Newswise — Jane B. Brown applauds the recent recommendation by the National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC) that colleges place less reliance on SAT and ACT scores and shift toward broader methods of admissions criteria. Brown, vice president for enrollment and college relations at Mount Holyoke College, not only helped her college make the jump into SAT-optional admissions territory long ago, she also led the campus-wide efforts to assess the outcomes of that decision.
Mount Holyoke went SAT optional in 2001. In 2002 the South Hadley, Mass., college embarked upon a three-year study of the effects of that policy, supported by a $290,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation. After examining submission patterns and comparing the academic success of submitters and non-submitters, the study revealed no significant difference in the success rates of students who choose to furnish scores and those who do not.
"The Mount Holyoke students who chose not to submit their SAT scores with their applications are succeeding academically, further bolstering our contention that the SAT is not essential to making good admission decisions," Brown says. "We believe the test has limited value as a predictor of an individual student's success."
Convinced that the SAT had become a negative force in higher education, Mount Holyoke committed in 2001 to casting a wider net for applicants with strong academic potential and exceptional talents " young women who may have otherwise been discouraged from applying because of their performance on the SAT.
"The fact is that the SAT does not add enough value for us to require students and their families to make such a large investment of time, energy, and money in this single, high-stakes test," Brown says. "We would encourage high school students to focus instead on activities that promote long-term intellectual and personal growth rather than on time-consuming and often expensive strategies to raise their SAT scores."
The study also confirmed what has been widely assumed: As families' income levels rise, so too does the likelihood that the student has had the advantage of SAT training classes or special tutoring. More than two-thirds of prospective Mount Holyoke students from higher-income families took an SAT preparation course, and one in three had private tutoring.
"By making it an optional part of the admissions process," Brown explains, "the college has been able to open its gates to many exceptional students who had previously found standardized tests to be a significant roadblock."
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