We have an emerging epidemic in our country, and nobody seems to have an antidote. Indeed, it doesn’t even seem to have been identified as yet. And there’s no funding on the horizon from the NIH.
The unnamed epidemic I reference is the growing practice of students vesting huge amounts of self-esteem in the results of the standardized exams we use in the college admission process: the SAT and the ACT.
Understand that I am not a test-basher. To be sure, I am actually a proponent of standardized exams and feel that the SAT and ACT represent some of the best of what our society offers in norming exams. However, as the stakes for admission to our country’s finest universities continue a northbound trajectory, so too does the emphasis we in higher education place on standardized exams.
It wasn’t always this way. If you’re forty-something as I am (or if you’ve been blessed with even more years), you likely took the SAT just once. Perhaps you even sat for the PSAT in advance of taking its big brother.
Today, an entire industry has sprung up around how to take these tests, how to BEAT these tests. It is no longer uncommon for us to see a student take the SAT a half dozen times and the ACT another three or four. Our high-water mark on the SAT alone this year was nine separate administrations!
Most universities will mix and match SAT subscores in an attempt to give the student the best shot at admission (and frankly, at least as important, to improve the university’s own profile). Why, therefore, shouldn’t students take multiple administrations? Doesn’t practice make perfect?
It is true that for a small percentage of students, multiple sittings will result in improved results. At the very least, one becomes so familiar with the test that reading and assimilating the instructions are no longer necessary.
But the test-preparation classes and the New York City phonebook-thick guides are never what the architects at ETS intended. This mix-and-match thing, as an example, is an abuse of the exam. So is the use of the exam in isolation. So is the use of the exam in the transfer admission process. The folks at ETS will tell anyone who is willing to listen that the SAT is to be used to predict “freshman grades only” and that it is always to be used in concert with a better predictor of those freshman grades: the high school transcript.
How much of the variance in predictability is accounted for by the SAT? It may surprise you to learn that it’s about a third at most institutions. In other words, you can only be about 33% certain, on average, that the results of the SAT are a reliable predictor of the student’s future performance.
The high school transcript, again on average, explains up to nearly half of the variance in most cases. Translated, you have nearly a 50% chance of being correct if you use the transcript as the yardstick. Put them together, then, and it makes for a much more sensible assessment of a student’s ability.
But I would argue that those two measures are only the beginning of what should be a thoughtful admission process. Standardized exams cannot measure heart (and neither can I, by the way), but we do have ways of getting a read on how much initiative or drive or whatever you want to call it, plays in the process.
Is the student involved outside of class? Is she a leader? Does he write well? How are her interpersonal skills? What do his peers and teachers think of him? All these elements contribute to the equation of whether or not a student is admitted to TCU. Our decisions are holistic in nature as we try to take into account everything we are able to discover about the student.
Standardized exams are only a piece of that puzzle; unfortunately, they are the most celebrated. If I never hear another student tell me, “I’m just a 1080 (on the SAT),” it will be too soon. Certainly there are those excellent students who are lousy test takers, but, if you believe in bell-shaped curves as I often do, there should be an equal number of lousy students who are great test takers. Yet these are words I’ve never heard: “Never mind my 1550 SAT, Dean Brown. I’m really not very smart.”
Standardized exams are useful. They have their place. And until we design something better, they’ll have to do. But we should honor our role in the college admission process by ensuring they are used properly. We owe no less to our kids.
