Dethroning the SAT

Editorial by Durham Herald-Sun, October 26, 2014.

Some eyebrows may have been raised by plans for a pilot program at N. C. Central University and two other historically black campuses in the UNC system to admit students with SAT scores below the minimum standard. Instead, the schools will place more emphasis on high school grade-point average in admitting up to 100 students a year.

The move might conjure suspicions of lowering standards and undermining education’s.

If you’re inclined to that worry, realize that rising doubt of the validity of the Scholastic Aptitude Test is transforming admissions policy at many colleges and universities. The pilot program at NCCU, Fayetteville State University and Elizabeth City State University is far less sweeping, for example than changes at Wake Forest University. That school a few years ago became the first top-30 national university in U.S. News and World Report’s widely watched rankings to make SAT scores optional in an admissions application.

For a generation or more, critics have worried the SAT not only poorly predicts college success, but demonstrably tilts the playing field its meritocracy-focused champions claimed it leveled.

Todd Balf, in a lengthy look at the SAT – and plans by its new CEO, David Coleman, to overhaul it – in the New York Times Magazine last March summed up the criticisms:

“Students despised the SAT not just because of the intense anxiety it caused — it was one of the biggest barriers to entry to the colleges they dreamed of attending — but also because they didn’t know what to expect from the exam and felt that it played clever tricks, asking the kinds of questions they rarely encountered in their high-school courses… Teachers, too, felt the test wasn’t based on what they were doing in class.”

And then Balf zeroed in on concerns that help explain the importance of NCCU’s pilot program:

“An even more serious charge leveled at the test was that it put students whose families had money at a distinct advantage, because their parents could afford expensive test-prep classes and tutors.” Or, as Wake Forest University sociology professor Joseph A. Soares, who has extensively studied the SAT’s impact, put it to Balf, “The test highly correlates with family income. High school grades do not.”

Wake Forest’s experience is instructive.  After the SAT became optional, incoming freshman averaged significantly higher high school grade-point averages.  The student body’s diversity broadened.

NCCU Chancellor Debra Saunders-White championed the pilot program after realizing that several hundred applicants whose grade-point averages suggested they would be successful missed the SAT cutoff.

“This is very consistent with North Carolina Central as being the ‘gateway to opportunity,” she said last week. That gateway has just become more broadly available to those who need it most.

http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/editorials/x1221648032/Dethroning-the-SAT