Colleges should continue to waive the SAT and ACT after COVID-19
By Riya Khatod, Copy Style Editor
Throughout high school, students immerse themselves in activities and learn and develop skills through school that they will use in college and in their future career. The question is, do all these classes and extracurriculars determine college readiness or does a single test? According to many colleges and universities across the country, a student’s admission boils down to one important multiple choice test: the SAT or ACT.
Supporters of these standardized tests believe that class difficulty varies from school to school, and therefore is not an accurate representation of a student’s intelligence, whereas the SAT and ACT are tests designed to measure the intelligence of any college applicant on the same scale. However, is the scale fair?
Time and time again critics of the standardized test have proven that affluent students seem to excel on the test, while lower income students score a great deal lower. The score disparity is clearly a direct result of low income students’ inability to pay for test prep, practice books and private tutoring. According to the college board, 50 percent of Asian American and white students scored a 1200 or higher on the SAT, while only 10.5 percent of Hispanic and black students scored in that range. For context, the SAT scale is out of 1600. For comparison according to PayScale, Hispanic men make $0.91 for every $1 white men make and every $1.15 Asian men do while black men make $0.87, meaning those who score higher on the SAT tend to accumulate more wealth.
Hampshire College, a liberal arts school in Massachusetts, stopped requiring the SAT and ACT in 2014 because their admissions board believed the combination of GPA and extracurriculars were a more valid indicator of college readiness. According to Hampshire College’s official website, after disregarding the standardized tests in admissions, the college saw a 10 percent increase in class diversity, an eight percent increase in the percentage of students who are the first generation from their family to attend college and a three percent increase in the retention of first year students, reinforcing the concept that the SAT and ACT are merely measures of economic stability.
Some also argue that the SAT correlates to graduation rates, which is not true. According to a study done by the National Association for College Admission Counseling in 2014, in which nearly 123,000 students from 33 different colleges were compared according to their SAT score, GPA and graduation rate, only 0.05 of a GPA point and 0.6 percent in graduation rates separated those who did and did not submit the SAT.
This minor difference in graduation rates combined with the socioeconomic aspect of the test means that the SAT is evidently not an evaluation of intelligence, but of which students can sit for a three and a half hour long test and receive the maximum amount of tutoring.
Furthermore, studying for the test prevents students from focusing on extracurricular activities they enjoy. Instead of going to work, Liza Mozlyuk (’21) had to study for the SAT. Having to study for the SAT or ACT while continuing to stay on top of schoolwork means students have a miserable junior year spent locked in their rooms trying desperately to get good scores.
“I started my tutoring maybe two months before COVID-19 happened and I had to miss shifts at my job because I had to take practice tests on Wednesdays and tutoring for an hour on Saturdays,” Mozlyuk said.
Evidently, the SAT and ACT should either be optional or completely removed from the college admissions process. It adds very little benefit to applications and generates excess pressure on students hoping to attend college.