Highlights from The Exam Man podcast, Series 2 Episode 10

In this episode we explored some of the differences between the UK and US education systems, focusing on exams. We chat to Dr. Kelly Frindell, based in Hawaii, who is the owner of Inhouse Test Prep which offers preparation for students applying to universities and colleges in the US. She explains the decentralised nature of the US system, where states and localities set their own education policies. For college admissions, students typically take the SAT or ACT, but the pandemic led to many schools adopting test-optional policies, which was really interesting to talk about!

Can you tell us about the students you work with, Kelly?

I live in the United States and I do work mostly with students who are taking entrance exams for college and university. And then also students who are applying to private and boarding schools who are a little bit younger. And so the ages that I work with are generally about 16, 17, 18. And then sometimes I have 10 and 11 year olds and 13 year olds too.

And there's two different groups of exams for those two different ages. And for the older students, the ones who are looking to go to college or university, they'll take either the SAT or the ACT. And there are different companies that offer the exams. But they do similar things, and schools that want those scores will take either test, they'll take either the SAT or the ACT, so students get to decide which ones they're going to take.

Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. So Kelly, the exams are administered by private companies then, is that how it works?

Correct, yes. And not all students have to take them. All of the states have their own rules for education. There's no national plan of what has to happen. And so each of the states set their own rules. And some states say all students have to take this exam as an exit exam. But a lot of states don't say that. So students who may not be planning to go to university or college, a lot of times they may not take the test at all.

What has made things much more complicated is in the last couple of years with everything that's happened with the pandemic, a lot of the colleges and universities went to what's called test-optional, which means that you actually get to choose whether you're going to take the test or not. And this has added a lot of confusion to the process because some of the schools, it's kind of a wink, wink, nudge, nudge thing of like, yes, it's technically optional, but if you look at the data that's coming out, the people that they're accepting into their schools are the people who are submitting test scores and submitting good test scores. And some schools have also gone to what's called test blind, which means they won't look at scores at all. And so in the state of California, they actually had a lawsuit a couple of years ago, where they are no longer allowed to ask for SAT or ACT scores, and you can't submit them by law, and so they have to look at other factors. So it's gotten really complicated as to whether you should take a test, whether you should submit your scores, and what you should do, and it has really caused a lot of confusion.

I bet, and it must make those decisions about where people want to go to school, quite dependent on how much you want to be tested, and what you want to be tested on as well, which is interesting. Has that really complicated your work?

Yes. And especially in the early days of 2020/2021, in that first year of the pandemic, almost all of the schools dropped requirements for the test because logistically students couldn't take them. There were none offered between February and about October of 2020. And so that first year, almost all schools just said, never mind, just get us what you can. And then some of the schools said they were thinking about this anyway, so they we’re going to try and experiment for the next semester. Three years and keep things test-optional.

But some said, no, we're going back to test. And some of them said, we're permanently test-optional. California got sued and they said, we can't accept tests. And so a lot of people just gave up on them and they said, it means I get to choose. So I'm going to choose not to do it. And that turned out to be a mistake for a lot of people because then it did turn out they actually needed those scores. Nobody knows what to do. And for a time people thought why would I take it if I don't have to? But the trend is starting to swing back a little bit the other way now.

That's interesting because we had a similar thing in the UK, obviously in the pandemic no students sat any exams or tests here. But it is quite interesting how quickly people were quite keen to get back to it because obviously it does provide you with that slightly more objective standard by which to make decisions about who you're going to admit and who you're not. So what do what do colleges base their admissions on if they're not testing? What's the academic standard then that they're basing their decision on?

So if they're not looking at test scores, what they say is they have a holistic approach. That is the term they like to use - holistic admissions. They're looking at grades, but grades actually are not a really good predictor anymore. A recent study came out and said that basically 80% of the students in the US right now have an A grade point average, and A is the highest that you can get.

If 80% of students have an A, that really isn't a useful metric anymore, so grades have become divorced from reality. They do slook at grades, but people also have to write essays for the application, sometimes they do interviews, they're looking at letters of recommendation, they're looking at students’ extracurricular activities, at what they're doing outside of school.

It has made it really difficult for the admissions committees and one of the unintended effects of not requiring the test is that people who would never have applied to the top level schools like Harvard or Yale or any of the Ivy League schools, all of a sudden think they've got a chance now. People are applying in droves to schools they would never have applied to before. Some of those schools are getting tens of thousands more applications than they were getting five years ago and they don't have the people to read them. They don't have the ability to sort them. And so it's just made a giant nightmare for everybody.

