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."

Applications to Bates increased 65 percent after the college made the SAT optional. Yet dropping the SAT requirement at Bates, a college with fewer than 1,600 students, was likely easier than it would be for the UC system, where more than 123,000 undergraduates attend its nine campuses.

"When we're talking the scale of a UC, it's like a mouse and an elephant they're simply different entities," Rosner said. "Removing [the SAT] in the context of UC admissions is an incredible challenge."

Earlier this year, Texas passed a bill making the students in the top ten percent of each high school automatically eligible for university enrollment, in effect removing the SAT requirement for top students.