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Trembling hands, flying graphite, nervous sweat. Anyone who's taken a standardized test recognizes those symptoms instantly. Millions of students take the SAT and ACT tests each year in hopes of earning admission to their dream college, but a growing movement insists these standardized tests are an unfair and inaccurate measure of academic worth. Should colleges continue to consider these tests when determining their future alumni?
I hail from the state of Washington, infamous for it's WASL (Washington Asessment of Student Learning) testing in grades 4, 7, 10, and nowadays pretty much all the others. Tests similar to the WASL are being used in place of standardized testing in classrooms across America. Tests like these, and their result have no correlation with academic value, seeing as they are corrected by teachers, rather than machines, amounting to varied scores for kids who put similar answers depending on who the corrector is. Also, these tests are commonly graded by a standard of "showing work" rather than getting the correct answer, and in certain portions, simply writing a longer answer is what gets you a better score. Things like this lead me to believe (yes this is a bit off topic, and feel free to label me a conspiracy theorist) that these tests are often used as a method of personal data collection derived from the views portrayed in one's answers on the test, carried out by state governments. Plus, teachers, students, and administrative staff HATE tests like the WASL. I don't know if this rule stands in other states with similar tests, but if a school scores low enough on the WASL, the government can come in, take over, start booting teachers, assigning different curriculums, etc. Decisions best left up to local school boards. In addition, these threats cause teachers to become nervous about their jobs and only teach kids what they need to know for the tests (known by local anti-WASL advocates as "teaching to the test") and neglect the things that our youth REALLY need to know.
- Brady
November 10, 2008 11:51PM
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I've been thrown through the BS that is the WASL for years now, and I really don't see the point in them. Can a few sets of questions really detail every last bit of knowledge a student has?
- F2XL November 11, 2008 1:36PM
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Colleges should do whatever they darn well please. If a college wants to specialize in teaching really intelligent students, that's its perogative. If a philanthropist wants to endow a college dedicated to providing educational opportunities to mediocre students, that's his own business, too.
A state's university system can dedicate itself to whatever legal mission the state legislature decides is in the best interest of the state (or, alternatively, in the best interest of its members' political careers).
If a college _wishes_ to favor more intelligent students, it needs a way to estimate students' intelligence. No estimate is perfect, but the S.A.T. is a pretty good one. If it uses it, however, fairness demands that it should allow applicants who undertest to offer alternate evidence of their intelligence.
- fsilber January 26, 2009 12:23PM
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Academic quality is embarrassing. Hence we need more rigorous college admission standards.
- bagpiper2005 October 26, 2008 3:44PM
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I am currently a freshman in college and could not agree more with the fact that schools should not base their acceptance on SAT scores. I had a good GPA, was involved in numerous extracurricular activities, and was the captain of two Varsity sports. Starting my Junior year in high school, I took SAT classes several days a week. I knew that I was a poor test taker so I felt that two years of a prep class would prepare me enough. When I got my SAT scores back, I was extremely disappointed to see that they did not meet the requirements of any of my top choices, and although I still applied, I was rejected. I am a great student, and was not accepted to colleges because I am a poor test taker. Is that fair?
- lsmeraldi October 26, 2008 7:45PM
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Admission is not based solely on SAT/ACT scores. Universities typically have an and/or requirement...that is a certain combination of SAT/ACT and GPA. Don't blame your bitterness on the fact that you were rejected because you did not meet that requirement. You do know you can always appeal the decision, don't you?
ECA's and being captain of two varsity sports should be irrelevant in admission standards. As mentioned, admission standards overall are way too low. Only about the top 1/3 of all graduating seniors should qualify to enter into college, but the fact is we let just anyone in and that's just not right.
- bagpiper2005 October 27, 2008 11:13AM
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You are correct in noting that the process does not rely exclusively on SAT/ACT scores. However, my point (and I think Ismeraldi's point) is that the scores don't match up with any other portion of college success.
And where does your "1/3 of seniors" statistic come from?
- Mark Truman December 1, 2008 7:32PM
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You are correct in noting that the process does not rely exclusively on SAT/ACT scores. However, my point (and I think Ismeraldi's point) is that the scores don't match up with any other portion of college success.
And where does your "1/3 of seniors" statistic come from?