That's one of the purposes of testing that’s come out in conversations we’ve had -ss that it's like a sifting process. As well as giving people a sense of where they are academically if they're trying to get onto a course or into a college and it's like a sifting tool for those institutions to be able to make decisions more easily. And I guess if you take that away, then you've completely removed the key sifting tool that they've got.

When you say it's based on grades, are those high school awarded grades?

Correct.

So how are those grades arrived at? How's that grade point average arrived at what? What do students do in order to achieve that? Is there any standardisation of that?

No, there is no standardisation. And everything with education is done at a very local level. So even within states, there are state guidelines, but then there are also city guidelines and different schools do different things. And the funding is related to where you live and how much money is available. If you're in a wealthy district, your school is probably getting a lot of resources. If you're not, you aren't. So there's a lot of inequality among the education system across the whole country.

And we've got 50 different states, which are basically like 50 different countries. They all have their own things going on. For grades, typically what happens, those are based off of the assignments and tests that people are doing in school. And then, at the end of the semester, teachers usually calculate a percentage out of 100. If you have a 90%, they usually translate those into a grade point average and a pretty common scale is out of a 4.0 which used to be perfect, the best score you could get. But now with things like honors classes and advanced placement classes, sometimes they get weighted more, so you get a little extra multiplier on there.

So people might have like a 4.3, or now grades have gotten up to like 4.7, out of a four point scale. And so 80% is people who are scoring at a 4. 0 or above, which used to be perfect. It's based off of daily work and exams and a lot of teachers have gone to giving a lot of leeway to retake exams or to submit homework late or to make something up. There's a lot of pressure from school districts to pass people and to have high grades, and so there's a lot of conflicting things going on that make those grades not as reliable as they used to be.

The variance is fascinating. I'm surprised by that. So for example, you're based in Hawaii, aren't you? So what's the system there?

Pretty similar. I just moved to Hawaii a few years ago and I don't have students here. Before that I was in Texas, and Texas is a very large state. Lots of things going on there. With my Texas students with the exams, the SAT and the ACT, there was a lot of confusion with them and a lot of my Texas students were just like, I'm not going to bother. And in other parts of the country, it was different. In places like New York or Boston, where education is really heavily emphasised, they never stopped and they have a strong focus on those tests.

So in the UK, when students come to the end of high school, effectively, they will usually do a set of exams, but those exams are standardised national exams and from that they'll get a set of grades which will then determine where they can go next and what they can do next. The grading aspect is taken out of the hands of the schools and the teachers and is given to a central authority and it's standardised by that authority. That's obviously really different to what happens in the States. Is there ever a call for that kind of system in individual states? Does it exist in any of the states at all?

Some states do have their own exit exam. I believe New York has their own exit exam that you have to take, and some other states do as well, but it still doesn't have to do with grades in terms of what you're submitting to colleges because those do come from the high schools themselves. I haven't really heard a call for a national system. That's what the SAT and the ACT were supposed to do. It was supposed to provide a level playing field because everybody is taking that same exam.

One of the things that has happened, is that there is always an argument about those tests, that they're unfair and they're biased against people who come from lower socio-economic neighbourhoods and schools because they haven't received the same resources as students from wealthier districts. People say that if they get a lower score on this, that test is biased against them. It's going to keep them out of schools. But what it turns out is when the colleges are doing their admissions, they look at the demographics of where people come from.

So the SAT is out of 1600, and 1400 and above is pretty high. At very competitive schools, most people might be at 1400 or 1500, but students from lesser advantaged areas might only be at a 1200. People say they're not going to get in with this 1200, but the schools know that for your school a 1200 is actually a really high score. It shows that you have the ability to succeed even when you don't have the same resources as other people. Part of the promise of making this test-optional was that, we can make it more fair. We can increase our demographics. We can make sure a lot more groups are represented and what has turned out is the opposite, because those kids are no longer submitting their scores and admissions officers have come out publicly and said, if we had known that you had this score, even though it's lower than our regular average, you would have got in. So people are making the wrong decisions.

