Penn, Swarthmore to drop essay portion of SAT and ACT

Essays will get less emphasis in the admissions process at two of the region's elite schools, Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania.

Swarthmore announced Tuesday that it would not consider the essay section of the soon-to-be redesigned SAT, nor the essay on its counterpart, the ACT. It will, however, continue to require students to submit an essay on "Why Swarthmore" with their applications.

The College Board, owner of the SAT, announced more than a year ago that the essay portion would become optional when the redesigned SAT is introduced in early 2016. The essay portion already had been optional for the ACT.

While many other colleges have already ignored or placed little value on the previous essay section of the SAT, Swarthmore continued to use it.

"We value writing, and it is of critical importance in being a successful college student," said Jim Bock, Swarthmore's vice president and dean of admissions.

The essay scores, however, correlated so little to academic success at the college that it did not make sense to continue to consider them, Bock said.

Penn, in a statement issued in late July, made a similar assertion about the value of essays in announcing it would no longer require the essay portion of the ACT or SAT.

"Our internal analysis as well as a review of the extensive research provided by the College Board showed that the essay component of the SAT was the least predictive element of the overall writing section of the SAT," Eric Furda, Penn's dean of admissions, said in a statement.

Furda said data gleaned from the essay were not worth the additional fees students would have to pay to take the essay in the redesigned SAT or the time required of staff to review the essays.

He said the admissions department would continue to look for evidence of strong writing in academic records and other parts of the application.

Some other colleges that require the essay, including Haverford, have not yet decided whether to consider the new SAT essay.

"Most of the schools that we overlap with for applicants look like they are going in the same direction" as Penn and Swarthmore, said Jess Lord, dean of admission at Haverford, noting Amherst, Pomona, and Williams Colleges and Brown University.

Other elite universities, Lord said, including Princeton, Yale, and Stanford, plan on continuing the essay requirement.

Swarthmore began decreasing emphasis on essays last year, when it dropped one essay and halved the word requirement for another. Applications to the university then soared.

Bock said Swarthmore was striving to place the right emphasis on writing.

"We continue to tweak and assess," he said.