- Mark Truman December 1, 2008 7:33PM
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But it should be. We let WAY too many idiots into college that have no business in college. So maybe not a percentage but a higher GPA. I'm saying we need much more stringent admission standards.
I'm sorry, but a "C" level high school GPA is not college material. A "B" really isn't either.
- bagpiper2005 December 1, 2008 7:53PM
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I can respect that you feel that college admissions are not stringent enough, but saying "it should be" or "we all know this" is not a substitute for evidence. The plural of anecdote is not data.
The issue here is the ACT or SAT. Let's leave debates like "Should college be harder to get admitted to?" to other debates.
- Mark Truman December 1, 2008 8:15PM
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Does scoring well on the SAT/ACT increase the probability of attending graduate school?
- ufcarazy February 6, 2009 8:45AM
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Yes, you're right that Colleges don't judge SOLELY on SAT, BUT it is a big part on getting into college . Here are the reasons why this is unfair in my opinion.
a. Language is made up MAINLY to communicate, and to get ideas across, it's not made to be used to determine a person's success in college. (FYI- 2/3 of the SAT grading scale is based on the English language- Writing + Critical Reading)
b. People coming from wealthier parts tend to do better on the SAT and other standard tests. ( My theory is that they got more tutoring opportunity than the less wealthy families).
c. Having a bad memory reduces your chance of getting a good score on the SAT, now Einstein had a pretty bad memory, but that's where mathematics kick in to our aid. Math doesn't require as much memorization as English, so we could excel in that instead of grammar, vocabularies, and writing.
d. People get nervous during tests, or they're naturally a bad test taker, you can't determine someone's success based on how well they could fill in bubbles.
e. The SAT system is "protecting" English language speakers, as you can see from the statistics of the 2007 SAT scores, whites tend to score better than all other races in 2/3 of the english sections, making up for their mathematics score. If you weren't a English speaker, you're at a disadvantage.
There are many more reasons concerning this topic, but this is all I'm going to give. The SAT is amazingly unfair. It's a pity that people have to go through this. Let's say if someone is very good in math and science and here comes this test that is based heavily on Language arts, what does he do? He definitely wants to get in a good college, so he studies. Now, it takes years to build up strong vocabulary fundamentals for the SAT, and he could have been excelling in his true passion/talent. This is the most unfair system I have seen in the 21st century, they should have a reform on this as soon as possible.
- lpbug May 31, 2009 12:40AM
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i've seen all too often high school athletes, and even now that i'm in college the athletes here that get very close to free rides, because of their sport, and they also seem to have a way to milk the system. If the SAT was your only reason for not getting into your top schools you must have seriously bombed it, and honestly it was probably for the best
- jcr0921 September 15, 2009 11:05PM
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From my reading of the literature around the SAT and ACT, neither claims to be "strongly correlated with college success". Both claim a moderate correlation with freshman-year GPA, and have evidence to support that claim. For better or worse, the standardized tests are just that--standardized--in ways that high school experiences, classes, and grades are not. It allows a direct comparison of students, and since colleges are risking their resources on the candidates they admit, the "level playing field" helps them pick the most likely students to make it through and become contributing alumni.
I've never seen anything that claims to relate to "college success" because no one can really define that term. There are a lot of ways one could claim "success" from a college experience, and graduation may not be the sole one.
- GrayCat January 17, 2009 9:50AM
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The ACT science questions don't require you to have memorized the periodic table of elements, but they do require you to be able to analyze and interpret data to draw conclusions from it. It's a test of scientific reasoning, a much better prediction of success in scientific fields than rote memorization could ever be.
The highest level of math required for graduation in most high schools is the equivalent of beginning Algebra II. It makes sense for the standardized testing to go up only to that point. Students who reach higher levels of math take SAT II exams, or AP or IB exams, to demonstrate their knowledge.
I have no problem with essay graders focusing on a student's command of language, rather than whether they happened to use an anecdotal example that wasn't entirely true. Those essays don't even have to be provably true in the first place -- they can be about your personal hopes and goals, or about a vivid memory, or your role model. Fact-checking has nothing to do with what's being tested on this portion of the test. (Were you aware that the math portion of the SAT isn't affected by a student's grammar?)
