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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