Reining in the Test of Tests
Some say the SAT is destiny. Some say it's meaningless. Should it be scrapped?
Objective criteria. How much do SAT scores really matter in the college admissions process? It all depends. Some schools, like UC-San Diego, freely admit that getting in is almost all about grades and scores. "Our admissions process is formulistic, not holistic, and I believe that's the best way to go," says Richard Backer, assistant vice chancellor for enrollment management at UCSD, which will accept about 16,000 out of 38,137 applicants in order to enroll an entering class of 3,800. "We are a public institution and as such the public has a right to know exactly what our criteria are. At the moment, I can tell the parents who call exactly why their son or daughter didn't get in. I don't have to give a subjective answer."
At elite private institutions, on the other hand, admissions officials insist that SAT scores are simply one factor in a comprehensive evaluation process and that there's no magic number. "We take everything into account that we can get our hands on, and the SATs are one factor that we find helpful," says Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of admissions for Harvard College, which last year turned down almost half the 347 applicants who came knocking with perfect 1600 SATs. Many admissions personnel say high scores won't make up for lackluster grades or an unchallenging course load. Still, while elite schools swear that they don't use automatic cutoffs to sift applicants, they pay plenty of attention to grades and scores. Would-be students can't help but notice that those who actually get in typically have sky-high numbers. Admissions officers worry that dropping SAT requirements entirely will rob them of a useful tool, especially in an era of widespread grade inflation when a neutral yardstick helps them compare students from schools with wildly different standards.
Wherever they stand on the usefulness of the SAT, many college officials are appalled by the extent to which SAT scores have become tied to people's sense of self-worth. "What bothers a lot of people is that SAT-taking has basically become a religion," says Rutgers University President Francis Lawrence. "Kids live and die by what they score on that three-hour test," says Ray Brown, dean of admissions at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. "If I never again hear a student say to me, `I'm just a 1050,' it'll be too soon." Many students with modest scores don't even bother applying to highly selective colleges. The self-esteem equation can work both ways, of course. Anthony DeCinque, 17, a senior at Jonesboro High School in Georgia, has readjusted his academic ambitions after nailing a perfect 1600 on the SAT (that's still a rare accomplishment, though the number of perfect scores jumped 17-fold, from 32 to 545,when SAT scores were recalibrated in 1995. A combined score of 1400 today would have been a 1340 in the old days). His fallback school was the University of Georgia, but he's already gotten accepted to Georgia Tech and, like Pascual Ramos of Los Angeles, is keeping his fingers crossed hoping for a thick envelope from MIT. "It's a great confidence-builder," he says of his accomplishment.
advertisement