More importantly, though: these points all sound like "the test is too easy." How is that a reason for not considering the results? If you do incredibly poorly on a very easy test, doesn't that predict a lack of success in college? At best this argument is completely irrelevant to the point you are supposedly making, but at worst (for you) it's an argument for the other side.
- thoughtcounts Z October 23, 2008 8:17PM
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I'm not asserting that the test is simply "too easy." Instead, I'm noting that the tests aren't testing the concepts taught in schools.
At the very high and low ends of the tests, we learn quite a bit about students. Any student that can ace this exam is obviously well-qualified for college. Any student that struggles to complete Algebra I problems should obviously receive some remedial training. But what about the students that score in the middle? Are they unqualified for college or simply lost in content that they haven't been trained on?
- Mark Truman December 1, 2008 7:27PM
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Some kind of quantitative evaluation of students' abilities is necessary for admissions committees to have, if we want any kind of reasonable portion of the population going to college. Admissions committees can't spend a day with each applicant to learn everything about them and develop an accurate holistic evaluation of the student's capabilities.
Let's say a college has 10,000 applicants and they can admit 2,000. Perhaps the SAT or ACT is only a good predictor of the extreme cases. The admissions committee at this college can then rely on the numbers to accept 1,000 students and reject 1,000 students. That helps a lot. They now have only 8,000 applications to sift through in more detail, and a little more time to spend on each to pick the other 1,000 to admit. That's what we should do about the students who score in the middle -- we make sure they have also submitted letters of recommendation, and high school transcripts, and personal essays, and portfolios of their extracurricular activities. (In reality, admissions committees look over these things even for the people who score very well or very poorly on standardized tests, to make sure the test results weren't anomalous. But they can certainly spend less time on those applications because they have information you admit is reliable in their cases.)
No one is arguing that the SAT/ACT should be the sole determiner of college admission. No one is arguing that the tests are perfect. But in the absence of some better standardized test, and given that we agree they do provide some useful information, there's no reason not to include the test as one of many factors that admissions committees consider.
- thoughtcounts Z December 7, 2008 10:57AM
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Just to be clear, I am not arguing against the SAT/ACT being used as a sole determinant for college because that's not what happens. Never does an SAT/ACT keep a student out of a college on the basis of the score alone.
I am arguing that the test shouldn't be used at all. We shouldn't accept them at any school. They shouldn't bear any weight because they are flawed beyond repair and fundamentally unneeded. Right now the scores are used in much the same way you describe and it's a significant problem.
The primary flaw with your example is that you are assuming that the distributions of the scores are even. That's unlikely. If a school with an average ACT score of 25 receives 10,000 applications, they will get lots of scores around the 25, with some amount above and below.
That means that the mushy middle remains important. With only a few students far above the average, most students fall in the position where we must continue to look at them holistically even though they took the test!
So skip it. Stop supporting it. Stop feeding a beast that doesn't aid the process. Look at the numbers and realize that GPA and Course Rigor are the best indicators of student success. Have kids focus on earning As in the classroom instead of acing a test that's not useful to the process.
- Mark Truman December 8, 2008 9:03AM
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The SAT and ACT are highly reliable tests, meaning that if a candidate takes the exam repeatedly, in the vast majority of cases, that person will receive essentially the same score over and over. So even though someone is in the "mushy middle", he or she is likely in the right place compared to peers. Knowing that adds to the information being considered by a college admissions officer as part of the process.
And I don't think that anyone would argue against GPA and Course Rigor as desirable measures--if those things were remotely comparable from student to student, school to school. There is no objective measure of how grades are assigned or how rigorous courses are. Even AP courses, that come with relatively constrained curricula, require a large-scale standardized test at the end to determine how effectively the material was learned by the students who nominally were all taught an equivalently rigorous and challenging course. GPA has suffered from massive grade inflation over the last few decades, and has become steadily less meaningful as a differentiator of individual academic strength.
Standardized tests are not perfect, but they do play a useful role.
- GrayCat January 17, 2009 10:07AM
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GrayCat,
1) It is a highly reliable test. But that alone is not a good measurement of future student success. All that tells us is that the test is designed to produce consistent results.
You are making the common mistake: A broken test that returns the same wrong result every time is not accurate.
