Scholastic Aptitude Test

For most high school students, summer means extra time for travel, suntans, summer jobs or relaxing with friends. But for college-bound students, it also means a head start on preparing for the most feared step of the college admission process--the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). This three-hour exam is used by most American colleges and universities to help choose applicants, and it is often weighed as heavily as the student's grade-point average. Many students take the SAT in 10th or 11th grade, then retake it early in 12th grade in hope of boosting their scores.

High school students have long wanted the option of taking the SAT in the summer. That's when many of the tutoring programs for the high-stakes college test are given, so the information would be fresh in the students' minds. The timing also would allow them to study for the test when they have more leisure, rather than during the academic year. Now, finally, this August, the College Board will offer a summer administration of the test - but only at a $4,500 summer program being held on the campus of Amherst College in Massachusetts, giving some 50 students who are already heavily advantaged an additional leg up. This was a terrible decision by the College Board, owner of the SAT. It's worth remembering that when the SAT (which stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test at the time; now it's simply an acronym)

Like many honor students with dreams of going to an Ivy League university, Burton Liao has been taking a test preparation course to boost his scores on college entrance exams. But unlike his classmates in the summer program, Liao has plenty of time left to learn SAT vocabulary words and score-boosting strategies before the big test day arrives. He's only 13 years old.

A major change in freshman admission requirements for the University of California this year was supposed to ease the burden of standardized test-taking for high school seniors and allow more students to apply. But the new rules have caused widespread confusion and anxiety among students about whether to take the supplemental tests known as SAT subject exams. To boost their chances of UC admission, thousands of high school seniors are taking the subject exams even though the university has dropped them as a requirement, starting with applications for next fall.

Re "Retire the Scholastic Aptitude Test," Commentary, Dec. 4: I would like to thank Lee A. Coffin for publicly stating what I have felt all along, that standardized tests do not do a good job of measuring academic achievement in the classroom and that they are biased against poor and minority students. Why can't the College Board abandon the SAT altogether? Haven't the members of the College Board got anything better to do with their time than make the lives of high school juniors and seniors miserable?

It's the kind of nightmare that only high school students can dream of: Imagine spending a Saturday morning taking a three-hour test that can determine college acceptance, then finding out that the scores are no good because of a printing error. The nightmare became reality for nearly 1,000 California students this month after it was discovered that some Scholastic Aptitude Test booklets had questions that were printed twice.

The University of California, along with Asian-American educators and activists, are pressing the College Board to add Asian-language examinations to the tests that high school students may take to compete for college entrance. A student can get a leg up in college admissions by doing well on achievement tests in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Latin or Hebrew proficiency achievement exams, even if the language is his native tongue.

A former Crenshaw High basketball star, Kevin Ollie, is eligible to play for Connecticut next season because he scored better than 700 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test he took on June 1, Connecticut assistant coach David Leitao said.

Trustees of the College Board, hoping to make the Scholastic Aptitude Test less coachable and more relevant to classroom learning, voted to postpone for a month a decision on whether to adopt sweeping changes in the test.

MOVE OVER, EINSTEIN: UCI's freshman class promises to be the best yet academically, with a mean high school grade point average of 3.66. "We think the faculty will be very pleased," Admissions Director James Dunning says. The average Scholastic Aptitude Test score was 1,032 out of a possible 1,600. Not bad, but UCI officials say the average of 461 on the test's verbal portion was "artificially" low, because English is not the first language of many new freshmen.

California's college-bound high school seniors scored somewhat better than the national average this year on the SAT exam's writing section but slightly worse on critical reading and math, according to results released Tuesday. With 800 a perfect score on each part of the arduous college entrance test, California's 2009 high school graduating class averaged 500 in critical reading, 513 in math and 498 in writing. The national averages were 501 in critical reading, 515 in math and 493 in writing.

Stanley H. Kaplan, the founder and namesake of the nation's first test-preparation company, died of heart failure Sunday at his home in New York City. He was 90. Kaplan started a tutoring company in his parents' Brooklyn home in 1938. In 1946, a student asked him to help her prepare for what was then called the Scholastic Aptitude Test. "I was there at the right time with the proper educational approach," Kaplan told the New York Times in 1981. "I consider myself a poor man's private school."

A much-debated plan by the University of California to expand its freshman applicant pool and reduce the tests required for admission won final approval Thursday from the Board of Regents. The new rules, among other changes, mean that applicants will no longer be required to submit scores from two SAT subject exams but as before, must take the main SAT or ACT test, as well as 15 UC-approved college prep courses in high school and keep a minimum 3.0 grade-point average.

Alex Schwertfeger doesn't know what college she wants to attend. But the Notre Dame High School junior is convinced that the key to entry at her dream school is the SAT. To boost her score, she attended a pricey private prep class and spent countless hours at home studying drills and completing practice tests. Before she went to bed many nights, she flipped through flashcards of the 200 most popular vocabulary words to appear on the test.

Like many business school graduates, Jake Neuberg and Ramit Varna had big plans. Theirs didn't involve corporate offices with city views or big signing bonuses but instead the standardized test that is the bane of many high school students' existence. When they graduated from UCLA's Anderson School of Management in 2002, the two wanted to create the largest SAT preparation company in the country, even larger than long-established companies Kaplan and Princeton Review.

After sophomore Anthony Mainero finished filling in the last ovals on the PSAT exam Wednesday morning in the airy gymnasium of the Sage Hill School in Newport Coast, he contemplated what the test symbolized -- the start of the college admissions roller coaster. Over the next two years, the 15-year-old plans to focus on standardized tests, high-level coursework, enriching summer classes and free-time activities that make his applications to such places as Yale and Stanford universities and the U.

Georgetown Coach John Thompson and some local high school coaches indicate that the Scholastic Aptitude Test is discriminatory. As a black parent who has spent a lot of time in schools lately, I must agree with them. It discriminates against students who avoid reading, do as little homework and studying as possible and spend every free moment in non-academic pursuits. I applaud the NCAA for trying to improve the academic level of our athletes, surely it will help more than it will hurt.

A big propaganda plug for the bilingual education Establishment ("Calexico Defies Odds on Dropout Rate," Part A, June 3): Kids learn better in Spanish. Rah! Rah! Among the glowing statistics you mention that 62% of the students entering high school are still not proficient in English. You neglected to mention that more than 95% of these students score below the national average on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). May I suggest that The Times also report on the schools with identical enrollments in south Texas.

The 2007 high school graduating class in California and across the nation scored slightly worse on the SAT college admissions exam than students did a year ago, officials said Tuesday. Small declines were seen in all three sections of the test, including the essay-writing portion that began two years ago.

More than 4,400 students who received incorrect scores on their 2005 SAT exams could get a share of $2.85 million under a proposed settlement announced in St. Paul by parties in a federal class-action lawsuit. The payout by the not-for-profit College Board and scoring company NCS Pearson Inc. would give each wronged test-taker a minimum of $275. The settlement needs ratification by Judge Joan N. Ericksen during a hearing scheduled for Nov. 29.