It's time to reevaluate admission tests - from our perspective

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, June, 2001 by Howard Greene, Matthew Greene

The frustration is evident in their faces. They are diligent students, dedicated to their studies, reflective thinkers and careful in their work. Then they face the test.

Recently, a parent wrote to us about her daughter, a strong student who had faced the SAT I for the first time: "She called today for her scores and she was very upset, as the scores were poor. Her verbal was 550 and her math was 560. She believed she did much better than that. She is so down on herself, it's horrible! We know some help in preparing for the SAT I is needed, but I'm afraid of what this score could do to her self-esteem as we look at colleges. She takes her schoolwork seriously and feels that her hard work has been wasted. She was proud of how she planned to challenge herself by signing up for several AP courses next year. Now she's asking, `Why bother?'"

We hear these comments from many parents and students discouraged by the failure of the SAT to assess their academic proficiency, commitment and knowledge. They fear that low scores relative to high grades in strong courses mean that they are "stupid," and feel they must take test-prep courses or they will be at a disadvantage in the admissions process.

The SAT controversy deepens as the opposing camps continue to debate the merits of this prevailing admissions test. The latest, and potentially most devastating, challenge to the advantage the College Board and the Educational Testing Service have enjoyed since the end of World War II is the proposal by the President of the University of California, Richard C. Atkinson. His plan, if he receives the consent of the California Board of Regents and his own faculty, is to make the SAT optional for the 90,000 students who apply annually to the university's eight undergraduate campuses.

"Developed properly and used responsibly," Atkinson recently argued, "standardized tests can help students gauge their progress and help the general public assess the effectiveness of schools. The problem is not the use of standardized tests to assess knowledge in well-defined subject areas. The problem is tests that do not have a demonstrable relationship to the student's program of study--a problem that is amplified when the tests are assumed to measure innate ability."

Atkinson believes that the SAT II and other subject-based tests are more valuable and appropriate in assessing students' knowledge in particular content areas. This fits with the overall movement in the country toward standardized assessments of progress, which still troubles us because the format in which they are presented makes similar demands on students.

In a recent letter to college presidents, business leaders at such companies as Shell and Verizon, in conjunction with a study by the National Urban League, urged colleges to place less emphasis on the SAT and other standardized tests. The letter called for better assessment of such attributes as creativity, leadership and community involvement.

These questions among academic, business and community leaders of the value of the SAT and standardized tests such as the ACT offer no particularly new insights regarding the tests themselves. They do, however, draw attention to the issue of how to enroll a class of ambitious young men and women each year to America's selective colleges, including the largest public university system in the country.

It is one thing for a small, private college to question the use of testing in crafting its undergraduate classes, and quite another for a public system of the size and prestige of California's to consider abandoning its reliance on this popular quantitative indicator. It is one thing for educational researchers to question the efficacy of standardized tests, and quite another for business leaders to indicate that "character" is the most essential attribute for professional achievement.

As practitioners for many years in the counseling field, we have witnessed the significant role SAT scores play in the admissions decision process for students of all backgrounds, advantaged and disadvantaged alike. We know from our backgrounds in admissions deaning and counseling college bound students that most colleges and universities are caught in a web of competition for the best or even merely qualified students; that their reputation in the public marketplace will decide if they can attract their fair share of the best and the brightest; and that this reputation is determined, at least partially, by the average SAT or ACT scores of their recent admitted students.

There is no question that the candidates who present the highest test scores in their applications have a greater chance of being accepted by the selective institutions. This is why families with the means will provide their children with test preparation at any cost, and families without the ability to help their children prepare for the tests rail against what they perceive to be the systematic exclusion of their children from the better universities.