This is a really familiar debate that we have in the UK. I think there's always this suspicion of testing that it's unfair, but often the other things you try and do to avoid the unfairness turn out to be worse. So if you're basing a college admission on someone's personal statement, often kids from higher socio economic backgrounds get tons of support to write that statement?

Exactly.

And often they'll have been able to do the kinds of activities and things that would look good on that statement. Actually the standardised test does provide a more level playing field than those other things that they feel might be better, but aren't in reality. I have a lot of parents who come to me and their child is getting a 4.7 out of a four point scale. So they think they're in the top 10% of students, but their child is scoring very average on the exams. They say my child's not average but it turns out they are. They're right in the middle, but they don't have a good sense of that because the grades are so divorced from reality that they don't necessarily mean anything. That is an unhappy surprise for a lot of parents and students to find out actually you are just kind of a middle level student.

Are children tested earlier in a more standardised way, earlier on in high school or middle school? What comes before these exams?

So typically most of the states have their own state exams and those are given at different frequencies. So a lot of students will start in elementary school, which is ages about five to 10 and they get some standardised exams and those are their state standards. So they're looking to see that they're meeting the requirements that they need to and those usually aren't tied to passing from grade to grade. In some states they are but generally they’re not any more. They don't show up on people's report cards but the kids are used to taking those tests every couple of years and different states do different things. So most of the students have taken some standardised tests before they get to these ones.

And what do these tests typically cover? What sort of areas of knowledge and skill are they focusing on generally?

It's a fairly narrow focus. So for the SAT, that one has two different sections on it. There's a reading and writing section and a math section. And for the reading and writing, it's a combination of reading comprehension questions, so passages with questions. There's some vocabulary on it. There's some grammar, so being able to use periods and semicolons and dashes and things correctly. The math is typically some basic arithmetic, there's pre-algebra and algebra, a little bit of geometry, and some pre-calculus and trigonometry. It's a fairly narrow focus of Math skills.

The ACT is very similar. It's got all of those things and then it also has a science section, but the science section is strange because it is about science, but you don't really need to know science to do it. So what they do is they give you experiments with charts and graphs and it's largely data interpretation. It's more of a reading and data section that is based in science, but you don't have to know chemistry formulas. You don't have to know physics formulas.

They're all quite narrow, aren't they? That's really interesting.

So no history, no hard science.

If you were a student who was looking to get into a top university like an Ivy League University and you were a really exceptional highly literate student and you were great at history and other humanities but you were absolutely not very good at maths are you’re going to really struggle to get a good SAT score to get into that top school?

On the SAT, the math is half of your grade, and on the ACT it's a quarter of your grade. There are other tests that people do. There's also something called Advanced Placement Test, or AP tests. A lot of schools will teach AP classes and they're supposed to be like college or university level classes, but that are taught in the high school and there is an exam. Those exams are usually used to get course credit at the college or university that you go to. So if you get a certain score on it, so it's out of five, and you get a five in the English exam, you might be able to not take one of your English classes. You get credit. And so those aren't necessarily used for admissions. You submit them at the time of your application, but it is another way to show some of the places that you might have really strong skills.

That's interesting. So it seems to me as though some of the testing is optional and it enhances your application, right?

Exactly. So it's not sufficient for admission, but it can bolster your application and it can help you to get good results and course credits so that you don't have to take as many classes, which can get you out of there earlier, or you don't have to pay as much tuition, which in the US is a big deal. So for me, I got a five on my English exam and I got out of three English classes in college. I was able to finish a whole semester early, which saved me an entire semester of tuition, which was a big deal.

Can you tell us Kelly a bit about how the tests are actually administered? How you sit a test? What's the environment like? Do you basically have people who organise exams in high schools?

Typically the tests are given through the schools, usually on weekends, on Saturdays. Just in March of this year, the SAT switched from a paper and pencil exam to a digital exam. It is now given on the computer and people have to bring their own devices, so you either need a laptop or an iPad or a tablet to take it. There's a registration site for SAT, you go and register, and then everybody comes on Saturday and they put people in classrooms, they put people in the gym and the cafeteria. There's a proctor who gives instructions, it takes a couple of hours and then they leave. And the ACT is similar, but it's still a paper and pencil exam. So the proctors are passing out a booklet for them to take it on. They do the Scantron Sheet with little bubbles in the circles.

