The SAT

As I am nearing the end of junior year, I am beginning to put more thought into the college application process.  With this thought comes a lot of thought about standardized testing and the SAT. For a while now, it has been preached to me that along with grades and extracurricular activities, a good score is one of the necessities to getting into a good college.  This measurement of reading skills, mathematics, and writing skills has served as a form of IQ test or general intelligence test, and a way for colleges to compare aspiring applicants.  It is commonly thought that students who do better on these tests have more potential for success and will likely do better in college, as it is a way of predicting someone’s academic performance in higher education.  This is why colleges look at the scores in the first place.

Many students stress over the tests and are worried about not scoring high enough.  There is a lot of debate over whether it is a fair way to measure someone’s ability.  It is impossible for a four to five hour test to measure someone’s true intelligence, but I don’t think I could come up with a more efficient way. 

For higher level colleges, they might have a few applicants they are considering whose grades are outstanding and are involved and have excelled in more than enough extracurricular activities.  They would then use these test scores to separate these individuals, so for elite schools, you can have everything going for you but have low scores, and that could be enough for you to be turned down. 

Joyce Slayton Mitchell, a director of college advising at a New York City high school, says that Princeton University, arguably the most prestigious university in the United States, rejects about 76 percent of applicants that score between 750 and a perfect 800 on certain sections of the SAT.  She also says that "Students don't need a perfect score and perfect grades to get in. It takes more than that. They need to pursue other activities and interests that are unique to them."  This shows that scores are not everything.  Achievements outside of school can be much more impressive to colleges than a good test score or a high GPA, so students should not stress as much about their test scores.  Like Mitchell says, they need to pursue their interests.

About 800 of the 3,000 four year colleges and universities in the United States have made the submission of sat and act scores optional, including respected schools like Wake Forest.  There was a study done that examined about three dozen schools that did not require test scores for admission, and compared the grades and graduation rates in college of the students who submitted their scores, and those who did not.  The study concluded that there was almost no difference between submitters and non-submitters in these categories.  The study also concluded that high school grades were the best predictor of success in college, regardless of whether they submitted test scores or not.  So if your test scores don’t look so hot, don’t worry too much about it.  If you work hard in school and pursue your passions, you will end up where you want to be.

Zenon