Baylor Pays Students

[filmerj]

Baylor paid freshmen to retake the SAT

By SARA RIMER

The New York Times

Baylor University, which has a goal of rising to the first tier of national college rankings, last June offered its admitted freshmen a $300 campus bookstore credit to retake the SAT, and $1,000 a year in merit scholarship aid for those who raised their scores by at least 50 points.

Of this year's freshman class of about 3,000, 861 students received the bookstore credit and 150 students qualified for the merit aid, said John Barry, the Waco university's vice president for communications and marketing.

"We're very happy with the way it worked out," Barry said in a telephone interview. "The lion's share of students ended up with the $300 credit they could use in our bookstore. That's not going to make or break the bank for anybody. But it's sure been appreciated by our students and parents."

The offer, which was reported last week by the university's student newspaper, The Lariat, raised Baylor's average SAT score for incoming freshmen to 1210, from 1200, Barry said. That score is one of the factors in the rankings compiled by U.S. News and World Report.

News of the action by Baylor, the 14,000-student, private Baptist university, came just weeks after the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) issued a report calling for a re-examination of the use of SAT and ACT scores in both college admissions and the awarding of merit aid.

Critics of standardized testing said they were troubled by Baylor's action, pointing out that the SAT was designed as an admission test and that these students had already been admitted.

"This appears to be the type of misuse of undergraduate admission tests that the NACAC Testing Commission sought to identify and correct," said David Hawkins, the author of the new SAT study and the director of public policy and research for the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

Barry said that Baylor's decision to offer freshmen incentives for retaking the test was driven primarily by the university's desire to award additional merit aid. He said the new students had not had enough chances to qualify for the aid.

Asked whether the decision was motivated at all by the college rankings, Barry did not say that they were not.

"Every university wants to have great SAT scores," he said. "Every university wants to be perceived as having a high-quality class. We all wanted that. Were we happy our SAT scores went up? Yes. Did our students earn their scores? Yes they did."

Robert Schaeffer, the public education director for FairTest, a nonprofit group that has been critical of the use of standardized tests in college admissions, said Baylor's move "fans the fire of SAT paranoia."

Whatever university officials might say, Schaeffer said he found it hard to believe that encouraging students to retake the SAT was not connected to the university's widely publicized 10-year strategic plan - called Baylor 2012 - which says that one of its major goals is bolstering its 2009 ranking of 76 among best national universities in U.S. News & World Report.

"This is a straightforward, cynical attempt to manipulate test-score averages to boost Baylor's rankings," Schaeffer said. "This is a perfect example of what NACAC warned about in their report."

Liz Foreman, the assistant city editor of The Lariat, and Ashley Corinne Killough, a staff writer, broke the story about the SAT retake Oct. 9. In Tuesday's Lariat, an editorial accused Baylor officials of "using some cheap ploys to try to better its ranking."

"The deal is unfair to the upperclassmen at Baylor," the editorial continued. "Every college student could use an extra $300 to pay for books or the chance to knock $1,000 off each year's tuition, but only this year's freshmen received that opportunity."

One of those quoted in for The Lariat's initial article was Emanuel Gawrieh, a sophomore.

"I think the people who put forth this decision completely compromised what they say Baylor is about: its Christian values, the integrity of Baylor, the integrity of Baylor 2012," Gawrieh said in a telephone interview.

A number of freshmen in Gawrieh's residence hall took Baylor up on its offer to retake the SAT. "It was because of the incentive," said one of those freshmen, Max Herrera, 18, a chemistry major from Houston. "It helped with the books. My books cost over $800."

[Eagle1855]

So they spent about $400k to raise their average SAT score 10 points?

[meangreendork]

And this was legal HOW?

[forevereagle]

And this was legal HOW?

Maybe not illegal, but unethical.

Whether it is legal or not, the ranking system should ignore the improved results. Paying to make your results look better doesn't mean you are.

[Green Mean]

I really do not see it as it being illegal or unethical. It is more like an incentive to take it. Kind of like a scholarship to some degree...if you do well on retaking the SAT then you will get a benefit out of it. I think its a great idea if you ask me.

[filmerj]

I really do not see it as it being illegal or unethical. It is more like an incentive to take it. Kind of like a scholarship to some degree...if you do well on retaking the SAT then you will get a benefit out of it. I think its a great idea if you ask me.

I think the issue is that the sat's are an admittance test. The students they paid were already admitted to the university.

[forevereagle]

I really do not see it as it being illegal or unethical. It is more like an incentive to take it. Kind of like a scholarship to some degree...if you do well on retaking the SAT then you will get a benefit out of it. I think its a great idea if you ask me.

It is a great idea if you are trying to help your students get more financial aid. The problem is that is not the goal. They are, admittedly, trying to improve their ranking by third parties. They want to improve the university's rating by changing the results. We don't allow this type of behavior in almost every competition.

