ATHENS, WV (WOAY) – In response to the pandemic, standardized tests typically taken by incoming college students have been delayed significantly.
As a result of this, Concord University has decided to completely waive ACT and SAT testing requirements for admissions.
William Allen, the Vice President of Enrollment at Concord, says the idea partially came to fruition when most of their staff began working from home, and they needed less variables to overwhelm the staff.
“The thing that was critical for me anyway was to make sure that no phone, email, text message got lost and that we could respond to people. You could call the admission line right now and you probably don’t realize that it’s going to somebody’s house at this point,” Allen said.
Allen also said the idea is not to lower the general requirements for admission. If a student has already made it to their senior year of high school and has the required GPA, then for the most part they might not even need to take the ACT or SAT to prove their worth.
Many students for the Fall of 2020 have also already taken the tests previously or have already applied.
“We’re not really doing it as a recruitment tool as much as we are doing it to help students that were already in the mix for us.”
But there are still some issues with the lack of testing. Incoming freshmen now have an extra thing to worry about. Many depend on test scores for enrollment in specific programs and even scholarships; thankfully Concord has thought for this as well.
“What we’ve done is we’ve just said basically if you meet our minimum scholarship requirement which is a 3.0 for freshman we would go ahead waive that test score requirement or that as well.”
While the idea is mostly in response to the delayed standardized testing, Allen mentioned it to also just take some more weight off of people’s shoulders during this difficult time.
“We went ahead and just decided we were gonna air on the side of caution and take that stress off people’s shoulders with all the other things they’ve got to worry about.”
There are still some issues though, some incoming students were perhaps hoping to retake the standardized tests to improve their scores. And some may think that only depending on GPA requirements won’t be enough for some specialized programs.
As of now, the earliest someone can take the ACT or SAT is May 8, which may not be soon enough for students to apply to some college programs.
