Morgaen Donaldson and Eric Loken led a study on the impact of switching to test optional admissions at UConn.

Eric Loken is interviewed about Yale’s decision to re-require standardized test scores for admissions.

The data represents the lowest scores in 4th-grade reading since 1998 and the lowest in 8th-grade math since 2000 in the state of Connecticut.

Eric Loken, a professor at UConn’s Neag School of Education who is affiliated with the Measurement, Evaluation and Assessment program, said he considered the results to be “pretty strong evidence” of a drop in student scores. “It’s good data, and the change in it is quite dramatic,” said Loken. “This is really a data source that people tend to rely on and take as a good indicator to track performance over time.”

Working with researchers Prof. Morgaen Donaldson and Associate Prof. Eric Loken from the Neag School of Education, UConn has found so far that the applicant pools in 2021 and 2022 were significantly more diverse than prior years in terms of students’ racial and ethnic backgrounds, family incomes, and other factors.

But, a pair of researchers argue in a recent issue of Science, the p-value may be doing more harm than good. Statistician Andrew Gelman, of Columbia University, and Eric Loken, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, say scientists have bought into a “fallacy” — that if a statistically significant result emerges from a “noisy” experiment, a.k.a. one with many variables that are difficult to account for, that result is by definition a sound one.