S.A.T.s Under Fire
With the snows of winter comes a traumatic experience for 1,400,000 of the nation's preparatory and high school students: they must suffer through the three-hour Scholastic Aptitude Tests. Much of the agony stems from the exaggerated belief of many students that their S.A.T. scores will determine whether they get into the college of their choice—or even any college at all. For the most part, the pain is pointless. A number of educators now contends that the tests are an imprecise indicator of future success—and colleges are relying on them less and less in picking their freshman classes.
One of the most outspoken critics of the S.A.T.s is Social Critic Martin L. Gross, a lecturer at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, who began his crusade against testing in 1962 with a book called The Brain Watchers. He calls S.A.T.s "the nail in the coffin of American intellectualism," since their emphasis on "certainty and right answers" makes test-taking ability "the criterion for college performance, and measures it badly." Gross and other critics deplore the pressure on students to score well on the tests. Many schools prep their students on the kind of vocabulary and mathematical skills tested by the exams; high school principals, as well as college publicists, tend to brag about high-average S.A.T. scores as badges of success.*
No Guarantee. Doubts about the S.A.T.s are shared by many university admissions officers. Yale's Admissions Dean R. Inslee Clark Jr. is not impressed by "multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank tests" as indices of a student's capability. The test scores, agrees Amherst Admissions Dean Eugene Wilson, "do not guarantee the presence of those human qualities and intellectual abilities we value most." Yale's Clark, as well as many Negro educators, feels that the tests' subtle orientation toward white middle-class values loads them against Negroes and other culturally deprived youths.
Actually, no one is more aware of the limitations of the S.A.T.s than the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, N.J., which produces and administers the tests, along with achievement exams in such specific fields as history and French, for the 782 colleges and universities that belong to the College Entrance Examination Board. Officials of E.T.S. continually warn colleges that the two S.A.T. exams (verbal and mathematical, scored from 0 to 800) are blunt rather than surgical instruments, and should not be used as the main standard in selecting students. Even E.T.S. officials rate high school grades as a better indication of how a student will perform in college.
At the same time, the E.T.S. examiners insist that their tests do serve a valid academic function. Since grading standards vary enormously among the nation's 24,000 secondary schools, the S.A.T.s at the very least provide admissions officers with a national common denominator in helping judge the thousands of applications they get every year. A high scorer from a small, little-known school is thus given greater consideration than he might have received from his class record alone. By the same token, the underachiever —the bright youth with poor high school grades—is often spotlighted by the tests, given a second chance to prove himself.