http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20060405/...HBhBHNlYwM5NjQ-

In another sign of the grade inflation that has taken hold in American education, some universities are now dropping the SAT requirement. Some college officials believe that the SAT is not a good indicator of success in college. But not all 4.0s are equal either. I think that some colleges are doing this SAT-optional idea in an attempt to sell the diploma. Given that many college graduates are unemployed or working at a Burger King, I would expect that colleges tighten their academic standards rather than try bringing in more people regardless of their talents. The Education Establishment must not tolerate the existence of Diploma Mills. After all, any person who works hard for his diploma should not worry about getting passed over for an interview because someone got his 4.0 by working the system.

So the question for debate is
Should Colleges be allowed to drop the use of standardized tests in the admission process

Should Colleges be allowed to drop the use of standardized tests in the admission process?

Colleges, especially private colleges, should be able to determine their admission criteria. In that sense, my answer would be "yes".

However, I am a firm believer that standardized tests have value. They compare students apples-to-apples, which cannot be done by grade point average alone. I do not think they should be a primary deciding factor--after all, there are poor test takers out there--but maybe more of a tie-breaker.

Consider the fact that many professions have standardized tests which are required for licensing or certification. Does dropping SAT requirements for getting into college help or hurt someone trying to pass the Fundamentals of Engineering test (FE) or obtain a teaching certificate or to become a building inspector?

Should Colleges be allowed to drop the use of standardized tests in the admission process

Certainly. Colleges should use admission policies that meet the needs of their defined educational mission. This does not mean that the concern about grade inflation is not real. It is a tragedy how many poorly educated people go to college with a 4.0 or higher. More and more each year grades become harder to compare.

I believe the SAT is a partially flawed test because you can improve you score on it be preparing and it stops at a certain level of knowledge.

I would like to see some type of effective academic ability test administered separately from a comprehensive acquired knowledge test that measured what students have learned prior to college. I do not think the SAT is a great tool.

Should Colleges be allowed to drop the use of standardized tests in the admission process

Absolutely. Why shouldn't colleges be allowed to determine their own admission criteria? If restrictions are placed on private institutions, we are letting the government in on the admissions process.

Secondly, making the SAT optional will force colleges to take a closer look at their applicants rather than making a decision largely influenced by the score of one test. Students will have to separate themselves from the pack more by unique talents and studiousness than how much they spent on a test prep course. It wouldn't be so bad if the SAT weren't such a biased test. From Fair Test:



Test prep and tutoring is a huge business. Richer students have more time and money to invest in test prep books and classes, and so they score better than poorer students.

I also think it would be beneficial for colleges to become SAT-optional because the test does not accurately predict how well students will do in college nor does it test intellectual capacity accurately. Why should colleges be forced to keep a test that simply does not work?

Alfie Kohn:

As many people much smarter than myself have said before me, the only thing the SAT tests is your ability to take the SAT. And the only thing the removal of the SAT shows is that institutions are recognizing it is not the end-all of academic achievment.

My local college when I graduated was URI, they were accepting people that could pay their own with 1000, and sometimes lower SATs. At that point, why not just throw it out completely? Achieving a high school degree is certainly more difficult than scoring over 900 on the SAT.

I don't really think this is something to get upset about, and is really indicitive of nothing. Who cares about Diploma Mills? Do you really believe an employee with 4 years of work experience is less valuable than one with a degree? I'd take a guy with 2 years work experience in an unrelated field over someone with a 4 year degree in my field any day of the week, and I really don't think that has anything to do with the SAT. An undergrad degree (which is what the SAT is for) is practically useless in the workplace, and has been for awhile, I don't think removing the SAT from the equation is going to make it any worse, or any better.

Should Colleges be allowed to drop the use of standardized tests in the admission process

The SAT isn't the be-all and end-all of student evaluation but it isn't worthless either. High schools vary in difficulty and students vary in motivation so an "A" isn't equal in value everywhere. If I get an "A" in english and a 760 on the SAT verbal section, chances are my "A" is more valid than someone who got a 500 but still got an A in english. That being said, the system should realize that some people aren't good test takers and some people who score highly on the SAT are poor students. But, regardless colleges should decide what factors they want to consider in admission.

In regards to whether the SAT is a valid measure, I think people are expecting too much. Nothing can accurately test knowledge, aptitude or ability to succeed in college. It's incredibly complicated and no test could ever do the job. However the SAT and the SAT 2 subject tests (perhaps more accurately) provide a ballpark measure that adds credence to other information about a student.