There is actually a big problem right now. People are having a hard time finding test sites. It used to be not a big deal but a lot of the schools are backing out of it now because they can't find teachers to staff them on the weekends. It doesn't pay very well. The logistics are just a nightmare in parts of the country where it's really hot or cold. They may not want to run the air conditioning or the heating on that weekend day, depending on what time of year it is. So people aren't able to find test sites, and there are people who are flying to other states, who are driving hours to take tests at other places.

That does not help the argument about equality, if you're having to fly and stay in a hotel overnight. That really isn't a fair playing field at all. The testing companies are trying to find solutions and I think right now some of them are talking to universities to see if they could partner with them or with some other community sites because they got to figure out a way to do this.

Why is it done at the weekends? What's the reason for that?

Because not all students take it. I think they can't really put it during the school day because they can't tie up school resources. They need the classrooms, they need the library, they need the teachers. It's optional. Some schools do have an in school test date. That's becoming a little bit more popular , but not all of them and I wouldn't say it's even a majority. Because of the national system we have here, the results that students get in their examinations are partially used to evaluate the performance of schools themselves. So to say this school's doing well, this school isn't doing so well, this school's providing a good academic grounding, this one isn't. What's the mechanism in the States for evaluating school performance? Those test scores are a metric and they also look at graduation rates, how many people are getting their diploma. Those are the two big ones that I've seen mostly when they're talking about schools. And then also sometimes they'll talk about demographics as well, and that's not really about performance.

Sorry Kelly, can I just jump in? If one of the metrics is graduation rates, but it's the school that effectively has control over whether a school student graduates, isn't there a big incentive to put students through to graduate, even if they haven't met the standard?

Absolutely. That problem we were talking about earlier with grades and grades being inflated, there is a huge incentive to make sure that people pass. Part of the other problem with that too is the state funding. So schools get funding from the state. State funding is also tied to graduation rates and so there is a giant conflict of interest here. Why those tests have been so important is because the grades have a whole lot of things that go into it that actually have nothing to do with education and what kids are learning.

That's really fascinating. There's some obvious benefits to having a system like that, because I think sometimes our system is seen as almost being a bit too robotic, there's so many standardised measures that you have to meet all the way through the system. In some respects that can be restrictive of an education system. But I guess the flip side of that maybe what you're saying is that at times in the States there's not enough standardisation?

There's basically none. So all the states have free reign to do what they want. There are standards for the state, for each state. They say these are the things you should cover but within that you have freedom. The teachers have freedom to cover it in the way that they wish.

Would the state authorities ever go in and say, you're graduating too many students? Or the students aren't meeting a high enough level to be graduating?

I suspect not. I've never heard of that just because you want your state to look good. And honestly, the education system is falling apart in a lot of ways right now. There is a big crisis right now in US education with standards and what kids are learning.

That must be pretty concerning, particularly when you work with students like you do?

Yeah. I think that’s something that's really different between our systems from what I know from working with students from your area. So with the colleges and the universities, there's just such a wide range of what they're looking for and who they admit. And you never really know what your chances are at any kind of school. I know with your system, those national exams help. They dictate where you can go, right? And here it's not the same at all. For the high level schools, the Ivy leagues, the Harvards, the Yales and the Princetons, you do have to have very high test scores to go there.

At a certain point, say SATs out of 1600, most people who get admitted there will probably have a 1550 or above, not everybody, but once you get to a certain score everybody's at that score. That's kind of the baseline thing of you're a good test taker, now let's look at everything else. Because so many people apply and there's so few spots in those kinds of schools, you really never know what your chances are to get into any high level school, even if you have a perfect SAT score and you have all the extracurriculars and you've cured cancer and you've done these amazing things. You just don't know.

And because so many more people apply to those schools right now because of the changing test policies, the people who should have been a shoe-in five years ago no longer are. For those high level kids, there's a whole lot of uncertainty that there didn't used to be, because there are kids who are applying to 10 high level schools and they are perfectly qualified and they're not getting into any of them. That didn't used to happen.

There are thousands of universities in the U S. and so there are places for everybody. There's those really highly competitive ones, and then there's also ones that would admit pretty much anyone who wants to go. And then everywhere in the middle as well. Sometimes people get really discouraged and they think my test scores aren't very high, so it's going to keep me out of this, and I can't do that. And that's not really true either. If you want to go to college, it’s likely you can find somewhere that you can go. It might just not be where you want to but I think too sometimes kids are really focused on having to go to this school and it's not worth it and what was all this for? I honestly think you can get a good education at most places. A lot of it is what you put into it and some places are truly not the right fit. What people find is once they get to a school, most of the time they realise it’s fine. And most of the time it is.

