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Going SAT-Free

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Going SAT-Free
The venerable test used to be the only one that mattered for college-bound seniors, but a growing number of schools are not requiring it.

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At her prep school in Kents Hill, Maine, Meg Richardson served as captain of the field-hockey team and president of the school's Amnesty International chapter. She took five AP classes, never missed honor roll, and interned for U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe throughout her senior year. She managed all this while maintaining a 3.7 GPA. But unlike her stellar academics and impressive extracurricular activities, Richardson's SAT scores—1850 out of 2400, placing her in the top 85th percentile—weren't strong enough to make her stand out at the top schools. So Richardson did what a growing number of students and colleges are beginning to do: she ignored them. "When Smith, a highly respected school, told me they didn't care about my SAT scores, I thought, why should I?" she says. "I will always be more than a test score, and any school that supports me in that is the school for me."
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On Nov. 6, thousands of anxious high-school students will sit for three hours and 45 minutes taking the SAT test, still considered an American teenage rite of passage. But despite its widespread acceptance for the past 63 years, its dominance as the must-take test for college-boundstudents has been slowly slipping. Not only do all four-year colleges that require a standardized test—including Harvard and Yale—let applicants choose between submitting SAT and ACT scores (the last school made the change in 2007), but a growing number of competitive institutions including Smith College, Wake Forest, American University, Bowdoin College, Bates College, and, most recently, Virginia Wesleyan, have decided to forgo standardized tests altogether. Today, about 830 of the country's 2,430 accredited four-year colleges do not use the SAT or ACT to admit the majority of applicants. (Some schools require a test if you have a low GPA or class rank.) "Colleges are trying to increase the number of applicants and diversify their population," says Kristen Campbell, executive director of college-prep programs for Kaplan Test Prep.
Even with more schools embracing test-free admissions, a record number of students took both the SAT and the ACT this year. With the average student applying to as many as 10 schools, it's hard to avoid submitting test scores somewhere. Still, this year marked the first time that slightly more entering freshman took the ACT than the SAT—1,568,835 versus 1,547,990—one sign that the SAT's dominance isn't what it once was. Seven states—Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee, New Mexico, and Wyoming—now require all high-school juniors to take the ACT as part of their end-of-the-year assessment. This move certainly has helped the ACT gain traction. By contrast, only one state, Maine, mandates the SAT. "The ACT has been quietly marketing and reaching out to states in a much more aggressive way over the past three to five years," says Campbell.
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When Virginia Wesleyan College announced its new "test optional" admission policy in October, it noted that a high-school GPA was the best predictor of college success. In fact, a College Board research study using data from 159,286 students at 110 colleges and universities showed that the SAT and high-school GPA equally predict students' first-year college GPA
Going SAT-Free

Still, don't expect to see Harvard's name on the no-test list any time soon. With so many kids applying, having a standard test helps weed out applicants. "I would say none of the top 10 or 20 schools are imminent [in switching to test-optional]" says Bob Schaeffer, public-education director at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a nonprofit. "The most competitive colleges in the nation—those admitting one out of six—have such a large number of applicants that they can pick and choose." Places like Harvard and MIT could admit only those with perfect scores if they wanted to. "As long as application numbers continue to be in the tens of thousands, the Ivies may be reluctant to give up the one measure of aptitude that is universal, if imperfect," says Keith Light, associate director of admissions at Brown University. "The wild variance in grading practices at high schools makes it difficult to rely on transcripts for a complete picture of a student's promise."

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But for Virginia Wesleyan, eliminating the standardized-test requirement made for a fairer admissions process. Students don't need to pay the $47 fee to take the SAT—nor the $500 to $1,000 required to take a costly test-prep class, which critics say puts low-income youths at a disadvantage. And some believe the test itself is biased. "The strongest correlation with a strong SAT score is family income," says Patty Patten, dean of admissions at Virginia Wesleyan, which has 1,300 students. "The playing field was never level." Patten hated turning down students with 4.0 GPAs and stellar activities simply because their test scores didn't measure up. "The GPA is going to be a stronger indicator of their success." Likewise, Wake Forest took into account a more diverse student body. Minority enrollment in the freshman class increased from 18 percent to 23 percent after the school became test-optional.
In addition to diversity, the no-test trend has a bottom-line benefit. Test-optional schools often have a spike in applicants—a good enough reason alone for some to eliminate standardized tests. Wake Forest and Smith College, both in their second years without SAT or ACT requirements, claim a 16 percent and 6 percent increase in applicants, respectively, since the switch—and no decrease in student performance. (Neither school, however, makes GPA data publicly available.) "Students love the idea of being judged on something other than a test score," says Martha Allman, director of admissions at Wake Forest. "We've looked at them under a microscope, and their GPAs don't vary from other freshmen." (She said the school saw no difference between the GPAs of those who submitted SAT scores and those who did not for 2009's freshman class.) Actually, many students still send SAT results to test-optional schools, and admissions offices still brag about those high scores.
The admissions office at Wake Forest requires in-person or Webcam interviews to get to know prospective students better. It also relies more heavily on a beefed-up, writing-intensive application. Applicants must design a class, complete with field trips and faculty members to go along. And extra essay questions such as "What outrages you and what are you doing about it?" or "Which Final Jeopardy! category would ensure your victory?" have been added. "They're interesting questions to get at creativity," says Allman. For this year's entering class, 72 percent of applicants submitted SAT or ACT scores and 28 percent did not. "I don't think it's fair to say categorically that not submitting hurt their chances [of getting in]," says Allman. 
Likewise, Smith College also looks at other circumstances when evaluating an applicant. For instance, is a student taking a lighter load because he or she is a world-class athlete? "There's no such thing as an ordinal ranking of human beings," says Audrey Smith, dean of enrollment at Smith. "Boys and girls have had a set of experiences that only makes sense in the larger context of their life." Interestingly, 64 percent of the school's applicants still sent in scores officially, and another 19 percent self-reported them on the common application.
Despite Internet conversion tables to determine IQ from SAT scores, Laurence Bunin, senior vice president of the SAT program for the College Board, which administers the SAT, insists that it's not an intelligence test, even though SAT scores seem to follow us throughout life. "Anybody who says it's an IQ test would be wrong," he says. "It's a test of math and English." Students who take a core curriculum of these two subjects in high school score 150 points higher on the SAT than students who don't. Students who take AP courses score about 300 points higher. And remember, standardized tests measure neither creativity nor drive. "Generally speaking, high academic performance tends to go hand in hand with high SAT or ACT results," says Brown's Light. "But we see brilliant kids who don't do so well with a No. 2 pencil on a Saturday morning, and less brilliant kids who happen to do well on standardized tests."

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