Why the SATs Aren’t All Bad
By Jesse Singal - Sep 23rd, 2008 at 10:39 amI missed this New York Times story when it ran on Sunday:
A commission convened by some of the country’s most influential college admissions officials is recommending that colleges and universities move away from their reliance on SAT and ACT scores and shift toward admissions exams more closely tied to the high school curriculum and achievement.
The commission’s report, the culmination of a yearlong study led by William R. Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, comes amid growing concerns that the frenzy over standardized college admissions tests is misshaping secondary education and feeding a billion-dollar test-prep industry that encourages students to try to game the tests.
On the whole this is certainly good news; the test-prep culture is pretty sickening, and is one of the clearest, simplest rebuttals to arguments that effort can trump class on a large scale–if two kids try equally hard, but one has the benefit of $250-per-hour tutoring, then it’s clear that the rich kid’s efforts will pay greater dividends.
All that said, I do think there is a need for something like the SATs in certain contexts. Not every smart kid does well in high school, and it’s worth keeping in mind that the middle teenage years aren’t the happiest, most productive of many peoples’ lives. Just as someone’s ability to score well on a standardized test shouldn’t be the end-all, be-all measure of their potential worth as a college student, I’d argue that high-school achievement can be an overrated metric as well. There’s a certain type of kid who deserves a chance to show his or her potential in a context outside of school or extracurriculars, who should have some means of saying to potential colleges, “Look, I haven’t been on my game for the last four years, but here’s why I will do well in college…” An eye-poppingly high score on a standardized test can help buttress such an argument.
Again–I’m totally with the commission that such scores shouldn’t be an important part of the admissions game. But, assuming that we can reform the tests to bring them closer to some agreed-upon notion of fairness, they should remain as an option for teenage underachievers who want to demonstrate that they have the potential to perform at a high academic level.
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