http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/the-growing-backlash-against-the-sat/?scp=2&sq=wake%20forest%20smith%20sat&st=cseTranslation. If you go to college after 2009 be prepared for complete idiots who tie up the class with even more retarded questions than are already being asked.
I wonder if they are trying to help any specific groups out???
The Growing Backlash Against the SAT
By The Editorial Board
Wake Forest University and Smith College have gotten a lot of attention since their announcements that they will no longer require prospective students to submit SAT and ACT scores with their applications.
The burst of publicity no doubt made their admissions offices happy. At a time when colleges are eager to elevate their brands - and are competing vigorously for students - dropping the SAT and ACT can be a helpful marketing tool.
The Wake Forest and Smith announcements are also part of a backlash against the use — and misuse — of the SAT. A growing number of schools have decided to drop the test, and there is an increasingly fractious debate underway about the validity of using the SAT to predict student performance in college.
The S.A.T., after all, is not a measure of creativity, drive or other factors that can affect student performance. Despite these caveats, the test is widely touted as a sacred index that tells all. Educational rating services evaluate colleges based partly on the SAT scores of their students. Real estate brokers market homes based on the average scores at local public schools. Bond-rating companies even consider SAT scores when judging a college’s creditworthiness.
That debate about the validity of the SAT was kicked up a notch last month, when the College Board released new studies of the test, which was revamped — amid much hullabaloo — three years ago. The Times’ Tamar Lewin wrote that the 3-hour and 45-minute test — with a new written component — “predicts college success no better than the old test, and not quite as well as a student’s high school grades.’’
There is also the troubling fact that SAT scores track with student income. Wake Forest President Nathan O. Hatch took issue with that in an opinion piece in the Washington Post in which he explained his school’s decision to go test-optional.
Mr. Hatch cited a California study, which he said showed that “SAT scores correlated with family income but not with college grades’’ and that “the SAT was the poorest predictor of college performance when compared with high school grades and performance on subject tests.’’
When it looked at admissions applications, Wake Forest “read and evaluated the essays and weighed a range of factors,” Mr. Hatch said. “But we thought that our SAT requirement sent students the opposite message - that in the end what counted was performance on a standardized test.’’
Mr. Hatch believes that the college entry examinations are partly to blame for the dearth of low income students at the best colleges. Reservations along these same lines have prompted a growing number of small liberal arts colleges to drop the test requirement.
Some schools that do so find that they broaden the applicant pool with no decline in academic ability. By following the small-college example, Mr. Hatch says, Wake Forest hopes to encourage momentum for further change.
Are some of the public colleges over-emphasizing the SAT, shutting out students who would otherwise perform well at the college level? According to a 2006 study by the Education Trust, Engines of Inequality, the answer is yes.
It is particularly troubling to see this sort of exclusion occuring at public colleges and universities, which were created with the goal of offering broad access in exchange for taxpayer support. That compact has gone by the boards at flagship campuses, which have increasingly come to define themselves not by whom they include but by how many applicants they keep out - based on SAT scores and other indexes that correlate to an uncomforable extent with wealth.
To put it another way, the flagship campuses are bypassing low income students who have few educational options and competing for high-achieving, high-income students who could attend college just about anywhere.
By going test-optional, Wake Forest and Smith hope to broaden their applicant pools and increase access for groups that are underrepresented at selective schools. Those are worthy goals.
Topic: More schools dropping SAT requirment for entry into college (Read 984 times)