Colleges and universities able to make "appropriate admission decisions" without the SAT or ACT should consider eliminating their testing requirement, a panel assembled by the National Association for College Admission Counseling to study the issue said late last month.
Led by William Fitzsimmons, dean of admission and financial aid at Harvard, the group of college admissions officers, high school guidance counselors and other education experts drew from a diversity of perspectives in formulating their recommendations on the usage of standardized testing.
The panel's report advises colleges to consider the disparities among students in accessing test preparation resources. "Students without the financial resources to gain access to test preparation may, in effect, be penalized for lower test scores in some admission and scholarship scenarios," the report said.
The commission also called on schools to "understand differences in test scores among different groups of people." Advocating a critical perspective on the appropriate use of test scores in admissions decisions, the report suggests universities should independently examine the correlation between test scores and first-year grades among their own student bodies to decide "whether the predictive utility of these tests warrant their use as admission tools."
In an official response to the report, the College Board, which administers the SAT, said it "intends to work closely with (its) member institutions to understand the new and changing needs of (its) constituents." Describing the SAT as a "fair" test and a valid measure for predicting success in higher education, the College Board attributed disparities in preparation for college admission to "inequities in the K-12 education system in this country," according to the statement.
In an official statement regarding the commission, Fitzsimmons said "the commission offers many helpful recommendations that Harvard will consider with great care." Harvard will work with other institutions of higher education in the effort to evaluate the best methods for measuring "academic progress" from high school to college, according to the statement.
In response to data indicating associations between "race, household income and test performance," Smith College in Massachusetts made the submission of SAT scores optional, beginning with the class entering in the fall of 2009, according to a press release by the college. Questions about the legitimacy of standardized tests in forecasting academic ability contributed to the decision, the press release said.
Connecticut College, which does not require applicants to submit the SAT Reasoning Test, has adapted its admission criteria to evaluate students in the "most subject-specific way," said Mitchell Herz, assistant director of admission. Although standardized testing "has a place" in the admission process - the college does ask for two SAT Subject Tests or the ACT - Herz suggested staying away from making decisions based on "fine distinctions" in scores. The approach to testing taken by Connecticut College "levels the playing field" among applicants from different backgrounds and forces the admission committee to "look beyond the numbers" and understand the context of the application, he added.
A section of the committee's recommendations is devoted to an inquiry of what it deems various misuses of standardized test scores. These include the use of cutoff scores as an initial factor in awarding scholarships, systems that rank institutions based on test scores and the practice of treating test scores as an index of high school achievement. Specifically, the report cites the National Merit Scholarship Program, calling on the organization to "cease using non-contextualized PSAT scores as the 'initial screen' for eligibility."
Dean of Admission James Miller '73 said the analysis of the "misuse" of standardized tests was the most important point of the report. While the SAT is a credential considered for admission to Brown, "nothing is more important than the high school transcript," Miller said.
The admissions committee at Brown takes the circumstances of applicants - especially whether they have access to enriched curriculums and test preparation - into consideration during the admission procedure, Miller said. However, making the SAT an optional component of the University's application is "not something we have talked about," he added.
About 60 percent of institutions of higher education assigned "considerable importance" to standardized test scores in 2006, according to the report. The panel noted that although standardized tests today have largely been rid of "individual item bias," differences in SAT scores across students of varying family income, race and ethnicity are "distinct" and must be properly considered in admission decisions.
Additionally, although the exact degree to which test preparation actually improves scores is debatable, it is clear that scores can be improved "at least to some extent," the report said. Therefore, the panel suggested that colleges mitigate the unbalanced effects of test preparation themselves.
