as an effort to eradicate prejudice and reward merit and hard work. In the late 19th century, many top universities required incoming students to know Latin, Greek and algebra – subjects which were not taught in most public schools, effectively excluding most of those students. In 1901, the College Board Entrance Exam was introduced to help solve the problem.
Just three years after adopting the exam as its main standard for admission, Harvard saw the composition of its student body shift dramatically: 7 percent was now Jewish, 9 percent Catholic and 45 percent came from public schools rather than expensive private academies. The leaders of elite universities unfortunately regarded the growing Jewish-American population on campus with disdain. So they devised non-academic, “holistic” admissions policies, such as personal essays and assessments of “manliness,” to keep Jewish students out. Within a few years these ridiculous policies had reduced Jewish enrollment by half.
But the rise of a new entrance exam in the 1930s, the SAT (which stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test”), helped end the anti-Semitic admissions processes by the second half of the 20th century. Following the lead of Harvard’s transformative president, James Conant, who believed that universities should embrace meritocracy, universities across America began requiring applicants to write standardized tests and basing more of their admissions decisions on a student’s intellectual aptitude rather than his or her ethnic or class background.
Standardized tests opened up equal opportunity to millions of intelligent, hard-working young Americans. Though it remains true that wealthier students can hire tutors and pay for test-prep classes, numerous studies have shown that these do not make a large difference in test scores. The data strongly suggest that standardized tests level the playing field between richer and poorer students.
The Brookings Institution, for example, studied results in Michigan before and after the state made the ACT mandatory for graduating high school students in 2007. It found that, for every 1,000 low-income students who voluntarily took the test before 2007 and scored well enough to attend college, 480 more college-ready low-income students were uncovered when the test was mandatory. “As a result of this policy, more low-income students went to and graduated from four-year colleges,” Brookings reported, concluding that “a universal test uncovers many academically able students,” particularly students who are lower-income and are members of a racial minority. Additional studies showed similar results in Maine, Illinois, Colorado and Florida.
Perhaps the greatest irony of the rejection of standardized tests is the enabling of racial discrimination. Consider how in recent decades, some of the same institutions that once excluded Jewish students have used ‘holistic’ admissions policies to enforce maximum racial quotas for Asian-American students.
And SAT scores are highly correlated with a student’s subsequent grade point average in college. They are an excellent predictor of success, in other words, which is surely what universities should be looking for when choosing students. Recent research in the U.S. has shown that, although high school marks are correlated with success in college, the combination of grades and test results is even better.
The Academic Backlash – and Reverse Discrimination
Still, in an attempt to move even further away from objective measures of capability, some institutions in the U.S. have adopted “holistic” admissions policies, which require students to submit personal essays extolling their admirable qualities, leadership abilities and so on. But in 2021, researchers at Stanford University concluded that personal essays “have a stronger correlation to reported household income than SAT scores.”
As a recent story in New York Magazine put it, “It is easier for a working-class kid to pick up an SAT prep book and study it intensively than it is for them to go on a community-service trip to South America, play travel lacrosse, or flatter the sensibilities of an upper-middle-class admissions official. More critically, it is easier for schools to game intangible criteria in the wealthy’s favor.” And according to research from City Journal, standardized tests predict university academic performance more consistently than interviews or personal essays.
Perhaps the greatest irony of the rejection of standardized tests is the enabling of racial discrimination. Consider how in recent decades, some of the same institutions that once excluded Jewish students have used “holistic” admissions policies to enforce maximum racial quotas for Asian-American students. Asian-American students earn, on average, the highest SAT and ACT scores. If America’s top universities admitted students on the basis of academics alone, many more Asian-American students would be admitted; Harvard University’s own data showed that if it did so the percentage of Asian-American students on campus would nearly double.
Unfortunately for students in this demographic, their race is a problem for many “progressive” university professors and administrators. While the left views some races as “marginalized” or “underrepresented” groups deserving of favourable treatment, it views other races, like Asians, with disdain. In recent years, many have begun calling Asians “white-adjacent” which, to be clear, is meant as an insult. (This insanity has moved to Canada as well. In 2020, a resident adviser at UBC sent out a document to students calling East Asians “oppressor[s]” and citing their supposed “yellow privilege.”)
To limit what it regards as the “over-representation” of Asian-American students, Harvard’s admissions process includes a “personality score.” According to an analysis of more than 160,000 student applications at Harvard, Asian-Americans had higher test scores, better grades and stronger extracurricular resumés than applicants of any other racial group, but had consistently lower personality scores.
