Where this was said
Dartmouth's Priorities: Trust, SAT Reinstatement, and the Admissions Data
At 12:53 · chapter starts 11:20
Three years into her Dartmouth tenure, Beilock identifies restoring trust in higher education as her primary mission and frames Dartmouth as a potential model for how to do it. Her first exhibit: the SAT. After COVID, Dartmouth became the first Ivy to reinstate standardized test requirements [1] — Sian Beilock "The test-optional era hurt the students it was supposed to help. Low-income students were less likely to submit strong scores, and Dartmout…" 09:27 , and Beilock walks through the counterintuitive data behind the decision. The assumption that the SAT disadvantages low-income students was complicated by Dartmouth's own findings — that when tests were optional, lower-income students with strong scores were less likely to submit them, masking their talent. She cites Raj Chetty's Harvard research showing that family resources help with exactly the non-quantitative factors test-optional policies elevated, like summer experiences and recommendation letters. The result: most Ivy Plus peers followed Dartmouth's lead, with Columbia becoming the last to restore testing.
Dartmouth Dialogues launched after October 7th, modeled on faculty in Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies who held open forums for dialogue rather than protests within days of the Hamas attacks.
While presidents at Columbia, Penn, and Harvard were ousted during the Gaza protest wave, Beilock held the line at Dartmouth by enforcing clear, pre-stated rules — and her board backed her. Leading by principle, not popularity, is what kept her standing.
When Beilock arrived at Dartmouth, it ranked in the bottom 200 for free expression. It's now ranked 35th nationally, with students two standard deviations above the mean in tolerating speakers across the political spectrum.
Dartmouth's free expression ranking from FIRE improved from the bottom 200-something to 35th nationally after Beilock's reforms.
