All across the country, high school juniors and seniors spent the morning filling in dots with number two pencils in the hope of gaining entrance to the college of their choice. For most, this won’t be the last time they take it. My 20-year old daughter (now a junior at Notre Dame) took the ACT three times and the SAT twice before she was satisfied.
Test Scores Predict Academic Success and Retention
The College Board reports that more students from the Class of 2010 took the SAT than any other class, a total of 1.6 million.
The Board maintains that scores on the SAT are predictive of college performance, especially when combined with high school grades (correlation of .5 and .6 respectively). Additionally, they provide data that shows a strong correspondence between the rigorousness of high school course loads and scores, with students who take a ‘core curriculum’ and AP courses scoring on average 150 points higher than those who do not. With this kind of evidence, it’s little wonder that the scores matter — and students and parents take them so seriously.
An Escalating ‘Arms Race’
An entire industry has developed to coach students into higher SAT, ACT and AP scores. Some families are now spending a small fortune in an attempt to boost scores (“The Escalating Arms Race for Top Colleges WSJ). Jennifer Moses reports spending over two thousand dollars on standardized testing, applications, counseling and test prep for her 17-year old twins, and another $4,000 on travel for college visits. This is on top of tuition for private high school where assistance in college counseling no doubt exceeds that of a typical public school. Her rationale? “We are all caught up in a crazy arms race, where the order of the day (to borrow a useful term from the Cold War) is “escalation dominance.”
Does test prep frenzy make a difference? In the aggregate, the answer is “no”. Average SAT scores have remained remarkably stable for the last twenty years.
For individuals, the answer is equivocal. While the vendors of these services purport that they can make a difference, the College Board says that the biggest influence is the rigor of the high school coursework. Those who take more years of history, math and English – and more difficult AP and honors versions of those courses – do better than those who do not.
An Issue of Fairness
As a parent, this imperviousness to coaching is both reassuring and troubling. I’d like to think that there is a way to get an ‘edge’, yet on the other hand, if that edge is only available to those with the financial resources and motivation to try to ‘game’ the system, then confidence in the ‘fairness’ of the admission process is compromised.
On an individual level, if the SAT and ACT scores are in fact predictive of performance, as the College Board says they are, test scores help to prevent students from attending schools where they lack the preparation or skills to compete.
Every student should strive to attend the best school for which they are qualified. But everyone loses when unqualified students are admitted where they don’t belong. It’s better in the long run for everyone that an average student find a school that matches their achievement than struggle to keep up in an environment scaled to the best and the brightest.
Incoming Freshman Are More Confident — AND More Overwhelmed
Source: Higher Education Research Institute – UCLA
Matching student ability to academic rigor may have direct implications for emotional health. The HERI (Higher Education Research Institute) has tracked the emotional health of high school seniors (incoming freshman) since 1985. According to their research, the class of 2010 has some of the highest self-ratings on ‘drive to achieve’ and ‘academic ability’.
While these measures have been moving up, indications of emotional health have been trending down. Similarly, the numbers of students who report being frequently “overwhelmed by all I had to do” was up two percentage points from 2009, moving from 27.1% to 29.1%. Stress was especially pronounced for incoming women — 38.8% felt stressed in this manner.
The Right School
Next month, this years seniors will begin to get the fat or the thin envelope. Many more will be disappointed this year than in years past, largely due to record levels of applications. UC Berkeley received 52,900 freshman applications for Fall 2011 – compared to just 35,473 ten years ago in 2001. Harvard has set a new record for applications. Given the longer odds, it’s reasonable for students to apply to more schools, which just drives the cycle ever higher.
Perhaps if students simply focused on finding the best possible choice among their ‘realistic’ schools based on grades, test scores and a new index being created by the College Board to equivalize ‘academic rigor’, we would all be better off — financially and emotionally.
