Studies have shown that eliminating the SAT requirement does not appear to reduce the quality of incoming students. An
independent study released in 2014 found that students who do not submit SAT scores, presumably because they think it would hurt their chance of being accepted, wind up doing just as well as their classmates.
SAT losing favor as more Mass. colleges end requirement - The Boston Globe
You can't really know what you are made of until you are tested.
― O.R. Melling
I think most high performing/well-prepared-for-college students have little to gain from standardized tests. Life isn't standardized, and a mark of high achievers is their ability to excel in unstructured, dynamic circumstances. Top performers will distinguish themselves in ways that standardized exams don't capture. Take, for example, students who attend St. John's College in Maryland. Critical and innovative thinking skills are what makes students successful there, and St. John's graduates graduate with a skillset that enables them to best most any challenge because they are strong thinkers who need only gather technical details (when relevant) to make sense of any situation and prevail in overcoming it.
Standardized tests, unlike essays, have implicit in their design an assumption that the topics tested can be conquered by applying a mechanical set of rules -- language rules, math rules, etc. -- and applying them. Now it's true that in many situations, one can use that approach and find success; however, the most challenging "tests" don't conform to rules. Moreover, when a rule-based testing method is inherent, what high scores necessarily show mastery of the rules, but it is not a given that rule-mastery indicates acute and quick cognition. For example, at the two schools where I know what their SAT average scores are, the SAT averages at both are above 2000 (The ACT average at both is 29.). In schools having students that academically adept, how does the SAT meaningfully distinguish one from another? And with regard to the "national student body," it's again of little value in differentiating the bright kids at those two schools from those at other schools; they are all sufficiently capable, at least as goes what is asked of them on standardized exams. For students of a very high caliber, tests like the SAT are pointless.
Midrange performers on the other hand, I think, are sometimes better served by having a test like the SAT be among the key elements examined by college admissions departments. Such students benefit from taking and scoring high on standardized tests because by so doing, they gain the benefit of the doubt. They do because despite the test evaluating one's proficiency with mechanical aspects of subject matter mastery, the fact remains that high scorers show they have mastered doing just that, and their high score accords them the presumption that they have more "on the ball" than just being strong with the mechanics of any given learning objectives. That they have done also suggests they have some skills that will help them be successful at university academic studies, particularly at the undergraduate level.
Given that highly ranked schools' professors can teach at higher levels, it's important that students matriculating there show at least some promise of being able to at least meet the challenge of being in a more academically competitive environment. The reality is that there is little to be gained by the student, or the school, from placing a student in an environment that is either too challenging or insufficiently challenging. Recognizing that, admissions personnel seek just as much not to place a very strong thinker who scores poorly (or just so-so) on standardized tests into a school where, overwhelmingly, most students are strong at both structured and unstructured challenges.
The key to the merit of standardized tests like the SAT rests in knowing what it does and does not indicate about a student's potential. Mr. Schworm implies as much when he wrote, "Supporters [of the SAT] say it serves as a reliable benchmark of college readiness when combined with grades and course selection, and allows colleges to compare students from a wide range of academic backgrounds." The operative words there are "when combined with;" the SAT is not the "be all, end all" indicator of one's academic skills or potential. Can the things the SAT tests for be evaluated using different approaches? Of course they can.
Does that mean that among the things students must learn is how to "test well?" Perhaps it does, and if it does, so be it. Short of a physiological malady, dyslexia for example, I don't see why it's unreasonable to expect students to learn how to test well. Let's face it, students, like everyone else, take formal and informal tests both big and small every day:
- sitting for formal exams,
- performing well in a job,
- mastering a video game,
- figuring out how to fix a machine,
- structuring a science experiment so it will provide results that answer the question asked in its hypothesis, or
- reasoning their way through a debate topic with friends or in a forensics competition.
In each "test" situation, one must do the same thing: take the information one has already gather, perhaps gather additional information, and synthesize it into a solution approach that works. Some folks are quicker at identifying a successful approach, others find more efficient/effective solutions. Few are the folks who (1) just don't and simply cannot find a viable solution, or who (2) quickly find the most efficient and most effective solution. Other individuals are both fast and effective in all disciplines, others in some, others in few.
The thing for college applicants to do is figure out what they are fast, efficient, and that they enjoy doing. Using that self-awareness of reality, they should then apply not, say, MIT because it's highly rated in nearly all areas, but instead to, say, UC San Francisco or UC San Diego because both are in the top five for biology and they want to major in biology, they are very, very good in biology, and by not aiming for MIT, they buy themselves a slightly less competitive situation overall (
i.e., perhaps a bit lower SAT expectation for admission), while effectively sacrificing nothing in the area of greatest import and relevance to their interests.
The SAT seeks, via objective means, to cull and distinguish the gradations among folks' ability to be be both fast and effective in a way that colleges admissions personnel can, given their own time and resources, separate the wheat from the chaff. Thus, in choosing whether to use the SAT as an indicator of what's "wheat" and what's not, the question deans of admissions must ask is whether they (and their staff) can use an alternative approach and do so as efficiently, (seemingly) fairly, and as quantifiably as does the SAT. For schools receiving vastly more applications than available seats, IMO, the answer is "no." Sadly perhaps, for college applicants the only sure way to gain admission to the college of their choice is to "bust ass" and consistently exceed expectations during high school, and they must understand how "the game is played" and focus their efforts accordingly..
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
― Sun Tzu,
The Art of War
