<p>School officials say they are changing their policies after research showed the tests favor the wealthy and are not good predictors of college success.</p>
<p>NY Times reported today (May 27th) that both Smith College and Wake Forest will no longer require students to submit SAT or ACT scores starting in the fall of 2009.</p>
<p>I think this is a great decision, and other Universities should follow suit. I did poorly on the SAT,but I was still accepted to a college and so far I have stellar grades in all classes(3.7 GPA). In other words, the SAT does not accurately demonstrate one's potential performance in college.</p>
<p>Wake Forest so far is the most highly ranked college (by the U.S. News methodology) to do this. I don't think this is a signal that there will be a rush to abandon SAT testing at the top of that or of other ranking lists, but rather this illustrates how tough Wake's competition is for the high-scoring students to which it sends recruiting letters.</p>
<p>we see essentially why Wake Forest decided to take itself out of this brutal in-region competition. This is a typical pattern for SAT-optional colleges: some other college that is otherwise comparable has much higher SAT statistics. That's why Worcester Polytechnic Institute went SAT-optional, and also why Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota did.</p>
<p>I agree with that, it helps distinguish us so we do not get lost in the shuffle of schools like Duke, Vanderbilt, UVA, W&M, UNC, Emory, Davidson, etc. Furthermore, I think this is an attempt to promote diversity on part of the administration in terms of geography, race, socioeconomic status, etc.</p>
<p>I have to agree with mammall, I think this could be a strike against WF with very academically gifted students--makes one think that the other very subjective factors that weigh in on the admissions decision could result in a less academically inclined student body.</p>
<p>As tokenadult suggests, this may just be making a virtue of necessity. Wake will still consider SATs, and you can bet they will take students with as high scores as they can get--but they already weren't getting them.</p>
<p>Well, congratulations to Wake Forest on being bold. I have to wonder, however, what is truly behind this. </p>
<p>One fears it paves the way to allow more "social engineering". You'll get more marginally qualified students from the oppressed groups, and more marginally qualified students from the groups financially successful enough to pay for themselves and others, and woe to the merely highly-qualified who fall into the middle ground.</p>
<p>I suspect that SAT scores are the inconvenient truth in the way of the priviledge rectification business that the soc professor prefers to the business of education.</p>
<p>This is simply a move to increase the number of applicants:</p>
<p>Students will mistakenly believe that not submitting their low scores will improve their odds of admission. The application numbers will swell from applicants who have little chance of admission.</p>
<p>Wake Forest can continue to take low SAT students with other attributes just as they do today. They will simply assume that anyone not reporting scores is a low-scorer.</p>
<p>What's more, they can say that they don't care about the fact that they have lower median SAT scores than other schools, because to them it is no longer "important."</p>
<p>All the families I know who have visited Wake love it. They love the campus, the students and the whole "vibe". Very few of the kids wind up going there, for some reason. I guess Wake falls into that sort-of "middle range" where a lot of the applicants who, even though they love Wake, get into a more selective school and pick it.<br>
It will be interesting to see how this new move pans out.</p>
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Wake Forest can continue to take low SAT students with other attributes just as they do today. They will simply assume that anyone not reporting scores is a low-scorer.
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I am sure it will also raise their reported SAT scores quite a bit (the low scorers will be more likely not submit their scores), and thus raise the ranking in USNWR. (That's how Middlebury has such high score ranges - they only use the "reported scores", while being "SAT optional"...)</p>
Not even close. ;) Off the top of my head Bowdoin, Middlebury, Hamilton, Bates (and maybe MHC) are all ranked higher. Oh, you probably meant "real" colleges, not LAC's. My bad. ;)</p>
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One unusual factor in Wake Forest’s decision-making process is that many of those involved read and discussed the implications of a scholarly book by one of the university’s faculty members. The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite College (2007, Stanford University Press) is by Joseph A. Soares, a Wake Forest sociologist who has done extensive work on issues related to social class and higher education.</p>
<p>In the book, Soares argues that the shifts at Yale and elsewhere in the ’60s — widely portrayed as replacing an aristocracy with a meritocracy at elite colleges — were far less dramatic and far less threatening to elite socioeconomic groups than such colleges would have you believe. And the book argues that the SAT — proclaimed by the College Board and colleges that support it to be a tool for allowing talent in — has actually been used consistently to keep some groups out. Soares cites documentary evidence, for instance, to show how the colleges that backed the creation and spread of the SAT pushed it with the explicit aim of having a “scientific” justification for limiting the enrollment of Jewish students.</p>
<p>While the SAT and higher education have changed since then, the Soares book drives home the point that the use (or abandonment) of various tests tends to have specific impacts on specific groups of potential applicants.
<p>Thanks too for pointing out that my point would have been clearer if I had referred to Wake Forest as a "national university" rather than use the more general term "college." The U.S. News methodology makes it debatable just how specific colleges in the national university category compare to liberal arts colleges.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I am sure it will also raise their reported SAT scores quite a bit (the low scorers will be more likely not submit their scores), and thus raise the ranking in USNWR. (That's how Middlebury has such high score ranges - they only use the "reported scores", while being "SAT optional"...)
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</p>
<p>Get your facts straight. Middlebury reports the SAT I scores for every student for whom they have scores, regardless of whether they were used in admission or not. Eighty-eight percent of last year's matriculants submitted SAT I scores and 24 percent submitted ACT scores.</p>