How did Harvard judge an applicant’s personality? It claimed to assess unquantifiable metrics like “courage,” “likeability” and being “widely respected” through interviews with students and by reading their application materials. If this sounds subjective and completely arbitrary, it is. As The Atlantic wrote, “While the other categories come with detailed and straightforward criteria, a vague rubric determines applicants’ personality rating; ‘outstanding’ personal skills secure an applicant a top score, for example, and being ‘bland or somewhat negative or immature’ gets her a middling one.” That is to say, there are no real guidelines on scoring a high school student’s supposed personality. Instead, Harvard’s personality score looks much more like the “holistic admissions” criteria it and other Ivy League schools used to keep out Jewish students decades ago.
Harvard and other universities have indeed succeeded in using “holistic” admissions criteria to keep the number of Asian-American students down. As Harvard-educated commentator Ron Unz put it, Ivy League colleges have effectively enforced a hard quota on the number of Asian-American students they will admit. In contrast, the elite California Institute of Technology (Caltech) does not use personality scores or race-based admissions criteria, and Asian-American enrollment has increased in line with expectations, according to their strong academic performance and extra-curricular involvement – and far above their proportion of the population at large.
In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court decisively ordered an end to this invidious form of racism. In its landmark decision Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Court declared that universities would henceforth be prohibited from discriminating against students on the basis of their race, a great victory for Asian-American students and for equality of all races.
To the ordinary observer, differences in average test scores are simply not evidence of racism. They can be explained by different factors. For example, many studies have long shown that Asian-American students spend much more time studying than non-Asian students. For those who attack standardized tests as tools to benefit the wealthy, the SAT’s own data shows that low-income Asian students on average score higher than wealthy non-Asian students. The difference clearly has to do with individual habits and, probably, cultural values, not racism or classism.
Canada, it should be noted, is not immune to the kind of thinking that drove the Ivy League’s campaign of restriction against Asian-American students. For many years, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) admitted students to its speciality programs – enriched learning for ambitious students – based, among multiple criteria, on their results on a standardized test. Last year, however, the TDSB’s trustees voted 17-3 to eliminate this test in the name of “equity” and replace it with a lottery system. Students no longer need to demonstrate intellectual aptitude to be admitted to these gifted programs – itself a ridiculous notion. But the TDSB went further and announced that 20 percent of the program’s spots would be held for black, Indigenous, Latin American and Middle Eastern students – excluding Asian-Canadian, Caucasian and South Asian students from those spots no matter how hardworking or intelligent these students are. Quite simply, this is blatant racial discrimination.
The 20th century’s emphasis on academic and intellectual merit allowed the West to flourish and prosper. Today, the war on merit threatens to undo that progress. Standardized tests would mark a return to the value of meritocracy.
In Toronto, Trustee Weidong Pei has been fighting a brave but often lonesome battle against the TDSB’s racist admissions policies. As Pei pointed out in a recent interview, “The average Asian family’s income at TDSB is below the overall average of TDSB families, and South Asians’ incomes are even lower. Yet Asian families are considered a privileged group.” Sadly, this information means nothing to the “progressive” trustees and bureaucrats who are determined to punish some Canadians for their skin colour.
Moving Forward: Recognizing Excellence
While standardized tests are not perfect, they remain the fairest way of evaluating students. As three authors in the Washington Post argued in 2019, “It’s true that any system can be gamed if you’re willing to cheat, and students from wealthier backgrounds do have some advantages over others. But eliminating or watering down the SAT wouldn’t solve this problem; in fact, it would make it worse — by removing the one relatively objective admissions criterion that can both prevent fraud and increase social mobility.”
Adding standardized testing to the university admission process in Canada would recognize and reward academic and intellectual excellence. It would create a defence against credit mills that allow wealthy students to beat out smarter, more diligent students in the admissions process. It would help counteract our schools’ rampant grade inflation and give parents a more accurate sense of whether their high school is truly preparing students for university. And it would push back against the new-racist “progressivism” of the educational bureaucracy. With the intrusion of woke politics into Canada’s schools, hardworking students whom the left deems to have the wrong ethnicity have everything stacked against them.
The 20th century’s emphasis on academic and intellectual merit allowed the West to flourish and prosper. Today, the war on merit threatens to undo that progress. Standardized tests would mark a return to the value of meritocracy – the compelling, moral and humane proposition that hard work and individual ability are paramount. As Ken Coates has written, “We shy away from excellence in this country too often. Admissions tests to the best universities in Canada would be a small step toward re-establishing the value of high academic performance and exceptional ability.”
Gordon Lee is a writer based in Toronto.
Source of main image: bibiphoto/Shutterstock.
