It may be time to throw in the towel on the conventional application of the SAT and ACT tests. The report recently released by the National Association of College Admission Counseling is only the most current criticism of the exams (or, more precisely, the application of the scores) that have been excessively relied on in decisions made by college admissions officers. In some ways, the simplest thing to do is to use the exams we’ve got more intelligently, sensitively and with greater restraint. But that has been suggested in the past, to no avail.
The new proposal talks about dropping the use of the test and putting greater emphasis on evidence more likely to determine a student’s capacity for academic success. William R. Fitzsimmons, who in real life is the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, chaired the NACAC study. He points out that inevitably standardized tests like the SAT and the ACT measure socio-economic opportunities, the qualities of secondary schools attended, and a host of things that may not tell us as much as we’d like to know, as equitably as we’d like to know it, about individual students. But, alas, typically there are two frustrating conclusions:
One is we ought to develop “a new test” that would predict college grades better than the ones we’ve got. Easier said than done. I wouldn’t mind seeing the new test before I completely turn my back on the old ones.
Second is the observation that the current exams induce people to spend a lot of time and money trying to game the system, as if exactly the same wouldn’t happen if you had a new test. We have to be honest with ourselves. So long as there are more people who want to go to colleges, or other distinctive institutions, than a place like Harvard can or wants to admit, people are going to try and figure out how to achieve their goals, new test or not.
And Harvard has made that competition even more ferocious by providing ever more generous financial aid opportunities, making attendance more available to an expanded universe. Distributive justice is not something that is going to be achieved simply by doing away with or rewriting the SAT exam. Moreover, we can be confident that whatever new schemes are developed in due course they will be revealed to have shortcomings and another commission will propose yet another innovation.
The commission believes that if the SAT is dropped three results will occur: (a) the “substitute” criteria will make the admissions process more equitable; (b) students might put more attention on their academic training if they were focused less heavily on the SAT exam; and © dropping the SAT’s might also “encourage high schools to broaden and improve curricula.” This presumes that high schools will have the resources for these additional courses offerings, something I am less confident of than is the commission.
It is worth remembering that today’s problem, the SAT exams, were yesterday’s solutions. The exams were created to introduce a form of meritocracy and to fight bias in the admissions arrangements of institutions like Harvard.
