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I
have an 18-year-old daughter, Heather. She’s a bright, energetic kid–in
the National Honor Society, captain of her tennis team, regularly promoted
in her part-time job until she is now a store manager at an ice cream
shop. Somehow, she juggles school,
work, sports, a job, and an active social life.
She’s learned to set priorities and to live with the consequences
when the time required to do everything is too short.
To me Heather has the basic skills to succeed at whatever she
wants.
But
the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) were something else. Her scores
weren’t abysmal, but they were certainly disappointing to her and surprising
to us. An early indication of
trouble occurred with the preliminary SAT (PSAT) taken as a junior.
Then in her senior year she took the SAT three times and the
Achievement Tests twice in an effort to raise her scores.
Friends in similar situations started signing up for SAT preparation
courses and rumors of impressive score gains filtered back.
The cost of these courses deterred her, however, and eventually
Heather reached an internal accommodation between her expectations and
the reality of her scores. Places
like Rice, Carnegie-Mellon, and Cornell, which had featured prominently
in her early selection of possible schools, fell by the wayside. Applications were submitted to a much more restricted set of colleges.
Just
to continue this personal story a bit longer, I’m happy to report that
in the fall Heather will enroll at a college seemingly well suited to
her interests. I’ve little doubt
that both the college and she will benefit from that enrollment.
But a part of me will always wonder how things would be different
had she gone to Rice or Cornell.
In
this article, I’d like to describe the principal issues surrounding
the use of standardized tests in college admissions by concentrating
on the SAT. You should be aware
that this is a controversial topic with little agreement. On one side
are the Educational Testing Services (ETS- the developer of the SAT),
most college admissions offices, and some academic researchers. On the other side are consumer advocate groups (e.g. Ralph Nader’s
group and Fair Test), some journalists, students’ groups at scattered
colleges, a few admissions offices, and some academic researchers. The battle lines are well entrenched and any
movement occurs slowly.
A
Bit of History
Around
the turn of the century, the transition from high school to college
was pretty chaotic, particularly in the East where most of the older
colleges were located. At that
time selective colleges required candidates for admission to take entrance
examinations in several different subjects.
Each college developed its own examinations. Because there was little uniformity across colleges, a candidate
for admission to two or three schools could end up studying for many
different tests in several subjects.
In
1901, the College Entrance Examination Board was started to create order
out of this chaos by developing a set of common examinations that could
be used to help make admissions decisions at a variety of colleges. At first, the College Board held essay examinations
in nine subjects common in secondary schools at the time (English,French,
German, Latin, Greek, history, mathematics, physics, and chemistry.)
In
the 1920’s the examinations were changed in several significant ways,
making them similar to the SAT today.
First, essay questions were dropped in favor of multiple-choice
questions. Second, the examinations were divided into
two major sections–verbal and quantitative.
And third, the College Board sought to sever the tie between
the examinations and the high school curriculum by testing for “aptitude”
instead of “achievement.” Instead
of testing students’ specific knowledge in a field (e.g., who wrote
The Origin of Species), the tests probed for more general abilities
of reasoning and analysis. Today
the College Board prefers to use the words “developed abilities” instead
of “aptitude” to distinguish what the examination measure.
At
first, only a small fraction of the college-going population actually
took the College Board entrance examinations.
For example, in 1907, the tests were administered to about 1,000
students and three-quarters of these were seeking admission to just
two colleges (Barnard and Columbia.) Growth in test usage occurred slowly. Even by 1950, only 15 percent of freshmen going
to college actually took the SAT. In
the last forty years, however, the test has become a common rite of
passage for students seeking entrance to college. Now, more than a million college-bound seniors take the SAT each
year.
A
Dialogue
I’d
like to get at some of the issues surrounding the use of SAT tests in
college admissions by introducing two friendly (but fictional) adversaries.
One is Peter R. Ochs (PRO for short); the other is Dr. Constance
O. Newton (CON). Peter is an admissions director at a selective
private college and a strong advocate of the SAT and its use in making
admissions decisions. Constance
is a tenured professor of educational policy whose research specialty
is the transition from high school to college.
She believes that SAT should be eliminated from the college admissions
process. To date, she has been
unsuccessful in convincing Peter of the need to change the college’s
policies on admissions testing. What
follows is typical of their long-standing debate.
CON:
Well, Peter, let’s start with a tough one.
The SAT is basically biased against groups like minorities
and women. Why is it, for
example, that composite (math + verbal) SAT scores for blacks are
200 points lower than for whites?
And why is it that scores for women are nearly 60 points lower
than those for men? Students’ chances of being admitted to this college are determined
in part by their SAT scores and the test isn’t even fair. How can you justify that?
PRO:
You’ve got it backwards, Constance! Nobody disputes that minorities
score lower than whites or that women score less than men on the SAT. But that doesn’t necessarily make the tests
biased. It’s just as likely
that the scores reflect differences in their background–some
kids simply have greater opportunities to develop the kinds of abilities
being examined in the SAT. There’s a higher proportion of poverty among
blacks, for instance, than among whites.
So it’s not surprising that whites score higher.
CON:
Poverty won’t work as a reason why women score less than men.
PRO:
No, but women tend to take different kinds of courses in high school
than men. For example, they’re
less likely to enroll in science and math courses.
You’d expect some of this to be picked up as lower average
scores in the SAT math section. I
just don’t buy the biased argument at all.
CON:
Suppose it’s partially true, as you claim, that society produces the
score differences through inequality of opportunity (in the case of
some minority groups) or through restrictive social norms (in the
case of women.) Using the SAT test as an admissions criterion just
perpetuates those inequities. Denying students admission to a selective school
on the basis of SAT scores just puts another impediment in front of
them.
