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The SAT, College Admissions, and the Concept of Talent: Unexamined Myths, Unexplained Perceptions, Needed Explorations.

1980; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 62; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

1940-6487

Gerald W. Bracey,

Medical Education and Admissions

n the general media the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is being pre sented to the public and apparently is increasingly accepted as both the gate keeper of college admissions and the single most important indicator of aca demic health at the college entry level. Allan Nairn and Ralph Nader, after their astonishing discovery that SAT scores are correlated with income, went on to paint the SAT specifically and the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in general as monoliths of monstrous evil aimed against poor and minority youth.' And ever since the Wirtz Report on SAT score declines,2 each minuscule change in the SAT national average has been treated as front-page news with ap propriate moans and groans or sighs of relief, depending on the direction of change, and pontifical but trivial inter pretations of each point, irrespective of direction. This is curious, coming at a time when more and more research indicates that the SAT is not as good as billed and is becom ing less and less relevant to anything at all. I shall discuss why such a disjuncture be tween fact and perception might occur, but first it is necessary to document the fact of the SAT's growing uselessness. It is not a difficult task. In the March 1980 issue of the Bulletin of the American Association for Higher Education, ETS researchers Rodney Hart nett and Robert Feldmesser state: the great majority of the one and a half million students who currently apply to undergraduate colleges each year, test scores have virtually no effect in determin ing whether they will attend college and probably little effect on which college they will attend. 3 Hartnett and Feldmesser prove their assertion in part by using in formation drawn from the College En trance Examination Board's own College Handbook, 1979 edition. The board, us ing a random sample from 1,700 four year institutions, reported that 78% of these institutions admitted more than 707o of their applicants. Oluf Davidsen, president of the American College Testing Program, recently reported a more dra matic statistic: Ninety-one percent of all applicants are now accepted by the college of their first choice.4 So much for the SAT as a gatekeeper. Even those schools perceived by the public at large as nearly impenetrable are not nearly so selective as the public be lieves. A 1978 study of 30 elite schools found that only eight admitted fewer than 25% of their applicants and that the average acceptance rate was 43'0/W.5 An earlier study of these same schools is even more revealing. In 1973 and 1974, before declining enrollments really started gray ing academic hairs, fully 69% of the appli cants to this group of 30 institutions were admitted to at least one of them.6 When enrollment declines are considered, it be comes clear that most high school stu dents needn't fear the tests or much of anything else concerning college. With college enrollments projected to decline until nearly the year 2000, it is not sur prising that the final report of the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education paints colleges as both heavens and havens for applicants in the remainder of this century: They will be recruited more actively, admitted more readily, retained more assiduously, coun seled more attentively, graded more con siderately, financed more adequately, taught more conscientiously, and placed in jobs more insistently; and the cur riculum will be tailored more to their tastes. 7 A few former college coaches may be forgiven if they entertain vengeful visions of recruiting scandals in the aca demic arena. Besides declining enrollment, the most common hypothesis advanced to account for the statistics reported by Hartnett, Feldmesser, and Davidsen is that ap plicants preselect their colleges on the basis of their perceived academic and financial ability, applying only to those affordable colleges most likely to accept them.8 The enrollment effects of opposing forces increasing costs coupled with in creasing subsidies in some form are too complex to deal with here. While facts about various institutions known to applicants or their counselors may affect the applicants' decisions, no easy generalizations are possible. For ex ample, how does one explain the fact that in 1978 the University of Chicago ad mitted 7007o of its applicants, yet had a freshman class mean SAT verbal score of 630, while Stanford admitted only 23'% of its applicants with a class mean of 615? Arguments for preselection based on SAT outcomes are particularly weak in view of the fact that most applications are made well before the applicants receive their SAT scores.