Reining in the Test of Tests
Some say the SAT is destiny. Some say it's meaningless. Should it be scrapped?
Long before the new UC proposal, several hundred campuses had already bowed out of the SAT frenzy entirely. Last year, Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts joined Bates, Bowdoin, Bard, and Connecticut College among others in dropping the SAT requirement. This is a godsend for teens who have proved themselves to everyone but the testing agencies. Take Bates freshman Sarah Gray, who graduated with high honors from Orono High School in Maine but never managed to break an 1190 despite three cracks at the SAT. Her score kept her from applying to Ivy League schools, and she was relieved to be judged by her other accomplishments at Bates, where she earned a 3.92 GPA her first semester. "I just am not good at taking the SAT," says Gray, clearly still exasperated by the experience. "I don't think it says how smart I am, and I certainly don't think it shows anything about anyone's work ethic."
At a much larger school, the University of Texas-Austin, nearly half the 7,600-member freshman class was admitted without regard to test scores under the new top-10 percent admissions rule. So far, says UT-Austin President Larry Faulkner, top-10 percent students are earning much higher college grades than classmates accepted on the basis of test scores. So will he think about dropping the SAT for all students? "We'll talk about it," he says. "It would be a mistake to think the SAT has no predictive value. It does. The question is whether there are other tests that have better predictive value."
It's ironic that a test first used as a tool for meritocracy has now come under fire as a barrier to opportunity. As Nicholas Lemann recounts in his 1999 book The Big Test, Harvard President James Conant laid the groundwork for the eventual nationalization of the SAT by using the exam in the 1930s to identify talented Midwestern public school scholarship boys who didn't have the advantages of an East Coast prep school education. An objective test, the theory went, could sweep away class advantages. Now the pendulum has swung back, and measures of innate aptitude are increasingly under suspicion. But Conant's original concerns aren't going to go away. Right after Atkinson's speech to college officials, Susan Cole, the president of Montclair State University in New Jersey, stood up to warn that moving to curriculum-based tests could worsen inequality for students who don't have access to good classes and good teachers. Others point out that axing the SAT won't do anything to get rid of racial and socioeconomic gaps in achievement, which show up on a wide variety of tests as well as in high school grades. The SAT debate at UC will be closely watched around the country, but don't expect the testing wars to die down anytime soon.
How SAT scores stack up
Asian-Americans and non-Hispanic whites continue to do significantly better on average than Hispanics and African-Americans on the math test, while non-Hispanic whites outperform all other groups on the verbal test.
[Data for chart not available.]
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