Back in the 'seventies I did not take an SAT before being accepted into community college, but they did base part of their acceptance criteria on the ACT (American College Test?--I'm no longer certain of the acronym because it was so long ago). Now, acceptance into junior or community college might not seem like a big deal, but it was to me.

I do remember reading and discussing an essay in high school civics class which suggested that the tests most widely used for college evaluation purposes were so skewed in favor of middle- to upper-class white Americans that they virtually ensured that certain economically and geographically-disadvantaged segments of the population would be denied admission based on the results. Those were the bad old days.

We should encourage colleges to place greater weight on interviews with their candidates for admission and base less of their decision on standardized testing that, after all, may only show that students know how to take tests well (as Rancid Uncle said) and don't necessarily know how to study or reason for themselves. In addition, a personal interview will indicate more about a student than an essay that might be written for him/her by someone else for a tidy sum.

It seems like a good idea to scrap the SAT, especially since it does not deal with real-world issues such as counting out change, writing checks and balancing a checkbook, or knowing enough about one's own spelling abilities to take the time to use the spell checker when posting in a thread.

Should Colleges be allowed to drop the use of standardized tests in the admission process

Sure. The test-taking skill set does not translate to real-world performance, including the seeking of knowledge.

Depending on test scores to measure a human being shows a lack of perception. But then, it makes the task easier, doesn't it. Never mind that the scores have no real meaning, other than one is good, bad or average at taking tests.

Last time I checked, the market for test-takers was pretty slim. Also, I've never read anything of worth from an excellent test-taker. There wasn't anything in there but a bunch of ABCDs, references to all of the above, none of the above, true and false. For some reason the author kept making black ovals and scribbling what appeared to be math formulas in the margins. Instead of -30- or -end-, it was TIME!

Should Colleges be allowed to drop the use of standardized tests in the admission process?

Some kids' overall GPAs are great but they would bomb on a test almost 4 hours long. I've never sat through a movie that long, let alone taken a test that long. I'm a very good listener, don’t have an attention disorder, and I'm sure I'd go bonkers before the clock runs out.

I suppose the reason why the SAT is getting longer is because kids are catching up. Maybe an educator can jump in here. What I was taught in high school is being taught in junior high. To narrow the gap of eligible college entrants they make the tests harder and longer, and generate more income as a result, instead of focusing on what makes a student a well-rounded contributor to society.

Ah, capitalism. It’s a morality whole unto itself.

If the SAT keeps getting longer and harder we’ll have to partition the college initiation into days like Japan’s Examination Hell. Our uniform initiation process may not be as grueling, since we don’t have the concept of lifetime corporate employment in common to make competition that more fierce, but it still won’t be worth it IMO.

Edited to add this:

[quote=Lesly,Apr 8 2006, 11:20 AM]
Should Colleges be allowed to drop the use of standardized tests in the admission process?

Private colleges should be allowed to do anything they want for acceptance testing under free enterprise "rules".

Public colleges should all have the same test for acceptance; but that test should be tied very, very closely to a "national standard" curriculum in great detail. (See Textbooks in the US by Amlord)

The real crunch to me is the curriculum creation, management, open review and maintenance problem. Testing for it worries me much less. However:

This "test" would include two test report results:

1) a statement of competence of the tested over a domain of "knowledge/expertice", and

2) a separate statement of the current economic value of that level of competence in present job markets.

I believe it's quite a task. But dumbing and grade inflation are quite bad problems for me and my tax $$$$$"s

Marathon test lengths are OK by me, as the jobs are marathon also!

If the college accepts no federal assistance, it should be up to them to choose what they wish to base their attendants requirements on. It should be the option of the college to use the tests or not because basing a student's aptitude based on the ACT or the SAT is foolish and may not screen for what the college seeks to teach.

The interests or skills of a person cannot be defined by a single standardized test, anyway. Some colleges may not feel like trusting their entire student population to faith that the accepted student based on their scores is the right choice.

I agree with everything you say up until this. The difference between these and professional tests are subtle but fundamental. The reason lies in the fact that the SAT is a reasoning based tested.

Knowledge based tests are fairly static and straightforward. There is no two ways about it, its black and white. You either know something or you don't. In this sense, tests that are used mainly to test knowledge are fairly straightforward and reliable. "Do you know the circumference of the Earth," for instance, is devoid of any reasoning at all, but certainly gives us a clear indication if the student knows the answer or not.

A reasoning based test, on the other hand, is more complicated to test because there are many, many correct ways of coming up with the right answer. For lack of a better example, lets say two artists both take a test to see how well they can create art. One likes to slowly shade in figures, whiles the other likes to black out the entire portrait with a graphite pencil and erase in the details (Known as an erasure painting). However, lets say this test did not provide an eraser, the second student ultimately has to change their artistic process to fit the exam. Of course they will be deemed the worse of the two artists, because they are maligned through a radical, forced shift.

