SATs, are they necessary?

Student Lounge College Life
1

<p>Hey guys,</p>

<p>I found several interesting articles about SAT's and the bogusness of them. I am doing a journalistic paper on the effectiveness of SAT's and their use on University admissions in America. It'd be great, awesome if we could start a healthy discussion on this as I'll be needing some opinions for my paper. What are you opinions about the SAT? Was it a good way of determining your college performance?</p>

<p>thank you!</p>

<p>Here's the article:</p>

<p>the link is here if you would like to read on...</p>

<p>Abolish the SAT — The American, A Magazine of Ideas</p>

<p>Abolish the SAT</p>

<p>By Charles Murray From the July/August 2007 Issue</p>

<p>Filed under: Big Ideas, Public Square
The SAT got him into Harvard from a small Iowa town. But now, CHARLES MURRAY wants to abolish the test. It’s unnecessary and, worse, a negative force in American life.</p>

<p>SAT1Welcome, Arts & Letters Daily readers! This story is from our July/August issue. You can subscribe online at a special rate. We also publish new material every day on this web site, and offer a daily email.</p>

<p>For most high school students who want to attend an elite college, the SAT is more than a test. It is one of life’s landmarks. Waiting for the scores—one for verbal, one for math, and now one for writing, with a possible 800 on each—is painfully suspenseful. The exact scores are commonly remembered forever after.</p>

<p>So it has been for half a century. But events of recent years have challenged the SAT’s position. In 2001, Richard Atkinson, president of the University of California, proposed dropping the SAT as a requirement for admission. More and more prestigious small colleges, such as Middlebury and Bennington, are making the SAT optional. The charge that the SAT is slanted in favor of privileged children—“a wealth test,” as Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls it—has been ubiquitous. I have watched the attacks on the SAT with dismay. Back in 1961, the test helped get me into Harvard from a small Iowa town by giving me a way to show that I could compete with applicants from Exeter and Andover. Ever since, I have seen the SAT as the friend of the little guy, just as James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, said it would be when he urged the SAT upon the nation in the 1940s.</p>

<p>I considered the SAT to be the friend of the little guy, just as James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, said it would when he urged the SAT upon the nation in the 1940s.</p>

<p>Conant’s cause was as unambiguously liberal in the 1940s as income redistribution is today. Then, America’s elite colleges drew most of their students from a small set of elite secondary schools, concentrated in the northeastern United States, to which America’s wealthy sent their children. The mission of the SAT was to identify intellectual talent regardless of race, color, creed, money, or geography, and give that talent a chance to blossom. Students from small towns and from poor neighborhoods in big cities were supposed to benefit—as I thought I did, and as many readers of the american think they did.</p>

<p>But data trump gratitude. The evidence has become overwhelming that the SAT no longer serves a democratizing purpose. Worse, events have conspired to make the SAT a negative force in American life. And so I find myself arguing that the SAT should be ended. Not just deemphasized, but no longer administered. Nothing important would be lost by so doing. Much would be gained.</p>

2

<p>It’s a way to speed up the admissions process. Ideally, colleges would read every essay and look at every grade in every class to determine whether the student should be admitted, and some small colleges do this. But it’s much easier to pick the highest numbers, and it helps your USNWR ranking as well.</p>

3

<p>It’s a good way to compare all the applicants.</p>

<p>I’m a good test taker so I liked it, especially since I had no ECs to speak of.</p>

4

<p>I didn’t even take the SAT. They don’t stress it where I live, because they feel the ACT is a much better system.</p>

5

<p>Ditto. I took the ACT once, got a good score, and that was that.</p>

6

<p>I think the SAT is a convenient tool to get a quick sense of the academic potential of an applicant. There’s a huge gap between a score of 1000 and 1600, and few colleges are set up to serve both students. But all this frenzy about retaking the test for a 40-point increase in score is just nuts…</p>

<p>I like the concept of a standardized college admission test of some sort, but I am not sure that the SAT (or the ACT for that matter) is the perfect format for that test.</p>

7

<p>nah. but they’re probably necessary unless the nation wants to go through actually improving our educational system and making tests that properly determine a student’s true level of mastery. until colleges trust that schools didn’t pad grades and test scores they will continue to use the SAT and ACT scores. although, admittedly, the ACT was a much nicer test for me then the SAT. it didn’t make me want to puke as much.</p>

8

<p>The SAT/ACT count for no more than 10% of the admission criteria at one top LAC, and the adcom understands its limitations, but submitting a score is nonetheless required; it’s the only standardized/objective measure available, providing a perspective on the subjective criteria. IMHO the article is nonsense, written with the assumption that the SAT score determines who gets in, when it doesn’t.</p>

9

<p>Nope.</p>

<p>I didn’t take the SAT I or any SAT IIs. I just took the ACT. Once. I got into 7 schools, all of them pretty good. Not super well known or anything (well, some of them), but some of them pretty up there.</p>