The SAT has long been a three-letter word for aspiring college
students—an abbreviation that stands for fear. It has become the
single most important arbiter of university admissions, the magic number
that seems to predict the future for nervous teens. But the tide may be
turning, at least among elite private schools. The latest nail in the
coffin: Sarah Lawrence College, a prestigious liberal arts school in
Bronxville, New York, announced that beginning with the high
school graduating class of 2005, applicants will no longer be required to
submit standardized test scores.
The decision was intended "to reflect our belief that
standardized testing is not effective in evaluating a student's
ability to succeed in a writing-based curriculum such as ours," the
college's dean of admissions said in a press release. The statement
also fretted over the growing inequity between test-takers who can afford
preparation courses (which can cost up to $900) and those who
cannot.
The SAT is the nation's oldest and most widely used college
admissions test. It is also big business: The College Board earns
millions each year in revenue from the exams.
But its critics have gained momentum in recent years. They say that
the SAT is a poor predictor of women's, non-native English speakers
and older students' academic performance in college. Whites
outscore African Americans on average by 206 points.
As a result, many colleges have dropped the SAT requirement in the
last decade, says Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the
National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a watchdog group critical of
standardized testing based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Roughly 700
colleges and universities no longer require the test, according to
FairTest. In eliminating the requirement, Sarah Lawrence joins such
top-drawer companies as Bates, Bowdoin, Hamilton, Mt. Holyoke and Pitzer
College. Public universities are following the trend, too—since
1998, Texas seniors applying to schools within the University of Texas
system who finish in the top 10 percent of their high school class
aren't required to submit standardized test scores.
"These schools have reported greater diversity among accepted
students and higher educational quality since they changed their
policies," says Schaeffer. He also says that school grades are a
better predictor of success in college than the SAT, despite the
variability in high school curricula.
Robert Sternberg, IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at
Yale, thinks the SAT is good at what it does, but is not an adequate tool
in the admissions process. The SAT was created "to provide
equity," he says, but has become "an additional source of
inequity." He agrees that standardized academic tests such as the
SAT don't accurately measure all types of intelligence, but he does
not believe they should be eliminated altogether.
Sternberg says that the SAT tests well for memory and analytical
skills. "Clearly, these are important," he says. "But
in life, and in college, you need more than analytical skills." The
test is not so good at gauging creative skills and practical skills,
which means that some kids may not be fairly ranked by the exam. "A
kid from a challenging environment might have better-developed creative
or practical skills, whereas a kid who grew up in Scarsdale [may have]
had the luxury of developing analytical skills," says Sternberg.
His recommendation: Admissions officers should learn how to recognize a
diverse set of skills or risk rejecting talented applicants.
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