Critics Say SAT Can Be Useful but Is Overrated : Education: Even those who endorse the test for measuring an individual student’s aptitude warn against using it to evaluate a whole school.

Come March 31, thousands of Orange County students will face off against the Scholastic Aptitude Test, armed with three years of high school education and a couple of No. 2 pencils.

The difference of a few points on the 3 1/2-hour exam will chart the educational future of some of those youngsters, strongly influencing the selection of colleges that will be available to them. The SAT provides one of very few objective measures for admissions officers, so some depend on the test to compare students from wildly different schools and school districts.

But the SAT’s uniqueness also has created a conundrum for educators: Even as they depend on the exam, many harbor doubts about its ability to predict a student’s collegiate success and fret over continuing allegations that the SAT is biased against ethnic minorities and women. Even educators who endorse the test for measuring an individual student’s aptitude warn against using it to evaluate a whole school.

“The test is biased, definitely,” said Sarah Stockwell, university tests coordi nator for FairTest, a nonprofit company in Cambridge, Mass., which advocates fairer standardized tests. “It consistently under-predicts females, and the same is true for minorities.”

Girls get better high school grades than boys, Stockwell points out. They also do better in college classes, yet they consistently get lower SAT scores. Test bias, and the nature of the exam itself--it rewards educated guessing and ability to make quick decisions under pressure--favor boys taking the test, she said.

Test advocates are just as firm in their denial.

“There is no bias in the test,” retorts Janice Gams, a spokeswoman for the College Board, which sponsors the SAT. Although they acknowledge that women and blacks score lower than white males on the test, Gams and officials at the Educational Testing Service blame the discrepancy on differences in students’ educational backgrounds, not on problems with the test.

Strongly held views on both sides leave little common ground between FairTest and the College Board, but what agreement there is tends to center around the use of the test as a way of evaluating a school or district. Better schools do not necessarily produce better scores, testing officials and their critics emphatically agree.

“Using these scores in aggregate form as a single measure to rank or rate teachers, educational institutions, districts or states is invalid, because it does not include all students. And in being incomplete, this use is inherently unfair,” according to the College Board.

What is just as important as the average score by a school’s students is the percentage of students who take the test. When a higher percentage of students take the test, it almost always causes a school’s average to dip because it means that more than just the top students are trying their hand at an SAT.

About a million youngsters a year take the multiple-choice test, which is divided into a verbal and mathematical section. Each portion includes a possible 800 points, and the test is administered several times a year, mostly to high school juniors and seniors.

The fear that some critics have is that parents will single out a school’s average SAT score as a measure of the school’s program. If schools then feel pressure to increase their scores, they could be tempted to discourage marginal students from taking the test.

“That’s a great concern,” said William Habermehl, an assistant superintendent of the Orange County Department of Education. “It used to be true with the CAP (California Assessment Program) tests that some schools hoped many of their 12th-graders would not show up on test day so that the school scores would be better.”

CAP scores are designed to judge schools, so students do not suffer if they fail to show up for it. But discouraging a youngster from taking an SAT can have dire consequences: Many selective colleges require the test, and students who haven’t taken it face an uphill admissions struggle.

As the SAT has become almost as important as grades or class ranking in determining some college admission decisions, a flourishing and controversial business has taken root. Test-coaching services, some of which promise gains of 100 points on the 1,600-point test, are doing a brisk trade, racking up millions of dollars of business annually.

In the process, the coaching companies may be contributing to the very biases that some of them deplore. According to managers of the Princeton Review, for instance, the SAT discriminates against poor children, particularly inner-city ethnic minorities, whose background gives them little preparation for some test questions.

One oft-cited example was a vocabulary question years ago that tested students’ knowledge of the relationship between yacht and regatta. The question was dropped after critics protested that it was biased toward children in upper-class families.

The Review counts itself among those critics, often lashing out at bias and inadequacy in the SAT and protesting that poor children suffer as a result. Yet the company’s coaching services are available to those families that can shell out $600 for a testing course, so the benefits of its testing techniques are mainly bestowed on wealthy children.

The company offers some scholarships and other training, but most of its patrons are middle- and upper-class youngsters, Review officials say.

“The fact that the Princeton Review exists exacerbates the differences between wealthy and poor kids,” acknowledged Paul Kanareck, program director for the Review’s Orange County operations. “That’s a basic conflict.”

College Board and ETS officials remain steadfast in their defense of the test. Isolated examples of bad judgment or bias have emerged over the years, they admit, but those were quickly purged. Now, panels of educators screen the test for bias, and changes in the SAT are contemplated to better emphasize reading and writing skills.

While those changes are implemented, the SAT will continue to hold a special, if sometimes embattled, place in the nation’s educational system.

“SATs still provide a major indicator to colleges,” Habermehl said. “And they will for some time to come.”

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