<p>The viability of the much maligned SAT as a measure of academic skill is squarely back on center stage with a vengance both in the student and parent sections of CC. Although this interview with Jonathan Grayer, president and CEO of Kaplan Educational Centers, is not new the questions posed about the SAT are still valid as is the acknowledgment that the SAT is "an imperfect and certainly anxiety producing event for almost everyone who takes it."</p>
<p>Sigh.</p>
<p>I took Part 1 and Part 2 of the bac (11th and 12th grades). Every subject tested, even PE, some in written and some in both written and oral forms (except PE of course, which included several elements). Each time it lasted one week, morning and afternoon. And if you flunked it, you had to repeat the whole year. There was the repechage (the rescue test) which was similar to the main test and covered everything in the same way. That was stress-inducing, and some of my classmates lost quite a bit of weight not sleeping and stressing.</p>
<p>The SAT is by no means perfect; actually, I dislike it. But you need a yardstick against which to evaluate those hordes of students with similar GPAs from totally different schools, totally different curricula, totally different ways of calculating. GPAs are not only subjective but they are often based on things that should not matter: neatness, doing all the homework, however trivial and unnecessary; behaving in class, and so forth.</p>
<p>Let's ditch the SAT, if that is what most people think should be done. I doubt that anyone will go for the week-long bac-style do-or-die test. But if the SAT did not exist, something else would need to replace it. Ideas on how to go about it, anyone?</p>
<p>
[QUOTE]
president and CEO of Kaplan Educational Centers
[/QUOTe]
When your job centers around gaming that exam, you'd be silly to ding it.</p>
<p>Some schools would have to adjust their methods for reviewing applications if we got rid of it, but that's not a bad thing.</p>
<p>4 hour exam vs. 4 years of information from the HS</p>
<p>I don't need ETS to tell me a student is a gem.</p>
<p>I agree completely with Marite (and said as much on the other thread LOL!). The colleges cannot judge apples and oranges (and every other fruit) without some consistent measure of comparison. </p>
<p>I don't know of a better measure, and, much as I dislike the pressure of the SAT and the way it can be "beaten", I know we need a standardized test in college admissions.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I'll be as blunt as I can. Without standardized testing selective schools will select even less people from rural high schools that are unknown to them, especially if they only offer one or 3 AP's.</p>
<p>Maybe even more to the point, my daughter would have had a much tougher time gaining the acceptances and awards she did coming from Bugtussle High without her ACT scores.</p>
<p>The SAT and ACT, however imperfect they are and they are plenty imperfect, provided my D a way to compete with the prepsters and private preparatory day schoolers head to head, and toe to toe and prove she deserved to be considered.</p>
<p>It is also my opinion that inner city kids from poor schools, and students with less traditional backgrounds will be punished as well as the rural kids from Middle of Nowhere, Texas. I mean a homeschooler without an ACT/SAT test , or at least some standardized test results would be in pretty bad shape. </p>
<p>I understand the cultural and economic biases and have seen the numbers, but at present, if a kid without the advantages necessary for most to do well on the standardized tests, does happen to do well despite their environment- it gives them some amount of credibilty.</p>
<p>So while I will support the concept of Test optional, the test still needs to be "Optional", not eliminated.</p>
<p>If we go back to pre-recentered, pre-revised, then fine. </p>
<p>Leave it as a test of aptitude to find the gems in the inner cities and rural areas. Now, however, it's a quasi-achievement test, so kids from schools with poorer curriculums, no matter how bright, won't compare with kids from better schools. Right now, it's pretty meaningless, especially the writing section.</p>
<p>
Huh, imagine that. At our school with an @ 900 SAT average and 3 AP's we had two kids over 1550 (equivalent).</p>
<p>"I'll be as blunt as I can. Without standardized testing selective schools will select even less people from rural high schools that are unknown to them, especially if they only offer one or 3 AP's."</p>
<p>I know you believe that, but I don't quite understand why. Certainly you understand that the "prestige schools" already have more than 50% of their student populations coming from the top 5% of the population in income already. This proportion of the population is the group most likely to attend "enriched" high schools or private schools, have highly educated (as well as high-income parents), take the tests the largest number of times, and pay the most for test preparation. All the SATs do for this cohort, is reinforce the colleges' biases toward accepting them.</p>
