College Admissions Test Flaws

With college admissions relying so highly on these tests many bright and capable students are getting left with little options (Sternberg 7). These students are facing this because the ACT and SAT primary focus on a narrow segment of skills that are needed to become a person that makes significant differences to the world (Sternberg 7). College’s argue that the admission test give them a quick glimpse of what the students potential is because they do not have to time to individually evaluate each potential student. This may be true but we need a better way to distinguish a person’s abilities than just a simple score on a test.

Standardized testing has been around since the early 1900’s. Today, it determines a high school student’s future. Every year juniors in high school start to prepare months in advance for the SAT’s and ACT’s. Along with the test itself, comes stress that is not necessary. The debate of standardized tests defining a student’s academic ability or not has become a recent popular controversial topic. Many colleges and universities are starting to have test optional applications because they are realizing that a single test score does not demonstrate the knowledge of a student. There is more value in a student that should rule an acceptance or rejection. In the article, “SAT Scores Help Colleges Make Better Decisions” Capterton states, “The SAT has proven to be valid, fair, and a reliable data tool for college admission” (Capterton). Capterton, president of the College Board, believes that the SAT’s and ACT’s should be used to determine a student’s acceptance because it is an accurate measure. What Capterton and deans of admissions of colleges and universities don’t know is the abundant amount of resources upper class families have for preparation, the creative talents a student has outside of taking tests, and the amount of stress they put on a 17 year old.

One of the main reasons colleges use a student’s standardized test scores is to determine how ready they are for college and how they will perform in their freshman year (“Do Standardized Test” par 10). However, in reality these standardized tests do not properly predict a student’s first year college performance. Throughout the years, multiple studies have shown that a student’s GPA is a much more accurate representation of their future performance in college than their standardized test results. One of these studies for example, states that “The ACT regularly underestimates the abilities of females, who earn higher grades than males in college, despite lower ACT scores.” (“The ACT: Biased” par 10)

Einstein once said, “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Likewise, if a poor test-taker is judged by their SAT score, they could be forced to attend an inadequate institute of higher education. For decades, the SAT has been “the test” that makes or breaks a student's chances of getting into their top college. Generally, the privileged populace do well, but minorities and women do not come out as strong and are therefore limited to college choice. The SAT has proven to be an unsuitable, biased method for predicting success of students in college.

For many years, standardized tests have been a pillar of college admissions. Students are persuaded to take the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) or the American College Test (ACT) because colleges believe the scores can predict an applicant’s academic success after high school. However, an increasing number of colleges have made reporting test scores optional due to inconsistencies with the tests, many of which have been emphasized by students. These inconsistencies and other problems with test distribution have led to increasing demands for standardized testing to be reformed or become optional in the admissions process. Standardized testing should be eliminated as a criterion for college applicants because the tests have made education less significant, have made scores vary among students with similar academic abilities, and have not contributed a noticeable improvement to children’s intelligence.

By now, everyone has come to the conclusion that SAT is a flawed system. The test is designed to determine the future of high school students. Its job is to capture a snapshot of what a student has learned over the course of their academic career. Unfortunately, this is not what happens. Instead of treating a student’s score as just a snapshot, colleges treat a student’s score as their complete academic intelligence. What the system fails to realize is that not all students are good test takers. A student could study for weeks, but when the curator says “You may begin” their mind goes blank. Furthermore, the education system has become too dependant on the SAT to calculate a student’s intelligence. The real emphasis should be on the student’s GPA, essays, extracurriculars, volunteer work, and how much they challenged themselves. Focusing on these aspects allows the college to review an applicant’s work ethic.

Colleges and universities such as Iowa State need ways to evaluate applying students which really show their potential as college students. A three hour-long test cannot reveal many traits of successful students. Qualities like good study habits, a positive self-concept, the ability to set goals, and real world knowledge are not shown in a test like the SAT (Fairness). Another problem with the SAT is that today so many preparation methods exist; the tests aren’t really a true showing of what a student knows. There are many companies who claim their product can be that miracle teacher that boosts a student’s score and get them into the college of their dreams. Should colleges really be base this large decision on knowledge that can be just "picked up" in four short weeks or an entire twelve-year education?

The College Board and ACT nonprofit organizations, known for developing and administering the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and American College Testing (ACT) assessment respectively, represents higher education’s widely accepted college readiness determinant for prospective students. These examinations empirically measure a student’s grasp of reading, writing, and mathematics – subjects taught every day in high school classrooms. As a result, they typically constitute a significant proportion of the total entrance requirements for prospective students to relevant institutions of higher learning and denote a serious endeavor unto itself. Students commonly take one or both of these examinations during their junior or senior year of high school as dictated by an institution’s administrative guidelines, although most colleges now allow either test as part of their proprietary admission formulas. And since it turns out there exists subtle differences in the tests themselves, students should review research concluding certain individuals may be better candidates for maximizing performance on one examination versus another.

