Significance of SAT importance under fire
Some say scores should play lesser role admissions

By Julie Ann Matonis
Staff Reporter

A recent proposal to eliminate the use of the Standardized Aptitude Test in the University of California school system has sparked a nationwide debate that some education leaders said renews the age-old question of what role the SAT should play in admissions decisions.

In a Feb. 18 speech to the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C., University of California President Richard Atkinson proposed the University of California system stop using SAT scores in admissions decisions because he said it is an unfair measure of student abilities.

“Many universities, faced with the problem of having to choose from among thousands of highly qualified applicants, have adopted practices that give too much weight to the SAT,” Atkinson said.

William Koehler, vice chancellor for academic affairs at TCU, said there has been a little discussion about making standardized scores optional at TCU, but he said he is reluctant to not use all information available when making admissions decisions. Koehler said if a committee was to explore the issue, they would look into what is currently being done around the country at universities similar to TCU.

“What we try to do with the admissions process is make a determination about which students have the best chance of being successful at TCU,” Koehler said. “If you make the scores voluntary, you’re only going to get the high scores, and I’m not sure how meaningful that is in decision making.”

Ray Brown, dean of admissions, said schools that make the SAT optional will receive scores primarily from students who score high, which causes a distortion in the average SAT ranking for that institution.

“Making scores optional is a tactic several schools have employed in the last decade,” Brown said. “Most notably, Bowdoin College in Maine dropped its requirement in the hope that students would offer several achievement tests instead.”

Brown said the average SAT score has remained flat at TCU for the past few years but may change this year in response to a record number of applicants. He said more rigid cut-offs exist for standardized test scores when determining academic scholarships, but the weight placed on a person’s scores for admission varies with each applicant. At larger state schools, the same amount of personal attention is not always possible.

“Students are much more than grades and test scores, yet the sheer volume of applications many state schools receive simply precludes their being able to process the massive amounts of paper to provide a thoughtful, reflective response to an application for admissions,” Brown said.

The National Center for Fair and Open Testing Web site lists 280 colleges and universities that do not use some or all of freshman applicants’ ACT or SAT scores when making admissions decisions. Some still require all students to submit the scores, regardless of whether they are used.

Brown cautions reliance on the Web site’s data. In Texas, 32 schools are listed on the Web site as not relying on standardized scores for all admissions decisions. Most are public schools, and in the state of Texas, public schools admit the top 10 percent of high school graduates, regardless of their scores.

Koehler said it is easy to use numbers to make comparisons between universities and say one average is better than another, but there is much more behind the numbers.

“I do think that in the clamor to rank and rate institutions, test results are one of the easiest things to use, but perhaps not the most sophisticated,” Koehler said. “It’s more difficult to look back retrospectively and try to determine the success of graduates.”

Brown said that as a whole, the SAT can accurately predict what it is intended to do. But on an individual level, he said it does not measure such intangibles as heart or motivation.

Julie Ann Matonis
j.a.matonis@student.tcu.edu