Availability of Standardized Data

The goal of both the admitting college and the tests is to make informed, fair and consistent assessments about matters of great impact on individual lives.  The SAT and ACT offer easily understood, standardized results that can be measured and compared. Most other student admission data is highly subjective.  The tests, used properly, are quantitative benchmarks assessing how ready students are for college as a result of their secondary school preparation.

That being said, no admissions committee would seriously make decisions purely on the basis of a test score. A student’s profile is determined by a number of important criteria especially high school performance.  But, high schools vary widely in terms of academic challenge, curriculum and grading.  Many colleges find that middle of the pack graduates of large, suburban high schools are often far better prepared for undergraduate success than top students at smaller, less well-resourced secondary schools.

There are, in general, statistically predictable correlations between high school performance and entrance test scores.  When a student’s application reflects these patterns, i.e. top quintile on both high school rank and SAT score, an admissions office can know with some assurance about the academic potential of the applicant.  Conversely, when there is some significant dissonance between high school performance and scores, admission professionals get a signal that they must dig deeper to discover if there are factors impacting performance or testing that must be better understood.  

While ACT and SAT are just pieces of the admissions puzzle, the tests often confirm or reveal important information needed by the college to evaluate and, hopefully, counsel an applicant effectively.  The entrance tests do level the playing field.  No matter where a student has prepared for college, ACT and SAT provide a platform and framework that allows colleges some objective measure to compare applicants’ potential for college success.  Decades of data are available to study and evaluate how well the tests have served in predicting student success.  To abandon the tests now would dismiss all this record and leave colleges on their own using almost exclusively non-standardized, non-comparable data in decision-making.  One can only imagine the new endless debates that would emerge about perceived bias absent any measurement or baseline for evaluation.