PRO:
You don’t have a very good understanding of how admissions decisions
are made at this college! SAT scores are never the sole determination
of admissions. We also look
at high-school grades, the types of courses taken, recommendations
from teachers and counselors, and a written essay in which students
can introduce themselves to us. All
of these things are considered when making admissions decisions.
Many students with low SAT scores but other strengths are accepted
for admission in this college.
CON:
Why use the SAT tests at all? Isn’t it true that if you ignored the
SAT information, very few of your admissions decisions would be different?
There have been some very good studies by colleagues of mine showing
that colleges can admit especially the same students with the same
likelihood of academic success by basing the decision totally on high
school grades. The SAT tests are redundant!
PRO:
I’m not going to try to refute the studies, because I really don’t
understand the statistical basis for them.
But I do know that the SAT tests add something to admissions
decisions that you can’t get by looking at high school grades alone.
Let me give you an example. We get students from all over the country
who apply for admission. Here’s
an application from a student at Minnetonka High School in Minnesota;
and here’s another from a young woman at Encina High School in California.
Neither of these is a school that we regularly visit.
Yet each student has a B+ average.
How am I to know which one is the stronger candidate without
knowing more about the schools than I can find out easily?
Or, how can I compare these two students to another with the
same grade average at a local school where I know the grading practices
are very rigorous? I can’t! The SAT is a nationally normed test
that is widely available and provides me with some kind of common
denominator that I need to evaluate applicants.
CON:
This college is in a unique situation, however, in that it has more
qualified applicants than can possibly be accepted.
Very few colleges in the U.S. are truly selective in this sense. Yet most of the private colleges have some
kind of admissions testing requirement, even those that essentially
admit anyone who applies. How
do colleges justify requiring students to submit SAT tests if 90 percent
are going to be accepted anyway? In fact, studies have shown that
most of these nonselective colleges rarely use SAT information in
the admissions except for the truly borderline decisions.
PRO:
There is something in what you say.
It seems somewhat illogical to require SAT tests and then not
to use them. But in fact there may be more logic to the
requirement than meets the eye. College
presidents, vice presidents, deans and the faculty like to report
average SAT scores. The test
scores provide a simple barometer of how the college is doing.
One can point with pride to rising average SAT scores and can
take steps to correct falling average scores.
For top administrators, the SAT is used as a proxy for student
quality and as an indicator of the public’s perception of the college. Regardless of whether the SAT tests are used for admissions decisions,
they’re still used by very powerful figures within colleges and universities
as an indicator of institutional excellence.
CON:
Well, that gets into the whole area of use and abuse of SAT scores–they’re
being used for all kinds of inappropriate things now. For example, almost every year there are newspaper reports comparing
average SAT scores by state that provide entirely misleading information.
It just doesn’t make sense to compare the average SAT in Iowa,
where only 6 percent of seniors take the SAT, with those in Connecticut
where about two-thirds take the test. And it’s the height of futility to compare
SAT averages by high school as if they indicate the quality of education
provided by the school.
PRO:
No argument there. From my
perspective as an admissions director, I’m also concerned with the
distortion that tests bring to the whole admissions process. There is an industry now that’s sprung up around
admissions testing, with all the books and computer programs to help
students prepare for the tests. Then
there are those expensive SAT preparation courses that make outlandish
claims about the score increases they are able to achieve for students. These courses are basically unfair because
only kids from wealthier families can afford them. So they interject an ugly class bias to the whole admissions process.
The whole thing basically feeds off the anxiety that students
and their families feel about the tests.
It’s even backed up into the high school curriculum, so that
schools are now providing SAT coaching courses for students.
It’s kind of ironic that the SAT test, which was designed to
test aptitude and not achievement, has come back to alter the high
school curriculum.
CON:
Maybe we should stop while we still agree on something.
Final Thoughts
The above discussion
is pretty typical of the debate about college admissions testing today.
There is little common ground and neither side seems particularly
persuaded by the other’s logic.
My
own personal opinions fall near those of Constance in the above discussion.
I’m troubled that some test questions do seem to be culturally
biased; that women, minorities, and others are being penalized for lower
scores in a variety of ways (e.g., fewer National Merit Scholarships,
these being awarded on the basis of the PSAT); that most nonselective
colleges do not need to require the tests in order to make informed
admissions decisions; that the student anxiety level is high enough
to support a small industry catering to their test fears; that, because
of cost, there is not equal access to test coaching courses; that students
use their test scores to limit unnecessarily the range of colleges to
which they apply; that a significant amount of instructional time in
secondary schools is now being spent on preparing students for admissions
tests; and that score averages are abused in a variety of nonsensical
comparisons.
Some
modification of the present role of admissions testing seems warranted. I’m not sure what form this might take, but
a number of things are encouraging:
-
Several selective
colleges (e.g., Bates, Bowdoin, Union, Middlebury) have eliminated
or made optional their admissions testing requirement without undue
strain on their ability to make admissions decisions;
-
At least one
prominent educational organization (the Carnegie Foundation for
the Advancement of Teaching) has cautiously proposed the need for
a new kind of assessment program to be used in the transition from
high school to college;
-
Several new
tests or assessment techniques are being developed to evaluate a
wider range of talents than just academic aptitude (e.g., the Sternberg
Multidimensional Abilities Test); and
-
There is increased
recognition by colleges that success in college is broader than
scholarship, that it includes leadership and independent accomplishment,
and that new measures must be used to identify students who will
be "successful" in this broader definition.
There are many
reasons that the status quo in admissions testing may remain intact.
But it's at least possible that something new will evolve.
Reprinted by permission
of the author.
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