WASHINGTON – You likely remember the anxiety of test day well. A sharpened No. 2 pencil, dozens of answer bubbles ready to fill and questions about topics and words you may or may not have heard of during your high school career.
The College Board, which creates the SAT, has released a sneak preview of the redesigned test that will land on students’ desks in the spring of 2016. The ACT will go digital by next spring, allowing students to take the college admissions exam on a computer.
Standardized testing has come a long way over the past two decades, but has it come far enough? Some experts argue that it isn’t needed at all.
“High school grades, despite all the variations in course rigor, predict college success better than the SAT or ACT do,” said Bob Schaeffer, public education director at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing. “The truth is you don’t need a test to do high-quality selective admissions.”
Schaeffer said 800 four-year colleges and universities prove that every day by being test-optional and not requiring standardized test scores for admissions.
Those schools often times get a better caliber of applicants because they’re sending a signal to students that they’re more than just a score, Schaeffer added, so the pool becomes better rounded in terms of interests and abilities.
A large study, commissioned by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, found that universities that don’t require exam scores have virtually the same graduation rate those that do.
“A clear message: hard work and good grades in high school matter, and they matter a lot,” the report stated in its February release.
The redesigned SAT, which gets rid of arcane vocabulary, deductions for incorrect answers and complex math problems, also makes the essay optional and drops back to the 1600-point score system.
The College Board is also partnering with Khan Academy to provide free test preparation tools to students from all economic backgrounds in an effort to further level the playing field. But, Schaeffer said, families that can afford expensive test prep systems and high-priced tutors will still probably take those steps.
At the College Board in New York City, Carly Lindauer, senior director of external communications, said the combination of SAT scores and high school grades are shown to be the best predictor of college success.
“The College Board is making a commitment to increase the college and career readiness of all students by offering a solution that goes well beyond simply administering another test – and well beyond what is offered by the ACT,” Lindauer said.
The last time the test underwent a redesign was in 2005, when the scoring system changed from 1600 to 2400, analogies were history and the essay became mandatory. Since then, Schaeffer said, nearly 100 universities, including the University of Colorado and Sarah Lawrence College, have gone test-optional.
When John Katzman founded the Princeton Review in 1981, he believed standardized testing would be long gone by now because he showed people that the system could be beaten.
“Every 12 years, the president of the College Board announces revelatory changes to the SAT that will supposedly align it better with high school curriculum and encourage reading and writing,” Katzman said. “None of these changes have ever made the SAT a test that measures knowledge in a meaningful way or predicts success in college.”
Doug Wright, a counselor at Fayetteville High School in Arkansas, said he’s a big proponent of grade point average as a marker of student success, but understands why standardized testing is in play.
A 4.0 GPA from Fayetteville High School may mean something different from another high school in another state, he said, depending on factors such as teachers, course options and rigor, and grade inflation.
Standardized testing can put students “on more level ground so you can make a more objective decision between the two,” Wright said. “So from that standpoint, it serves a purpose.”
Suzanne McCray, dean of admissions at the University of Arkansas said that admissions officers’ also realize grade point average is more important.
“But because we have lots of different schools with varying levels of approaches to grades, the ACT and SAT become kind of a nationally vetted way that we can make sure all students are on the same page,” she said.
But as most people know, test scores aren’t the be-all, end-all of the college application process.
“Students know it’s important, we know it’s important, but there are so many different possibilities as to what role it’ll play in admissions,” Wright added. “The big determiner is what school you want to go to.”
More than 3.3 million students took either the ACT or the SAT last year, so it’s clear many high schoolers are still playing it safe.
In the Northeast, Tim Conway, the director of school counseling at Lakeland Regional High School in Wanaque, N.J., said only a small percentage of students at his school are choosing to apply to colleges that are test-optional.
“It’s gotten so competitive and some kids get very anxious with the process,” Conway said, which is why some will bank on their academic performance and submit a paper instead of the scores from a three-hour test.
Suzanne McCray said that while the University of Arkansas isn’t leaning toward becoming test-optional, it has offered people, typically non-traditional students or anxious test-takers, the opportunity to take a non-timed ACT Compass test.
In 2012, the ACT surpassed the SAT as the test of choice by a small margin. The test, which has rivaled the SAT for years, is particularly popular in the South and Midwest but has been growing in popularity nationwide in recent years. The ACT has also often been touted as more curriculum-based than its counterpart.
That competition is one of the main reasons the 88-year-old SAT is changing, experts said.
“If you want to see what the new SAT looks like as a student, just take the ACT,” said Jillian Youngblood, director of communications at Noodle Education, another one of Katzman’s companies.
But most experts agreed that neither test provides an accurate picture of how a student will fare in their first year of college.
“You spend a lot of time freaking out about the test, and for what?” Youngblood said. “You already have a measure of how you’re going to do in college so why are we driving everyone crazy on these tests?”
That measure is the high school transcript – so why do colleges keep pushing standardized testing?
“They do it out of inertia,” Schaeffer said. “Because they always have.”
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