Let's try a sports analogy. When Ohio State lost to USC, they dropped in the rankings. What if they were allowed to pay for more opportunity to score to bring the final closer so they didn't fall as far in the ranking. The outcome wouldn't be affected, just the score. Would that be ok? In this case, the score has already been registered and the students were admitted. Now they want to change the score to make the school look like it has higher overall scores.

[meangreendork]

I think the issue is that the sat's are an admittance test. The students they paid were already admitted to the university.

Yeah, the re-taken exams don't really benefit the students any. It's really to benefit Baylor and pad it's SAT stats. Man, that's shady activity.

[filmerj]

Now they back off their plan.

Baylor University backs off plan offering perks to retake SAT 2:58 PM CT

02:59 PM CDT on Thursday, October 16, 2008

Associated Press

Baylor University, facing sharp criticism for paying already-admitted students to retake the SAT and try to boost their scores, said Thursday it "goofed" and would probably end the practice.

The school in Waco, Texas, offered enrolling students a $300 bookstore credit for retaking the college entrance test and $1,000 if their scores rose 50 points or more. The carrot prompted a wave of criticism, on campus and nationally, as an unethical bid to boost the school's rankings.

"It was a straightforward bribe," said Robert Schaeffer of the group FairTest, which opposes overreliance on testing in college admissions.

The practice was first described in a story by the Lariat student newspaper. Of the school's roughly 3,000 incoming freshmen, 861 received the bookstore credit for retaking the exam and 150 boosted their scores enough for the $1,000-a-year merit aid.

"Was the financial incentive, at a minimum, did it have the appearance of impropriety, and was it going to raise unnecessary questions? Yeah, I think we goofed on that," spokesman John Barry told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Barry defended the program's intent, which he said wasn't to boost Baylor's average SAT scores - or by extension its ranking - but rather to distribute more aid to students. He said 177 students who retook the test earned scores that qualified them for yet more merit aid that the university awards based on SAT scores.

Still, Baylor's practice was widely criticized as at least partly a ploy to try to boost the average SAT scores it can report to U.S. News & World Report magazine for its annual college rankings, in which Baylor has plainly stated in its strategic plan that it hopes to rise. It was ranked 76th this year.

"Baylor has become the poster child for test-score misuse," Schaeffer said. "There is no other plausible explanation for what they did other than gaming their test score averages."

If Baylor had leftover money to award, he said, it easily could have used factors such as grades or the SAT scores students had already submitted, rather than paying them to retake the nearly 4-hour exam.

Sophomore Emanuel Gawrieh told the Lariat that Baylor was simply paying for higher scores and rankings.

"We're at a Christian institution where morals and values are supposed to be all that it's about. That was stretched and left behind in this decision," Gawrieh said. "I know someone who had to work all summer just to pay for books, but the entire freshman class had a chance to sit for a few hours and get paid for it."

The controversy comes just a few weeks after the National Association for College Admission Counseling released a report calling for standardized tests to be de-emphasized in college admissions. The report also restated NACAC's position opposing linking merit aid to minimum test scores - a practice Barry noted is still common at many institutions besides Baylor.

The Baylor situation has illustrated how "the misuse of admissions tests in the rankings are driving colleges and universities to behavior that is perhaps unfortunate," David Hawkins, NACAC's director of public policy and research, said Thursday.

Barry said Baylor had moved its admissions process so far forward to accommodate students and parents that many incoming freshmen hadn't taken the exam for well over a year, and might be expected to score better and thus qualify for more aid.

Now, he said, Baylor would still try to communicate to students that retaking the exam may be worthwhile. But, he added, "We have heard the criticism, we understand the criticism, and I would say it's unlikely we would issue cash incentives again."

Asked several times what role, if any, a desire to move up in the U.S. News rankings played, Barry replied it would be unreasonable to expect such an effect. The incoming class's average SAT score did rise from 1200 last spring to 1210 by the time school started, a small boost that Barry noted can't be fully attributed to the incentive program, given that the scores didn't come from precisely the same group of students.

Schaeffer, of FairTest, said that if Baylor did want to boost its rankings, the plan might have backfired. SAT scores account for only 7.5 percent of the rankings, while peer reputation counts for 25 percent.

"They are damaging themselves in the eyes of the higher education community, which will hurt them in U.S. News rankings," he said.

In another controversy, the University of Michigan Law School has recently faced criticism from legal bloggers over a new program in which it will admit Michigan undergraduates who have a 3.8 GPA but don't submit LSAT scores. Some called it a back-handed attempt to avoid submitting LSAT scores that might drag down Michigan's average.

Sarah Zearfoss, the school's assistant dean and admissions director, said the program would have a negligible effect on its numbers and was intended to attract students who might be scared away by Michigan's high average LSAT but who, their grades suggest, will succeed in law school. The school expected the program to draw no more than five or 10 students.