The Russian Roulette of SAT Scores
As this year's college-admission cycle nears its end — with most high-school seniors having chosen the colleges where they plan to enroll — it's time to look ahead with the Class of 2010. For our current juniors, the College Board has created Score Choice — which ostensibly allows students to send only their higher SAT scores to the colleges that they are interested in attending. As a college counselor, I wish it were that simple.
When I think about Score Choice, I remember the day that a great public university invited a group of counselors to a "fishbowl" admissions-committee meeting. We sat around the perimeter of the room while admissions officers presented and evaluated candidates. I felt as if I were watching pros play poker with GPA's, SAT scores, and other criteria submitted by applicants. Now, with Score Choice, which cards get into the committee's hands will supposedly be up to the candidates themselves.
Unfortunately, not every dealer wants to play that way. In fact, the College Board has posted a 12-page list of the policies that different colleges will employ — and many of those on it still require "all scores." In essence those deans are saying: "Apply here, kid, and there is no such thing as Score Choice. Empty your pockets. We want to see everything you got."
The deans who take that view say they want the whole record in order to understand the total context of the application. That's especially important, they say, with regard to the differences between socioeconomically advantaged students — who can take these tests multiple times with untold hours of paid preparation — and less-advantaged students who might take the test only once, usually without much, if anything, like test-prep coaching.
My school is a founding member of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools, which includes all sorts of institutions — some in highly affluent communities, others with vastly more socioeconomically diverse populations, and some with strong percentages of international students. Individual members' approaches to admissions issues vary: Some pitch in on College Board committees to make Score Choice work, while others refer to the College Board as "the Death Star" for what they regard as the onerous, expensive, and debilitating effects its "services" have on students. Somewhere in the middle are colleagues who think the SAT Reasoning Test is the core problem because it serves only the colleges — providing a no-cost way to winnow applicant pools — while doing nothing to test students on specific prerequisite knowledge that will be essential for further study.
If there is one thing that all members of our association agree upon and want to see, however, it is total, forthright disclosure by colleges and universities about exactly how they will play the testing cards that come into their possession. Right now, our students cannot always say for sure how committees will use their scores. Until colleges and universities are totally transparent and scrupulously consistent in their practices, students will have reason to believe that the game they're playing might be rigged by a house intent on complete control.
Questions that need to be answered explicitly and truthfully, and followed to the letter, by each college or university admissions office include:
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Do you "super score," taking only the student's top section scores from different dates?
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Do you look at all test scores reported, or just the highest in each section?
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Do you use the writing score on the SAT?
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Do you use the writing score on the ACT?
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Do you look at SAT subject-test scores?
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Do you look at just the two highest subject-test scores if that is all you ask for, even when additional scores become available to you?
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Do you look at AP scores for admissions purposes? If so, how do you use them? What do you do with scores that you didn't request and don't require, but somehow still received? Do you use them — or discard them by scrubbing them from the file?
The reasons that those and other questions need to be answered on the Web sites and in the materials of each admissions office — and then adhered to rigorously — is that we as counselors know that stated policy and actual practice sometimes diverge. Too many of us have had conversations with candid admissions officers who have cited one poor test score as a problem with an application — even when institutional policy would ostensibly have been to super score or otherwise remove that one low result from consideration.
It's only human for one's eyes to catch on a low result when one is trying to make tough calls between admirable candidates, but when those particular numbers weren't supposed to be under scrutiny at all is when counselors want to call a foul. When we professionals who do this sort of thing year-in and year-out are uncertain as to exactly how scores will be used, it's no wonder that the kids in our care worry when playing the game.
While one can think of SAT scores as cards to be played, held close, or discarded in this high-stakes game of admissions poker, the feeling that some of our students can have is closer to that of Russian roulette — where one chamber of the revolver holds a single low score that can end an application's life. What we who care for kids under pressure every day are hoping to accomplish is some greater clarity, consistency, predictability, and fairness in a system that is too often fraught with misunderstanding, obfuscation, and worrying levels of unnecessary anxiety.
If admissions committees would make all testing practices crystal clear to all constituents, and follow them without exception — in essence, always dealing from the top of the deck — it would be a big step toward a better game.
Chris Teare is director of college counseling at Antilles School, on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and a member of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools.