High School and College Counselors Debate The SAT Problem at Annual Conference
SAN FRANCISCO
Echoing the recommendation of a Latino task force
that the SAT requirement for admission to the University of California
(UC) be dropped, several speakers at the fifty-third National
Association for College Admission Counseling conference declared their
opposition to standardized test requirements for college admission.
But they also noted how challenging, it would be to convince a system as large as the UC to change its policy.
The conference, attended by some 3,500 college and high school
counselors, addressed questions regarding the legitimacy of
standardized tests and the effects of recent legal challenges to
affirmative action programs, particularly in California and Texas.
“There’s a history of making [the] SAT optional, but it’s not been
done on a really large scale,” said Jay Rosner, executive director of
the Princeton Review Foundation. He has long been a critic of the
admissions test.
Bates College in Maine was one of the first colleges to make the SAT
optional for admission. That was thirteen years ago. The college has
been satisfied with the caliber of its students since.
“All the results we see are positive,” said Bill Hiss, vice
president of administrative services at Bates. “Those students were
right who said they’re better students than those tests suggest.”
