SATs Use Comes Under New Scrutiny by Colleges

The Scholastic Aptitude Test, a cause of perennial teen-age anxiety and a staple in the college admissions routine for five decades, is coming under new scrutiny in higher-education circles at the same time high schools and their students are assigning greater significance to this academic rite of passage.

Vermont’s elite Middlebury College announced in April that it would no longer require applicants to take the SATs. Union College, a New York liberal arts institution that had required the test for more than 50 years, made a similar announcement a few weeks earlier. Bates College in Maine declared the SAT optional three years ago. Bowdoin College has not required scores since 1969.

College officials have raised several concerns about the test: It does not predict college performance as well as high school grades or subject-area achievement tests; low scores can unnecessarily discourage students from applying to certain schools; and minorities, women and students from low-income families consistently score below white males.

But many administrators said they were most concerned that the test has taken on undue significance among high school students and their parents. The result is high stress and increasingly popular, high-priced test-preparation courses that can give unfair advantage to students from middle- and upper-income families.

“We just got very dismayed at the amount of emotional energy being devoted to SATs by students and their parents,” said Peter Blankman, spokesman for Union College. “It’s almost become the tail that wags the educational dog.”

The actions of a few schools can hardly be classified as a stampede: 1,600 institutions still use the SAT, and in the last decade, hundreds of institutions have begun to require the test. But decisions by these selective, Eastern colleges carry weight around the country. The move away from SATs also indicates that the longstanding internal deliberations among administrators about the pros and cons of standardized testing have intensified.

Several other voices are contributing to the debate. Students at Brown University organized and came close to passing a referendum in April calling for administrators to declare the test optional. The students, who vowed to organize similar protests on other campuses, claimed that the test is culturally biased and flawed as a predictor of scholastic success.

Also this spring, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a Cambridge-based public-interest group, released a study charging that women were losing millions of dollars in scholarships because they score an average of 61 points below men on the SAT.

Finally, in a report issued this year, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching urged institutions to drop standardized test scores as admissions requirements unless they are actually used as a yardstick in the selection process. Ernest L. Boyer, who heads the foundation, said two-thirds of the 30 institutions he studied rely only marginally on the scores but continue to require them to maintain “an aura of selectivity.”

“If you don’t use it, just to require students to go through this is not being fully fair,” said Boyer, who recommended that a new system of assessment be developed for college admissions.

The College Board, which administers the test through the Educational Testing Service, agrees that high school grades are a better predictor of academic success, but argues that the prediction is even more accurate when SAT scores are combined with grades. The organization also offers 14 achievement tests designed to measure a student’s knowledge of a particular subject, such as mathematics, history or a language.

Janice Gams, a spokeswoman for the College Board, said differences in minority and female test scores reflect differences in academic preparation, income and other factors.

“The SAT is not biased,” she said, “it reflects variations in certain subgroups.”

More Colleges Use Tests

She added that the actions making the test optional had been given “inordinate attention” in light of decisions at 400 colleges over the last nine years to begin using the test.

The SAT, which was taken by nearly 1.7 million students last year, is administered in a three-hour morning session. It is divided into two parts: 85 questions on the verbal section and 60 on the math section. Both are designed to measure ability more than achievement.

The results are used not only in the admissions process but also to counsel students on where they need assistance and as a means of placing them in appropriate courses.

The test was created in 1926, when the notion of measuring basic intelligence, rather than achievement, was in vogue. SATs grew to prominence in the postwar years as higher education boomed and college administrators sought ways to assess the wave of prospective students.

Variations Compensated

The standardized nature of the test was an attempt to compensate for great variations in the quality of high schools and teachers, a point that takes on some irony in the current era when high schools, districts and states are intent on comparing themselves based on their students’ SAT scores.

“Now, 60 years later, we’re less confident we can measure innate ability so we’ve started to use the score to measure school performance, absolutely turning the intention of that examination on end,” Boyer said.

The SAT is not the only standardized test whose status is changing. Last year, Johns Hopkins University dropped the requirement that applicants to its medical school submit scores for the widely used Medical College Admissions Test. The decision, said spokeswoman Ghita Levine, was made so that undergraduates could spend less time preparing for the test and “to encourage a broader type of student to consider medicine as a career.”

Applicant Pool Soars

In the following year, the applicant pool increased by 50%, she said.

Harvard’s Business School announced two years ago that it would no longer require students to take the Graduate Management Admissions Test, pointing again to an overemphasis on scores and the failure of the test to predict which students would make good general managers.

But the SAT has received the greatest scrutiny because “it is such a symbol of selective admissions,” said James Crouse, a professor of education and sociology at the University of Delaware and co-author of a book on the test.

“There’s a growing group of people in positions to influence policy makers who are beginning to question the test, largely on the basis of academic and scholarly studies,” he said.

Overreaction Cited

But others, even those at colleges where the SAT is optional, said their concern is motivated less by problems with the SAT than by the overreaction it has prompted in high school circles.

“We’re not doing it to hammer the SAT,” said Rick Dalton, director of enrollment planning at Middlebury. “We’re doing it to make a statement to kids. They’ll get in because of what they do well, not because of what they don’t do well.”

At Middlebury, students can still submit SAT scores along with scores from three achievement tests. They also have the option of submitting results from the American College Testing Program exam, known as the ACT, or five achievement tests.