2) GPA is comparable. Studies have repeatedly shown that GPA is the single best indicator of future college success. Yes, grades have inflated. Yes, it's hard to judge from school to school. But in general, As are earned for working hard and turning in assignments. Fs are earned for not showing up to class and not doing your work.
The Standardized tests don't add anything of value!
- Mark Truman January 17, 2009 11:11AM
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I did not indicate that I believed that reliability was the only property these assessments have--they are also a valid measure of performance. I do not agree with your premise that the test returns a wrong result, so your conclusion is specious.
The test items are not selected solely to cover content--there you and many others make a common, albeit mistaken, assumption. The items are selected so that the content is relevant to the content taught in schools, yes, but they are not intended as a comprehensive survey of everything learned there. They aren't some grand comprehensive exit exam. Instead, the items are selected as indicators of content knowledge and understanding PLUS another important aspect--they correlate with whatever it is that predicts freshman GPA in students. This is why the elimination of the analogy items from the SAT was not a good idea. It may be true that this content is not a prominent feature of many college educational requirements; nonetheless, the items were a good predictor of freshman academic achievement and eliminating them in response to political pressure just reduced the predictive power of that exam. There is something about understanding how to complete an analogy that is related in some way to something that helps students achieve an acceptable GPA in the freshman year.
Neither the ACT nor the SAT predicts anything perfectly, but no one claims that they do. You appear to be equating imperfection in prediction with a complete lack of value--which is inappropriate. Imperfect measures still have value. If you don't believe that, next time you are at your doctor's for blood work, make sure he takes it all and not just a sample. The sample blood test result is correlated with your overall blood composition outcome if it were tested, but not perfectly! Nonetheless, a test of a sample of your blood has value in establishing probable information about your state of health...
You assert that grades are comparable. There is a considerable body of work that asserts just the opposite. The proportion of students reporting an "A" GPA has risen from less than 10% to more than 30% in the last few decades. Has overall student performance really increased that much? Are all the students reporting a GPA greater than 4.0--and there are a lot of them now--really so far above what was previously defined as "outstanding"? If this is the case, why has the proportion of students required to complete remedial work just to enter the standard freshman courses increased even more dramatically than the rate of those A averages? And to refer to one of your earlier issues with the tests, supposing we accept that the As and the Fs are useful indicators of academic qualities (questionable, but let's assume it). What about the "mushy middle" B-through-D students? How are they to be compared and sorted for admissions purposes?
I note with some amusement that you state that "As are earned for working hard and turning in assignments". Is that it? In your definition (and apparently in that of many of our schools), a student doesn't have to submit any actual correct answers or demonstrate mastery of the content to earn an A--just turn in the assignments. Interesting, especially in light of your claims about the properties and comparability of an A grade point average. I have little doubt you will claim that the correctness is implied--that's another point on which I suspect we disagree.
- GrayCat January 17, 2009 11:44AM
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I also teach test prep classes, and I too have seen students increase their scores by leaps and bounds with only a couple months of prepping. But without exception this only happens with the bright students. The mediocre ones never improve, or improve very little. And the average ones improve moderately. If the SAT and ACT are phased out, students who are not ready for college will not get any leg up in the admission process, though they are always the ones who clamor the loudest for the SAT and ACT to be abolished. It really doesn't matter if colleges use the tests or not, the students who are ready for college will get in, and the ones who aren't won't. Grades, AP & honors courses, essays, and letters of recommendation are all enough to show who is ready. I only vote for keeping the tests since it helps keep me employed...
- halola December 1, 2009 9:46PM
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Multiple choice and standardized tests are an insult to students who do their homework, study for tests, read thier book chapters, and participate in class. REASON: Multiple choice tests, give even those who dont earn their grades a chance to succeed, and this is unfair. i could elaborate more on this topic , but i have a paper to write.