In this way, reasoning tests seem to falter because they make generalizations on thought itself. If there are many ways to find the area of a cube, then test takers aide the one student who can find the area with the information they provide to the exclusion of all students who think about calculating area in a different manner.

On a more general note, I don't think anyone in the world quite has a grasp on the exact nature of intelligence. All we have is some vague, intuitive grasp on it. Jim Carrey and Dennis Miller are both funny, but they are just incredibley different types of funny. A funny test, in this instance, would be futile. Theres no real way to prove which one is funnier.

So, ultimately, I agree with you that standardized testing has value ( and is neccessary), but only so much that knowledge, and not reasoning, are compaired between students.

But the reasoning on the SAT tests themselves is not complicated reasoning in itself. For example, some of the math problems include figuring out the sides of a Triangle. You can memorize every trigonometric formula in preperation for the SAT. But usually, the SAT expects you to know a more simple shortcut like remembering the ratios for triangles of 30 degree-60 degree vertices, or 45 degree-45 degree vertices. What the SAT usually tests is a person's ability to solve problems quickly. And you brought up the example of 2 artists using 2 methods to create the same picture. If an artist were to be tested on both methods, then the artist would be expected to learn both methods.

If indeed the key to the SATs is remembering a shortcut, then the test leans towards a knowledge based system anyway.

But lets say that the simple, shortcut trick was something that a test taker would have to come up with on the spot (Or reason their way through). The information given about the problem could aide one type of reasoning to the exclusion of another. Similarly, if the previous information were withheld and some other tidbits were revealed, another type of reasoning might be favored.

Using our artist example, if we gave them an eraser instead of a pencil, we could get totally different scores.

Lets rule out the generous test givers who might give the student both a pencil and an eraser. With those two, you almost have too many supplies to show your talent with one medium or another. Similarly, giving too much information ruins the problem. Test takers strive to give you just enough information to solve the problem.

The meat of your argument, however, is that the reasoning on these tests are so elementary that every type of reasoning should be mastered by the test taker.

This declaration, I believe, serves my argument because here we assume that there is one type of way to go through a problem, and that a student must have mastered every way to succeed. Granted, switching reasoning might only slow down an accomplished student, but it would serve as a type of favoritism for that particular problem nonetheless.

Not to mention, learning a different way to reason is just that, learning (knowledge), not reasoning. (Come to think of it, this is a philosophical discussion in itself and should not be belabored).

This leads to another question though, if one is phenomenal at one type of reasoning, and poor in another, is it really fair give them a mediocre score? If they can calculate the surface temperature of the moon on the basis of the average temperature of the sun, but for the life of them don't understand why hot is to cold like black is to white, is this person really mediocre? Interesting.

I think in general that there are so many ways to think about any problem it would be impossible to test everything. Your solution would be to test both the erasure and shading, but what if there are hundreds of ways to get the same picture, each way with a type of personality that best matched its reasoning? I can get the area of a triangle with some angles and sides, or all angles, or all sides, or if I cut out a triangle from a sheet of paper and measure the difference (The latter being similar to water displacement).

At the very least, grant me that these reasoning based tests can never be as accurate as a knowledge based exam (Do you know the circumference of the Earth? Either you do or you dont) due to the complexity of reasoning compaired to knowledge. There is only one type of knowledge as opposed to several types of reasoning (or hundreds) that must be accomodated for.

But the SAT doesn't test for knowledge of Differential Equations or Advanced Calculus. The SAT have been around for years and it tests to see if a person is proficient in the basics of Algebra and Trigonometry and Business math skills. If you do well in those classes, then you'll most likely get a high enough SAT score to get into a decent college.

We are off the point of contention. I am arguing whether giving "reasoning" based tests are fair or not given that their are many types of reasoning.

When I said:

I meant to show that if a student mastered one type of reasoning extraordinarily well (Not knowledge, which, using this example was understandably decieving. Differential equations do not factor in) at the expense of another, it wasn't fair to give him a poor grade (For if he was given the same type of information that would aide his moon calculation reasoning for the analogy problem, he would do well).

I'm probably losing you due to my over use of prepositions

But lets just say that if algebra and trigonometry classes do prepare you for the SATs, the test is ultimately more knowledged based and therefore a fair test. Perhaps this arguement is totally pointless.

Edit: hmmm, or perhaps an overuse of the passive voice.