<p>What are some advantages and disadvantages? If you do what are your sources?
I feel like they aren't needed and they hold people back. Some don't perform well on test, especially under all that pressure
Also do you agree that it should be free to take?</p>
<p>There are a number of schools that no longer require any tests. Wake Forest is the highest ranked of those schools.</p>
<p>If tests are required by the college they are needed. If they are not required, they are not. What people believe about whether they should be required makes for water-cooler discussion but is irrelevant to the actual application process.</p>
<p>Could you break down that last sentence?</p>
<p>It is just that the dispute over whether colleges should require and rely on standardized test scores has been around as long as there has been standardized tests (and the SAT has been around since the 1920s). The main argument for them is that they give the college a uniform way to compare all applicants regardless of their high school record and that is needed because there is no uniformity among high schools in exactly how they grade, exactly what they teach, or the quality of teaching so it makes comparison more difficult if you relied only on grades. Tests are not perfect but no one has invented a better system to provide a uniform comparison. The argument against, made most often by those who don’t do too well tests, is that their grades should be enough to determine the issue and there are biases in the tests (that cause women or minorities to score lower on average). Whether you personally believe tests are pointless or should not be used has no impact on what you must do to apply to a college. If it requires a test you must submit one so the argument over whether tests should be required is a topic you can discuss all you want but it won’t change what you have to do as a current senior applying to college.</p>
<p>And if you would like one point of historical interest to feed the conversation, the person who created the SAT in the 1920s, Carl Brigham, a Princeton professor, ultimately in the late 1930s/ early 1940s, before he died, became the most vociferous advocate against the use of the SAT because he concluded that it was a biased test that should not be used. Of course, at the time he created the test Brigham was a bigot, who believed only upper crust white anglo-saxon male americans should be admitted to college and he actually created the test hoping that it would be used to acheive that result.</p>
<p>Not quite true. Harvard President James Conant advocated for the SAT as a way to allow OTHER people than the upper crust white anglo-saxon male to attend elite colleges.
[frontline:</a> secrets of the sat: interviews: nicholas lemann](<a href=“http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/interviews/lemann.html]frontline:”>Interviews - Nicholas Lemann | Secrets Of The Sat | FRONTLINE | PBS)</p>
<p>Yes, those who actually made the decisions to use the test believed differently from Brigham.</p>
<p>The SAT has changed quite a bit since the 20s-40s (even since the 70s when I took it–and even since 10 years ago).
I would think that the current tests are much less “biased.” They have been working to eliminate bias.</p>
<p>If you don’t want to take standardized tests, fine. You’ll just have to limit your applications to those colleges that don’t require tests–there are quite a few of them.</p>
<p>IMO, tests are useful/necessary for comparing students from various educational backgrounds. GPA is really no indicator–grade inflation is a huge problem --a 4.0 at one school might be worth a 2.5 elsewhere. If you know of a simpler way to help evaluate the huge number of applicants every year, speak up.</p>