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 has been raging for years. The level of intensity was kicked up when the College Board released new studies of the test last year, which were 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.’’
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