The Big Tests: The SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test )

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If you are interested in applying to some of the hundred most selective liberal arts colleges and research universities in the United States, you already know—or soon will find out—that most require applicants to submit scores from one or more standardized tests. Less selective colleges generally require them as well. You probably also know that these tests—what they actually measure and the role they play in your getting accepted to college—are at the heart of the most anxiety-provoking part of the college admissions process.

This article will help you understand what the SAT, the best-known and most controversial of these tests, is all about and why so much controversy surrounds it. We discuss how the SAT has changed over time and how colleges weight SAT scores in the admissions process. Understanding all this will help you put the SAT in perspective and approach it more confidently.

Where Did the SAT Come From?

Your parents may remember when the SAT was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test. First developed in the mid-1920s as an adaptation of the Army Alpha test used to assign duties to recruits during World War I, the Scholastic Aptitude Test became widely used as an important tool in college admissions after World War II. Colleges facing unprecedented numbers of applications from returning veterans needed an efficient way to evaluate them. The idea of testing “aptitude” for college as part of the admissions process became popular as the number of applications soared.

Almost sixty-five years later, a version of the Scholastic Aptitude Test is still widely used in the admissions process at most selective institutions, although with considerably more caution. The Scholastic Aptitude Test, originally designed to measure just what its name suggested, morphed into the SAT Reasoning Test, or SAT for short. According to the College Board, the organization that owns and administers the SAT, the SAT now measures “what you have learned in school and how well you can apply that knowledge. It assesses how well you analyze and solve problems.”

Concerns About the SAT

The SAT has been challenged as culturally biased and unreliable in predicting success in college. Critics point to the substantial disparities in average scores of African Americans and Hispanics compared to white or Asian students, as well as strong correlations between socioeconomic status and performance on the SAT. Critics also cite data showing that high school GPA is a better predictor of first-year college grades than the SAT.

The SAT has become a symbol of all the anxieties, concerns, fears, and frustrations in the college admissions system. -  Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University

For those who appreciate history, it is more than a little ironic that the current arguments against the SAT are basically the same ones offered in favor of the Scholastic Aptitude Test by those who promoted its use after World War II. Educators at that time knew that economically disadvantaged students rarely had access to classes and instruction of the caliber offered at prep schools. Thus, they argued, these students would be at a disadvantage on the subject matter tests that had traditionally been part of the college admissions process. Tests of more abstract reasoning ability like the Scholastic Aptitude Test, however, would presumably be less closely tied to high school quality, thus allowing good students to shine regardless of where they went to school. Additional support for the test came from statistical studies at that time showing “that general verbal and mathematical ability tests predicted college grades better than did achievement tests in particular subjects.” New research now leads to the opposite conclusion.

Recent Changes in SAT

In response to concerns about the SAT, the College Board announced a major revamping of the SAT that took effect in March 2005. The changes included new types of questions, elimination of some existing question types, and an entirely new section on writing. The old SAT had been divided into two parts, verbal and math, each of which was scored from 200 to 800, for a maximum possible score of 1600. The test now has three parts, each still scaled from 200 to 800, so the maximum score is now 2400. The SAT is now about three hours and forty-five minutes of actual test time, roughly forty-five minutes longer than the old version.

The verbal section was renamed “critical reading” and the word analogies that were part of the old SAT verbal section were dropped as a result of criticism that they were unrelated to anything ever taught in the high school curriculum. The analogies were replaced with short reading passages that are included along with the longer reading passages that were already part of the test. The math section was expanded to cover additional math concepts; the questions now assume that a student has studied Algebra II and Geometry in addition to Algebra I. The newest section, writing, requires students to write a short essay in response to a prompt as well as to answer multiple-choice grammar questions. The prompt consists of either a pair of quotations or a short paragraph from a real text. The essay assignment asks the student to write an argument in response to the prompt. You have to take a position one way or the other and support it with examples taken from your reading or personal experience. An example of such a prompt is whether memories hinder or help people in their effort to learn from the past and succeed in the present. You can answer this either way; you are graded on the structure of your argument, not on which side you support.

These changes, the College Board has argued, more closely align the new SAT with the standard American high school curriculum and allow students to demonstrate what they have learned to a greater extent than they could on the earlier version of the test. But not everyone is happy with the changes. The new writing section is of particular concern to nonnative speakers of English, who believe that it puts them at a disadvantage. In addition, even those who support a test of writing skill question the predictive validity of an unedited essay on a previously unknown topic written from start to finish in twenty-five minutes and graded in two minutes (or less). This is a task that you rarely, if ever, face in high school or college, so its relevance is dubious. Furthermore, factual accuracy is irrelevant—you could claim that Picasso discovered America and still get a perfect score. One researcher found a strong correlation between the length of the essay and its score: the more the student wrote, the higher the score tended to be.

The essays are handwritten in pencil but later scanned into a computer and scored on a scale from 1 to 6 by two independent readers. Essays that do not respond to the prompt receive a zero, no matter how well written. The scores from the two readers are then added together to obtain the student’s essay score ranging from 2 to 12. The essay score counts about a third of the overall writing score after it is combined with the score on the multiple choice portion of the writing section to produce a scaled score between 200 and 800. Colleges can read the actual essay itself if they wish along with the regular score report, but few take the time, unless something unusual prompts them to do so. In fact, many colleges have been wary about the value of the writing test and continue to focus on scores on the other two parts of the test, although this is gradually changing. In a recent survey, 32 percent of colleges that require or consider test scores said the writing test had “no influence” on their evaluation process, while only 17 percent said it had “great influence.”