The
SAT can
make or
break a student. High school students can break their backs making sure they study and understand their classroom materials, maintain a 4.0 grade-point average, volunteer in their communities and on their campuses and still not be admitted to the colleges of their choice, because they had a
bad test day.
The SAT is a do-or-die scenario for most students. It can make or break college admission, and despite the fact that a student is a model individual, a bad test can ruin a life. The SAT is an unfair indicator of a student's ability; plain and simple.
Last week, the students of my university were served a reminder of how lucky we are. When our President moved that the SAT be dropped from admission requirements by 2003 and he recommended a new way at looking at admissions for the immediate future.
This "holistic" approach, as he described it, would be to examine the outside activities of students, include interviews and stop placing such a heavy emphasis on their SAT scores. The students of my university are fortunate, as this is the way our university has already been evaluating admissions.
But why remove the SAT? The reasons are clear.
The SAT does not measure any learned forms of intelligence. The test is beatable and does not require a student to have learned well in high school. It does require that students learn how to take it.
To do so, a student can sign up with any number of companies that specialize in test preparation. This gives students with money an extreme advantage over the hard-working students who come from modest economic backgrounds.
The SAT puts too much emphasis on one particular brand of learning and testing. Some students are naturally talented in the subjects it tests while others are not.
Those students who are not, then, give the impression that they are not intelligent, even though they may be. When a test tries to measure college-level work and thinking, it neglects students with different abilities. Some students do well because they are willing to work hard in their classes to get good grades, not because they are good test-takers.
Removing the SAT from college applications will provide a more fair and balanced ground for students, but it is only a temporary solution. The long-term goal should be to fix the public education system in California to give all students equal opportunities.
When students are taught the same material with regularly updated standards, then the playing field will become equal.
The public schools are not currently preparing students for college-level work. Private education is not available to all, so if the state is truly concerned about the publicly educated students, it needs to prepare students for the material they will meet in college, and in the SATs.
Some form of testing is necessary, but it needs to be carefully balanced so that the privileged and extremely intelligent don't have the upper hand on the students who truly work hard.