- Wyatt Wallen December 8, 2009 7:17PM
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GPAs are clearly impacted on so many levels by forces outside of a student's intelligence. SATs are impacted by these things as well but much less so than GPAs. The best solution would be to make the SATs much harder to where the advantages of tutoring and financial/family advantage would be negligible. In my own opinion most people who want to do away with SATs are those who are simply not as intelligent as their GPAs make them out to be. People who in my own opinion have gone beyond wanting to cheat the education system, to wanting to redesign it to shut out the truly intelligent people and let in the mindless majority. It is very easy to cheat through high school with tutors, parental help, lack of outside responsibilities, flattery, etc. For people like myself from broken homes, who worked a lot in high school and had serious survival needs to deal with, a standardized test is a blessing and the one piece of paper that is undeniable proof I'm not an idiot. And now people want to cheat others like me out of it, so they can officially shut us out of the system and call stupid people brilliant and smart people idiots. At the end of the day, a student with a very high SAT score and a low GPA, is much brighter than one with poor SAT scores and a high GPA. However these people are of course vastly outnumbered which is the only reason we don't come to the logical conclusion that standardized tests should be the only criteria for college admissions. The only people who seem to have a problem with the SATs are advantaged kids who are confronted with the fact that it is something they can't use to misrepresent their intelligence on paper, so they can get jobs they are not qualified for and success they don't deserve. Or disadvantaged people without innate intelligence who are looking to blame outside forces. As far as SAT scores not being an accurate measurement of college success, I'd argue that is a problem with the colleges themselves not the students. Musical ability, social skills etc have nothing to do with a strong logical ability which is the glue that holds all of society together. School is about book smarts, anything else has its proper place elsewhere. Society should be based around IQ intelligence since it is what gets things done at the end of the day. Most of societies problems stem from these weaknesses in the education system that are the basis for providing wealth and power to people who are genetically intellectually inferior, over naturally brilliant minds. Everything gets dumbed down to accommodate the average man, at the expense of the intelligent. And you end up with average people running around as if they are brilliant and their opinions are beyond debate. If you don't think that is a disastrous problem, just take a look around at the country you live in and the problems we are facing. The education system has become just one more system manipulated for political reasons. The real problem with the SATs of course is that it hurts people's precious feelings, and forces them to move out of candyland and back to reality to take a realistic look at their own abilities and limitation. And we can't have that in America because then people won't feel special and we couldn't run around anymore talking as if we are brilliant while acting like morons.
- Bomberman February 6, 2009 2:40PM
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Should Colleges Consider SAT/ACT Scores?
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What does "consider" mean?
To "consider" something does not mean to make it the sole determiner of the outcome. Are SAT/ACT scores a piece of information that could potentially communicate something useful to an admissions committee? The answer is obviously yes. Should college admissions be based solely on standardized test scores, to the exclusion of all other possibly contradictory information? Of course not. This is not worth debating.
- thoughtcounts Z
October 23, 2008 7:57PM
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Of course
And, quite frankly, I don't think they're given enough merit.
I'll also go on to say that college admission standards are way too low and college graduation requirements are also way too low. We let more people into college than should be in college, and we graduate people from college who should not have even gotten into college in the first place and/or give half effort or less and still graduate.
There's a real problem with this.
- bagpiper2005
October 26, 2008 3:42PM
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well...
seems to me you believe that the uneducated deserve to be educated? while I will not address your views on graduate requirements, I do think that entrance requirements should be pretty low.
- userk
June 25, 2009 1:55PM
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The Reason
The reason I'm saying yes is 1. What is the alternative option? and 2. Colleges consider multiple other things in reviewing applications, the SAT/ACT is just the biggest factor.
- Dylandts
August 13, 2009 8:25PM
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Yes, but low on the list
I scored a combined 1510 on the math/verbal portions of the SAT (with minimal prep, I might add ), which opened a lot of doors for me. But personally, I almost find it an embarrassment. I would make the case that it places emphasis on the wrong thing, which is the ability of the student to reason as compared to the student's work ethic.
In fact, my scholastic performance is nothing special. I probably average around a B. But I am very passionate about my field of study and have had great success in extracurricular journalism . Contrived coursework just doesn't sit well with me, and neither do these contrived tests.
If it was me, I would make all college admission requirements subjective to the student's accomplishments in high school and their vision for the future. This would save students money they would otherwise spend on a meaningless degree, and would encourage them to spend some time thinking about what they actually want to do before they go into college without a plan.
All that said, high SATs do show a certain ability to reason through logically constructed problems. So sure, they should be considered. But far down the list of priorities. Pre-college accomplishment and passion for the field should be considered more highly.
- losangelesgirl
December 18, 2009 2:33PM
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