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Home > Blogs > Springfield Schools News and Issues > Archives > 2008 > September > 23 > Entry
Saying goodbye to the SAT?
A panel of experts has recently recommended moving away from the standardized college admissions tests that have been used for the last several decades, according to the New York Times.
Ah, the SATs and ACTs. This is a debate that has been brewing for a while. Some schools have dropped the tests from their admissions process, while others are still including it in the process but with less importance. Most are still treating the tests the way they always have.
The panel of admissions officials concludes that the SAT and ACT really just measure the opportunities a student has had and not their potential for academic success.
At its upcoming annual meeting, the National Association for College Admissions Counseling will present the year-long study and recommend that colleges abandon the old minimum-score requirement for admissions.
Wittenberg University has already started down this road.
The report says that other College Board-administered tests — ones specific to subject, like Advanced Placement — are a better measure of a student’s aptitude.
This testing debate sounds an awful lot like another testing debate we hear about very frequently in education.
Think about what the admissions officials are saying in the article: the SAT and ACT seem to be assessing and rewarding test takers for factors out of their control: parental education level, class and race.
That’s the same thing we often hear about why accountability in schools shouldn’t focus so much on high-stakes testing. Districts with high populations of student sub-groups that typically do not perform as well as their peers — students with disabilities, economically disadvantaged and racial minorities — face more challenges to reach benchmarks than their wealthier counterparts.
That’s where the value-added measure that the state implemented this year comes in to play. Districts are rewarded if students make more than a year’s progress over the course of a year, regardless of what level that student reaches.
The SATs and ACTs, according to the national admission association, are even trickier with progress. Students who enroll in prep courses will usually see some benefit - an increase of 20 to 30 points. But economically disadvantaged kids are less likely to be able to enroll in those courses. And 20 to 30 points doesn’t really represent any increased knowledge, according to the report. That’s more like 100 points.
The thing is that people want some way to measure things, in almost every area of life. For education, testing is the traditional and most easily understood way to grasp what is happening in our schools.
But is it the best way? It seems college admissions experts are saying no, at least for college aptitude.
What do you think?
I took the ACT, based on a recommendation from my high school counselor. Many Mid-Western schools, including the one I planned to attend, took the ACT over the SAT anyway and I was never a stellar math student and students who were better at verbal sections usually did better on the ACT, he told me.
And then the scores came back. I did pretty well overall but actually did very well in math, raising a collective “What?” from most people who knew me well.
Based solely on those scores, it would seem I would have a high aptitude for math. Based on every single other thing I’ve ever done in my life, not so much.
But in general, I have always been a pretty good student and a very good tester. So in my experience, the overall score was probably a decent indicator but not the math score.
What are your experiences with standardized testing? Do you believe the ACTs and SATs are accurate indicators for a student’s higher education performance?
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