MASTHEAD EDITORIAL: Unreliable Tests Tarnish the Application Process A Masthead Editorial
By The News Masthead
April 1st has come and passed, and with it the long-awaited arrival of college acceptance letters in the SAC mailboxes. Sixth formers may be preparing to bid Choate farewell, but fifth formers have only tentatively begun the process of researching and applying to colleges. It’s a vicious cycle—and one that certainly shapes the decisions we make, even as under formers. Applying to schools is the culmination of most of our high school careers, and as a result it is an experience wrought with anxiety and doubt. Added to the laundry list of application anxieties are the recently surfacing doubts about the accuracy and usefulness of the dreaded high school right-of-passage known as standardized testing.
A dramatic example of such concerns is the recently exposed botching of several of the October 2005 SAT’s. This past March, Pearson Educational Measurement, College Board’s scanning vendor, announced that 27,000 of the tests had not been fully evaluated, and that an additional 1,600 scan sheets had not been double-checked for accuracy. Consequently, 4,411 students received scores lower than their actual numbers. Choate’s own Chip Robie was one of the students who received a lower score, but, according to Interim Director of College Counseling, Terri Burditt, it did not affect his college acceptances. Collegeboard.com makes clear that the number of mis-scored tests was only .8% of the total examinations taken that day; however, the statistics neither minimize the impact that these errors probably had on the students affected, nor lessen the blow to the SAT as a respected measure of student potential in college. How can a student be confident that his score is necessarily accurate ever again? And because the College Board organizes most of the testing required for college applications—save the alternative ACT—it is entirely possible that similar errors may occur with the scoring of AP and SAT Subject Tests. Incidents like the October 30th SAT mishap suggest to students that their test scores may be misrepresenting them.
For admissions offices, comparing the GPA’s of applicants is ineffective unless administrators have a strong understanding of the level of difficulty of each applicant’s school—a nearly impossible task. Standardized tests are therefore supposed to give colleges a better idea of, as the College Board puts it, the relative “preparedness for college” of high school students. Examinations like the SAT and ACT purport to level the playing field, but when their data is false or unreliable the tests are rendered useless. The mis-scoring of SAT’s doesn’t only affect students: when one of the main measures of applicants’ academic skill becomes faulty, an admissions board’s ability to select a suitable student body is also impaired.
Lately, though, colleges seem increasingly wary of standardized testing. Schools such as Bates and Middlebury are now accepting certain alternatives to the SAT or ACT; Fairtest.org, a website devoted to the promotion of fair standardized evaluations, offers a list of schools in the United States that do not use SAT or ACT scores in their consideration of applicants. Also, many major universities either no longer accept or only accept certain AP tests as a basis of course acceleration or credit, even though the tests were originally developed to let gifted students enroll in challenging classes.
So why are we taking these tests? Once again, we are suspicious. The AP, formerly a way of advancing one’s placement in a college’s curriculum, has now evolved into but one more “brand” intended to legitimize the candidate. As numerous articles in the popular and business press have shown in recent years, the College Board is a money machine. It costs about $41 to take the SAT, but the College Board offers services such as receiving scores by phone or adding to the list of score recipients for an additional fee. Signing up past the deadline will incur a late registration fee of $21 per test. Many of the major universities also require applying students to take two or three of the SAT II Subject Tests. Advanced Placement examinations are even pricier at a cost of $82 each. Add in the cost of preparation books and software, or even courses and tutors, and the “prep price tag” is pretty daunting. Standardized tests have gone from simply being a measure of a ability to an extremely profitable—and tapped—market that takes advantage of a large applicant pool, cutthroat competition, and the high anxieties of applying to college. Needless to say, those high school students less fortunate than most of us at Choate remain outside of the pool of those who can afford such special preparation. Public school educators have noted the disadvantage of poorer and minority students in the college chase as a result.
In theory, a fair system to compare students’ relative aptitude for college work makes sense. But the ineptitude of scoring the SATs, diminished frequency with which AP credit is allowed, the inflated prices and consequent social discrimination these prices trigger all make us on The News wonder about the true usefulness of such evaluation instruments. When you add the psychological ordeal of taking the SAT’s, we conclude that the process needs to be re-evaluated.