Do employers ever ask about test scores. Is that something?

Occasionally. There are some industries that people do, some of the more math oriented ones, they might, but mostly they just want to see, do you have a diploma from a university? That tends to be the more important thing - that you have graduated. But there are places that may ask for it, but typically not after an entry level job. In the UK your exam results go with you everywhere pretty much and I think that that's one of the criticisms that they're too defining in this country. If you've done well in your GCSE exams, which are the ones you do at 16, or your A levels that you do at 18 those, results follow you around. You have to give them to employers. You have to provide your certificates when you apply for a job and things like that. You put it on application forms. We don't typically do that.

It seems to me that it has a different level of status within the system. Maybe it's not as important in the US system. I think you described it as being holistic, the approach at the moment. I guess, ours is less holistic, though you do write personal statements. One thing that's interesting, is that Oxford and Cambridge universities have both had a big drive to get more students who go to state schools, the publicly funded schools rather than the private schools. And one of the things that they identified as being an issue was that too much weight was being put on the interview. You can imagine you turn up at Oxford or Cambridge and it's a very intimidating environment and you've a crusty old don who's an expert in philosophy or whatever. For kids who have come from the top private schools they can navigate that situation much more easily because they may have already been exposed to it in their lives. Whereas kids coming from lower socio-economic groups might find that more difficult. So that resulted in a move towards focusing more on grades because the students have all sat the exams under the same conditions. I think some universities have gone to no personal statement now as well? Or even like the whole body that organises students going to university, UCAS, has got rid of personal statements. So it is basically now just your grades that determine whether you get the place or not.

I'm going to have to fact check all of what I just said.*

Can we just ask you about Hawaii, Kelly, just because I've only spoken to people who are in the south of England today and it's been quite boring? Just what your day is going to be like, what the weather’s like today, that sort of thing.....

I'm in the middle of the ocean, very far away from anything else and it's about a five to six hour flight to California. It's the closest state from here. So very, very isolated, but very nice. I live on the Island of Maui and it's pretty small. You can drive across the whole Island in about an hour and a half, which by US standards, is pretty small, versus when I lived in Texas which is very big and you can drive for an entire day and still be in the same state. That's been an adjustment.

The island that I'm on is somewhat rural. We've got a town with buildings and things and it's sort of a downtown, but mostly we're just little rural towns and there's chickens that run around everywhere. So when you go to the grocery store, when I go to yoga, there's always chickens with their babies walking around. Everything shuts down very early, so pretty much most stuff is closed by 8 o'clock at night and everybody goes to bed very early.

I usually am in bed by 8.30 or 9, which is pretty shocking. That sounds hard but I get up about 5.15 when the roosters start crowing. It's tricky because the time zones are so different from the rest of the US So I'm six hours behind the Eastern coast of US, I'm three hours behind California. It makes it tricky to coordinate business and personal life and talking to my family, but it also works really well for me because I can work with students across the whole US in their evening and it's still my daytime. And the weather's very nice, I live right by the ocean, got a volcano out my window, it's great. So my website is all one word www.inhousetestprep.com and I've got information about my services, about the tests on there. I always offer a free consultation, I'm always happy to talk to people if they've got questions. One thing that I did want to mention too that I forgot to mention, is that one of the other things that the test scores are sometimes used for is scholarships. So separate from admissions, you also may want to take a test because even with schools that are test-optional, sometimes they're still basing their scholarships, their merit based scholarships, on test scores and various things. So, for most students, it's worth taking the test, even if they're not sure if they're going to submit them or need them, but because it may be tied to money as well as admissions.

Thank you so much, Kelly. We've learned such a huge amount in such a small amount of time. It's been absolutely fantastic to talk to you.

Thanks for having me on!

*QUICK FACT CHECK on what we said about UCAS and UK universities because we do like to be accurate on this podcast. So I said that I thought that UCAS were getting rid of their personal statement for university applications. And that's not quite right. So what they're actually going to be doing is reforming that process. So from September 2025 rather than students having an open ended personal statement, they'll all be given three structured questions to answer. I think the idea is to make it a bit more standardised and thereby to try and level the playing field

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