Should SATs be considered in the admissions process?: Mount Holyoke opts for optional

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Nov-Dec, 2000 by Nicole Rivard

During this five-year trial period the Mellon Foundation will fund a study of how this change affects Mount Holyoke's application pool and the success of the matriculants. The research will compare admission and matriculation rates along with academic performance and persistence of students who do and do not submit SAT scores.

Since Muhlenberg is four years into the SAT-optional policy, the school has analyzed the results. Administrators had to learn to read applications differently and put more emphasis on the students' junior and senior course load and on writing skills, but they believe in the decision more and more as time goes on.

The grade point average of freshmen who did not submit SAT scores was 2.34 the first year the policy was implemented, 2.68 the second year, and 2.74 the third year. Those who submitted scores averaged 2.84, 2.87, and 3.07. (For research purposes, the scores of students who did not submit them as part of the application process were collected after the students were admitted.) Haring noted that although there wasn't a huge difference in the first-year GPAs of the two groups, there was an average of a 200-point difference in the overall SAT scores. He also discovered that applicants who don't submit scores are likely to apply for early admission.

Mount Holyoke plans to compare the aggregate characteristics of the classes of 2003 and 2005, using multiple indicators of student success, such as engagement in independent research, leadership positions held, extracurricular involvement, and graduate school admission.

The college is also interested in pursuing another avenue of research that would use focus groups and surveys to assess the attitudes of high school students and counselors toward the SAT. The goal would be to try to make sense of the inconsistency between public thinking about the SAT and access to higher education. While colleges and universities consistently downplay the importance of the SAT in their decision making, students and their families still seem to believe the SATs have a dominant role in gaining access to higher education.

Morton Owen Schapiro, president of Williams College, Williamstown, Mass., partially agrees with Mount Holyoke that it is a good idea to develop techniques for measuring other features of personality and motivation that predict success at least as much as the SATs do. "It is a fine idea to evaluate the role of SATs, but that is made much more difficult when they are voluntary," Schapiro said.

He and Michael S. Mcpherson, president of Macalester College, St. Paul, Minn., and a trustee of the College Board, expressed their concern about Mount Holyoke's decision in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post in October.

The two argue that "for every student who judges that her SAT scores don't show her full potential, there is another who thinks his high school transcript was marred by a bad semester or a feud with a teacher. Should we invite students to edit out their bad grades or to screen their recommendation letters so they can delete ones that include any hints of doubt ..." They go on to say that to invite students to withhold information is like saying the admissions staff is not capable of putting pieces of information into context.