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Colleges dropping the SAT

No more SAT? Well, not quite. BoardBuzz was interested to learn in this Associated Press (AP) article that Wake Forest University has joined the list of mostly small liberal arts colleges that will no longer require applicants to take the SAT or its fellow college admissions test the ACT. For years high school students with dreams of going to college fretted over taking such tests. Many feared that their four years of high school performance would be wiped out with one bad performance on one test. Students applying to Wake Forest University and a number of other small liberal arts college across the country, fear no more. These schools believe that the SAT is not a good predictor of college success. Instead they will rely more heavily on each applicant's high school transcript, personal interview, and extracurricular activities. But does this spell the end for the SAT and ACT? Not likely. Many schools, especially large schools that receive thousands of applications a year, are unlikely to stop requiring the SAT or ACT any time soon. Although a student's academic performance in high school is the most important factor in getting accepted into college, college admission's tests do play an important role in the college admissions process. As independent college admissions consultant Steven Roy Goodman stated in the AP article:

"? it's very difficult to assess the quality of courses in high schools around the country and around the world, and to reconcile the different grading systems, and to take into account the grade inflation that we've seen in many schools throughout the United States."

Just as schools should not be judged purely on one test, neither should students. College admissions tests like the SAT and ACT are just one tool in determining how well a student will succeed in college. The same way that state test scores are just one tool in judging our local schools. To find out what other tools can be used to evaluate your local schools check out the Center for Public Education's Good Measures for Good Schools.

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on May 27, 2008 (boomark / email).