<p>What the lack of SAT would do would not be to punish the 95%ers (the system already does that perfectly well without it), but force the admissions offices to use a different algorithm for choosing among them. </p>
<p>In other words, the colleges already judge apples (their full-pay and near full-pay customers) and oranges (blemished, and coming from the 95% unwashed.) (Karabel (in "The Chosen") even talks about how the prestige colleges developed systems for putting the applicants in various "baskets" so that they wouldn't have to compete against each other.)</p>
<p>Dean J, do you work as an admission officer at the University of Virginia?</p>
<p>If you don't need the SAT why do you use it?</p>
<p>Curmudgeon, what was the make-up of your daughter's SAT scores when she scored a 1470? It's amazing. That score wasn't good enough, and the way things worked out, it wasn't. Your daughter made a nice improvement from fantastic scores.</p>
<p>cur:</p>
<p>In the excruciating on-again, off-again, Calif HS Exit Exam, the local papers just love to print the bios of kids with a 3.4 gpa (which means some A's) who fail one or both parts of the exit exam. [Note, that the CAHSEE was designed by HS teachers based on statewide curriculum standards.] Since this exam only tests 10th grade english and, essentially, 8th grade math, it is just incredulous that these students can earn passing grades in HS....talk about grade inflation in HS.</p>
<p>Thus, the SAT and ACT, for all thier flaws are the only nationally-normed tests that we have.</p>
<p>Well that's good news, curmudgeon, I feel better now.</p>
<p>I figured you would ;) Hereshoping, and that was my only goal in posting.</p>
<p>dstark, she always intended to take the ACT and the SAT. Her 1470 was a 730V/740M, her "improvement" was a 35, calculated by Collegeboard as a 1580. The main reason she retook the ACT (from a 32) was that she missed a whole section of science (she didn't understand the graph) which brought the composite down. Without that gruesome section her first score would have been a 34 and we'd have been done.</p>
<p>Curmudgeon, Now I get it.</p>
<p>curmudgeon: Do you think your school might have had maybe seven or eight diamonds in the rough (or more, instead of just two), if the old SAT were used? How many high scorers has your school had in years past? More, or less? I have no idea what your answer will be; I'm just asking.</p>
<p>On better prepared students from affluent schools. Several thousand 7th and 8th graders take the SAT each year and an amazing number do as well or better than 11th and 12th graders. Preparation is not everything.
Sure, many of these youngsters come from well-to-do families with plenty of cultural capitl, but would eliminating the SAT do away with the advantage conferred by such background? S's roommate comes from a town so small that only Curm apparently has heard of it. But he made it to H, just as Curm's D made it to Yale and Amherst. Getting rid of a national yardstick would give a tremendous edge to the Andover and Exeter and Harvard-Westlake type of schools, the kinds that adcoms already know and whose GCs can cultivate good relationships with adcoms.</p>
<p>Essays can be written by someone else; GPAs are incredibly subjective and not comparable; ECs can be padded. Anyone wants to argue against getting rid of all or one of them? Why harp on the only yardstick that is not amenable to cheating, that can be used for ALL schools and ALL students?</p>
<p>here'shoping, our school had their first NMF last year. The school is older than dirt. I just used the number 2 over 1550 because that's as far down as I know for sure.:( I don't know the rest but I think we probably had maybe 15 kids over 1200 as a rough estimate. Maybe 3 over 1500. 5 over 1400. 10 over 1300. Just basing this on the kids I know scores of and then their rank in class. I have zero idea how this compares to previous years. Sorry.</p>
<p>Edit: I do know that when you get down to the 75%tile the scores are @1050.</p>
<p>I'm biased, my D chose not to submit her SAT scores to Mt Holyoke, an SAT-optional school, and was admitted even though it was a reach and the scores weren't bad.</p>
<p>The president of MHC had an article written in April which I read in the LA Times <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-sat24apr24,0,6030749.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials%5B/url%5D">http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-sat24apr24,0,6030749.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials</a> (hopefully this works).</p>
<p>I'm a retired hippie and am dead set against standardized tests for college enrollment.</p>
<p>Well, when discussing the relative merits of the old and new SAT, especially at a school like yours, wouldn't that information be helpful?</p>
<p>Really, all our kids are guinea pigs right now. We won't know the fallout of this for years to come.</p>
<p>I believe the SAT was revised to drive curriculum (as our state exit exams do), in a misguided attempt to provide equity.</p>