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You
may have heard the news that the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is
getting an overhaul. The essay portion that was added in 2005 will be
made optional, and the rest of the test is going back to the old
1600-point scale. Questions will be replaced to bring them more in line
with what students are being taught in the classroom, to try to level
the playing field that has been upset in recent years by students who
can afford test tutoring. Why? Because students, parents, teachers, and
even colleges don’t like it. It’s stressful, interferes with regular
classwork, and doesn’t even predict college success.
A
growing number of colleges and universities, frustrated by the minimal
change to the SAT when it was revised in 2005 and motivated by a report
issued in 2008 by the National Association for College Admission
Counseling (Nacac), began to eliminate the SAT and its competitor, the
A.C.T., as admission requirements, following the lead of several small,
liberal-arts colleges that did so years before. The authors of the Nacac
report cited a University of California study, which characterized the
SAT as a “relatively poor predictor of student performance” and
questioned the tendency of colleges to rely on the SAT as “one of the
most important admission tools.” (Many of the schools that dropped test
requirements saw spikes in their applications, at least in the first
year.)
Around the time the report came out — and following the
publication of “The Power of Privilege,” by the Wake Forest University
sociology professor Joseph A. Soares, an account of the way standardized
tests contributed to discriminatory admissions policies at Yale — Wake
Forest became the first highly rated institution (it regularly appears
as a Top 30 university on the U.S. News & World Report college
rankings) to announce a test-optional admissions policy. Follow-up
studies at Wake Forest showed that the average high-school G.P.A. of
incoming freshmen increased after the school stopped using
standardized-test scores as a factor. Seventy-nine percent of its 2012
incoming class was in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes.
Before going test-optional, that figure was in the low 60s. In addition,
the school became less homogeneous. “The test highly correlates with
family income,” says Soares, who also edited a book that, in part,
examines the effects of making the SAT optional at the University of
Georgia, Johns Hopkins University and Wake Forest. “High-school grades
do not.” He continued, “We have a lot more social, racial and lifestyle
diversity. You see it on campus. Wake Forest was a little too much like a
J. Crew catalog before we went test-optional.”
The
new test will not be introduced until the spring of 2016 -too late for
all my children. Only time will tell if the changes are an improvement.
The New York Times has the story of how the SAT became something other
than what it was intended to be, and
how the changes for 2016 came about.
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