Colleges can consider high school GPA as the alternative for test scores. Almost all of the schools during admission completely overlook high school GPA. William C. Hiss, a principal investigator of Defining promise, declares “High school grades matter, and they matter a lot” (Maitre, par.2). It is not fair for many students like Ms. Casimir, a sophomore attending Wake Forest University, who scored 1580 in SAT. This was “an embarrassment” as she graduated high school “with a 4.0” (Simon, par.10). Her dreams to go to “Cornell” and “Davidson” was shattered but yet she was admitted by the “Wake Forest University which gave her full ride without seeing her SAT score and she has 3.2 GPA now” (Simon, par.10). It’s not a miracle as diligence and

Standardized tests measure only a small portion of what makes education meaningful, making them both inaccurate measures of collegiate success and detrimental to students’ educations as schools refocus their curricula on test preparation. Standardized tests don’t measure other important elements of a student. There is a countless amount of important characteristics that are not measured in standardized testing including “creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, curiosity, endurance, reliability, enthusiasm, empathy, self-awareness, self-discipline, leadership, civic-mindedness, courage, compassion, resourcefulness, sense of beauty, sense of wonder, honesty, and integrity” (“Student Achievement”). Each and every one of these characteristics are extremely important for a person to have to live in the real world, which requires a person to think abstractly at times. The standardized test doesn’t test the most important things that is essential to survival in the real

The Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT is a very well known test, especially by high school students across America. This test consist of 138 questions, all multiple choice except for several math graphs, divided into two sections-math and verbal, both scored on a scale of 200 to 800 (Pacenza). The SAT’s are currently a determining factor for college admissions. This paper will only address the SAT’s, not the PSAT’s or the ACT”s. The SAT was born in the 1920s-the product of a growing desire by American educators, led by Harvard president James Bryant Conant, to open up their universities to the best students across the country (Pacenza). After searching for something that could satisfy their quest for intelligence, the American educators came to a test created by Princeton psychologist Carl Brigham. Brigham had created this test because he concluded in his 1922 book, A Study of American Intelligence that, "American intelligence is declining, and will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial admixture becomes more and more extensive." The test was created because according to the author there needed to be a “division since racial admixture becomes more and more extensive.” The author made the test to be able and pick out the smart, white males and be able to put them in recognized institutions.

Throughout America, the opposition to standardized tests is increasing due to the negative effects they are having on bright young students. These tests are taking these students years of hard work and basically throwing down the toilet. It just is not right to have one test that bases how smart a student is, when there are so many other factors that should be looked at. Standardized tests should not be required for college admission because they are an unreliable measure of a student’s performance and are not as important as what was accomplished in the students four years of high

Year-round students send in admissions requests and await anxiously for a response that is based on their academic excellence. This achievement can be expressed through a standardized test score, specifically the SAT. For some, this letter of acceptance is a confirmation for their futures, meaning that the test score received lays out the framework for their future successes. Because the exam raises such an importance in a student’s college future, the efficiency of the test should be examined and questions should be asked such as, is a person’s ability to comprehend basic math, reading skills, and writing techniques actually access a student’s abilities? And is

The SAT is a standardized test widely used for college and university admissions in the United States. It was first introduced in 1926, and its name and scoring system have changed several times throughout the years. Many students around the world that want to pursue post-secondary institutions in the US make it a point to write the SAT at least once in their high school career to better their chances of getting a higher score. This test has three parts to it – one reading, writing and one math. In order to achieve the best score that they can possibly get and be placed in the highest possible percentile, students may decide to attend SAT preparation classes starting from the early years of High/Middle School. The unfortunate reality of these extra preparation courses is that they are quite expensive, and due to this, they mostly cater towards to higher or higher-middle class families. Courses that provide extra preparation such as Ivy Global are not very affordable to many families and so students. According to many statistics and news reports, the higher the test taker’s family income, the higher their scores in the test. This has been a topic of great controversy as we have grown in the modern society

Howard Gardner recognizes that intelligence is more than the single logical-mathematical processing of stored facts that intelligence tests assess. He views intelligence as problem-solving, problem-creating, and problem-finding across a range of situations. There are a total of eight Multiple Intelligences: Logical-Mathematical, Linguistic, Musical, Spatial, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, and lastly, Naturalist Intelligence. These Intelligences allow educators to carefully integrate several content areas within a specific curricula.