Admissions officers say SAT exams should be optional
Hundreds of thousands of high school juniors and seniors are filing bleary-eyed into classrooms across the country this morning for the school year's first seating of the SAT.
Meanwhile, hundreds of college admissions counselors just wrapped up their annual meeting in Seattle with a finding that standardized tests -- like the SAT and the ACT -- aren't essential for admissions decisions.
What that means to today's test takers is, unfortunately, nothing. Kids, keep your pencils sharpened and your calculators ready.
But students still in the pipeline can take heart.
I consider the counselors' declaration a noble shot across the bow in the battle between a student-centered education system and a profit-driven standardized testing complex.
Their report, commissioned by the National Assn. for College Admission Counseling, urges colleges to consider making SAT and ACT scores optional in the admissions process.
Led by the dean of admissions at Harvard, the group is concerned that so-called aptitude tests have become the backbone of the admissions process, even though they're little better than high school grades alone at predicting students' performance in college.
That refrain has been heard before. But this call goes beyond the traditional claim that standardized tests are biased against the poor, minorities or foreign-born.
The tests define merit too narrowly to fit this country's increasingly diverse college-going population, the report said.
And their role in admissions has generated a testing obsession that is discouraging students, hijacking the admissions process and fueling the growth of a burgeoning test preparation complex.
Auti Soltani knows about that. The Granada Hills Charter High senior spent six weeks this summer -- four hours a day, three days a week -- in expensive SAT prep classes.
She'll be taking the SAT for the second time this morning, along with 499 other students at Granada.
I met Auti and her friends, also Granada seniors, on Friday in the school's college counseling center.
The test is "all anybody talks about," when it gets close, said her friend Emily Cheng, who has taken it twice.
It's become more than a test, the girls told me; it's a social and academic barometer on campus.
"There's all this pressure from your family, your classmates, your friends . . . like they expect you to get a perfect score," said Taylor Goulding.
