Setting a standard

The committee's report, released last week through The New York Times, argues that standardized tests do not correlate well with college scores and corroborate ingrained gaps in education based on socioeconomic factors. While these aspects of the SAT are troubling, the alternative - measuring high school achievement solely on a subjective spate of courses, GPA, club leadership, extracurricular activities and teacher recommendations - would be far worse. High school grades are often severely inflated, club leadership can mean more on paper than in practice, and recommendations too often overstate student achievement.

Fitzsimmons' committee frets over well-off students gaining an advantage by devoting inordinate amounts of time and money to "game" the SAT. But the committee's report found "gaming" increases SAT scores by only 20 to 30 points - a modest gain, considering the SAT only claims to be accurate to within 30 points. The committee also notes that well-off students have more opportunities to build their vocabulary and math skills - and while this factor will affect almost any standardized test, it will also affect almost any aspect of a student's application. Furthermore, well-off students can just as easily "game" the other parts of the admissions process as well: Personal essays can be edited or re-written by hired writers, tutors can prepare students for class, club leadership can go hand-in-hand with connections and recommendations with parental pressure. No barometer in the admissions process is free from bias toward socioeconomic privilege.

Harvard has already decided once before to lower the weight it gave to the SAT: In the early 1920s, Harvard's president found that the school was admitting "too many Jews" because of their high test scores. Harvard subsequently instituted a series of required interviews, personal essays and other requirements that now make up the standard college application and in the process greatly cut down the number of Jewish students admitted. While we are not arguing that the University will today discriminate against applicants based on religion, this is an example of how subjective qualities can be abused in the applications process. The maintenance of some national standard is an effective and necessary check on any such tendencies.

For these reasons, the University should continue to take the SAT seriously as a component of admissions decisions. If the University finds that the SAT doesn't correlate with college performance, it can work with other schools to create a new test that better reflects a student's readiness for college. But radically decreasing the importance of standardized tests could have negative consequences.