SATs can't test for mental toughness

WASHINGTON -- Evidence seems to be mounting that the scourge of every young college-bound American, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, may be headed for ultimate extinction, where it belongs. After pulling out all the stops to make it fairer, the overseers of the king of the standardized tests now have decided that beginning in 2010, students can take the exams as many times as they can afford and report only the best. Heretofore all their efforts were perused by college admissions officers.

Then comes the news that more and more schools have decided to look solely at other things like courses taken and class standing when deciding who can darken their hallowed halls. Among these is Wake Forest University, one of the nation's premier institutions. The Demon Deacons have decided to make the SAT optional for applicants, thus further certifying what many have been arguing for decades -- that a test alleged to measure what a student has learned in high school but in reality is subject to expensive short term improvement is hardly the best way to predict success or in the classroom.

Wake joins other prestigious schools like Middlebury, Holy Cross, Bowdoin and Bates in discovering that overemphasis on the value of the SAT and the other standard bearer, ACT, has held back diversity on several levels, including economic and ethnic. The fact is that more than one study has found that an applicant's family wealth is a larger factor prospective achievement. Just the ability alone to shell out the fees for expensive preparatory courses and repeats of the exam itself makes money a better predictor. Add to that the financial ability to provide the access to broadening experiences outside the school and the result is obvious.

There is, of course, also a fairness factor. Some youngsters, who are in reality very capable students, become so nervous about these examinations that they do not do well. Others are poor test takers. Knowing how to take these kinds of exams is half the battle. The huge cottage industry of experts who make a nice living off telling prospects how through books and courses proves that. They openly scoff at the pretentiousness of those who design them. Just learn how to take it and relax, they tell their clients, who of course are overwhelmingly white.

Lest we come down too hard on the early designers of these allegedly better yardsticks, it is necessary to point out that the institutions of higher learning are as much to blame as anyone for the myth that quality is measurable on such a limited standard. Too many institutions have misused the SAT as a convenient way to save money, time and energy in the admissions process. It just became too easy for admissions officers to set an SAT level below which most students, with some exceptions for sure, would not be accepted. Even if that was not the case, it clearly sent that message to students who came to believe their scores on these high-pressure exams were all that really mattered.

America's prep schools have lived off their ability to produce high SAT and ACT scores, basing their reputations and high tuition costs and building their endowments on the percentage of their students who are admitted to the nation's elite colleges partially because of their exceptional test scores, These private high schools begin teaching toward SAT success the minute their students walk through the door, something few public schools can manage because of the diversity of their classes and the need too often to teach to the lowest common denominator, particularly in the inner city.

Writing for a major newspaper recently, Nathan O. Hatch, the president of Wake Forest, said that a 2007 analysis of national data "showed that colleges can attain both academic excellence and social diversity if they base admissions on high school grade-point average but not if they depend on SAT scores."

With schools like this declaring their independence from the standardized test, it should not be long before others in their top-20 peer group do the same. For far too long scholastically capable young men and women have been denied access to colleges and universities because they were too poor to take prep courses or environmentally oppressed or just plain spooked by the exam.

It is impossible to measure human desire and mental toughness on a standard scale. We shouldn't try. Long-term grade success and achievement outside the classroom are far better yardsticks.

(E-mail Dan K. Thomasson, former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service, at thomassondan(at)aol.com.)