More than 280 U.S. universities ditch SAT

A recent commission led by William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard University reported that less focus should be put on the SAT.

“Despite their prevalence in American high school culture, college admission exams—such as the SAT and ACT—may not be critical to making good admission decisions at many of the colleges and universities that use them,” stated the National Association for College Admission Counselling report.

“While the exams, used by a large majority of four-year colleges and universities to make admission decisions, provide useful information, colleges and universities may be better served by admission exams more closely linked to high school curriculum,” it continued.

The National Centre for Fair and Open Testing in the United States stated in an online video campaign stating that “Standardized exams cannot assess creativity, higher order thinking or the ability to apply knowledge.”

The University of Maryland is one of the universities in the United States has kept the SAT and ACT as a requirement when it comes to admission.

According to Celia Gamboa, admissions councillor for the University of Maryland, “Specifically for critical reading and math . . . the scores that are achieved by students are usually indicative of how well they are going to do their first year.”

According to Gamboa, the SAT tests students on “fundamental things” that will be a part of higher education. She said that the SAT is just one of 26 factors for admission to the university. “It's not the most important factor but it is academic in nature and since we are an academic institutions is going to be one of the higher criteria were going to look at.”

Wake Forest University in South Carolina is one of the more than 280 post-secondary institutions that are making the SAT and ACT optional. Wake Forest's class of 2009 will the first class to apply without the SAT as a requirement.

Unlike Wake Forest, Bates College in Maine has had the SAT and ACT optional since 1984 and because of it has seen a increase in applicants and no change in the amount of graduates.

According to a 20-year study performed by Bates College aimed at finding the results of making the SAT and ACT optional. The survey showed that the difference in the level of graduates from Bates varied by 1/10 of a percent. It also found that the grade point average (GPA) between people who submitted there SAT and ACT scores and people who did not differed by 1/500 of a GPA point.

William Hiss, responsible for making the SAT and ACT optional as dean of admissions and financial aid at Bates College in 1984, said that the college found three reasons the SAT was not a dependable way of assessing the success of a student.

“It wasn’t that [the SAT] was uniformly terrible predictors but their predictive value was highly un-even, it predicated decently for some students but for many others . . . the SAT turned out to be what statisticians call a false negative.”

Hiss also cited a marketing reason for eliminating the requirement, which turned out to have ethical implications as well.

“You're artificially truncating your pool by about a third of people who either you would not admit because you thought their score was too low, or even worse, they just don’t apply at all,” said Hiss.

He continued, “We thought we were scaring off a significant portion of the pool and that turned out to be absolutely right. From an ethical point of view our job as admissions officers is to admit the class, admit the young people who have the highest chance of succeeding.”
Hiss added that the university wanted to send the right signals to students to best prepare them for university.

“We came to feel . . . that we were sending a false education signal to students,” Hiss said. He said that the amount of time that students spend prepping for the SAT could be used more efficiently.

Hiss states, “We felt [students] were spending way too much time worrying about and trying to prepare for testing [ . . . ] instead of taking advanced calculus or taking a Chinese history course or working at an AIDS clinic.”

”There could be a hundred things that educational we felt were more valuable than taking cram courses for the SAT,” Hiss said.