It doesn't test for success

BY NOW, MOST OF the country has heard of the College Board's gaffe in reporting erroneous SAT scores for about 4,000 college-bound students. A single case in which a college does not accept a qualified student because his or her SAT scores are erroneously reported is clearly an injustice. The potential for 4,000 such cases is a disaster that should prompt all colleges, universities, students and their families to ask serious questions about a college placement system that, through a single computational error, can irrevocably alter a student's educational trajectory.

High-stakes standardized tests such as the SAT have assumed a central role in the admissions process disproportionate to their value. This test falls far short of predicting academic or career potential or a host of important aptitudes, such as curiosity, motivation, persistence, leadership, creativity, civic engagement and social conscience.

Think of all the high school students you've ever known, and then think of all the colleges and universities you've heard of. Now try to come up with a set of questions that would tell you how each person would do in his or her postsecondary education.

The SAT might have made sense when it was developed in the 1920s, when higher education was an elitist proposition and the college admission pipeline led a relatively homogeneous population of young adults into a similarly uni-dimensional set of colleges and universities. But U.S. secondary education today is a multilingual, multiethnic, socioeconomically diverse enterprise, and so too are the 3,000-odd colleges and universities to which high school students aspire.

It seems self-evident that a one-size-fits-all test could not adequately assess the diverse populations of students and schools that make up the U.S. educational landscape. In fact, one need only visit many of our nation's most prestigious institutions to see the cumulative effect of reliance on the SAT: campuses that are populated predominately by whites, Asians and the rich. Even the wealthiest universities, many of which waive tuition for poorer students, end up educating an embarrassingly small number of students from the lower fifth, economically, of the U.S. population. This is not the meritocracy the SAT's early proponents had in mind.