 |
|
|
This
Op-ed ran in the Washington Post on Wednesday, January 3,
2001.
SIDETRACKED BY SATS
By Joanne V. Creighton
Across the nation, eager high
school seniors are now struggling to put the finishing touches
on applications to colleges and universities. What institutions
students choose and whether those schools in turn choose them
could be life-defining decisions. Yet too often those decisions
are influenced by the misleading ways in which both students and
institutions are reduced to numbers by the SAT and annual college
rankings.
SAT scores have assumed a central role in the admissions process
disproportional to their value. While this test has some ability
to predict student performance in the first year of college, it
falls far short of predicting overall academic or career success
and a host of other aptitudes that educators and society value,
such as intellectual curiosity, motivation, persistence, leadership,
creativity, civic engagement and social conscience.
Since Mount Holyoke's announcement in June that we are making
submission of SAT scores optional for a research period of five
years, we have been inundated by e-mails and letters from high
school guidance counselors, principals and headmasters applauding
our decision and expressing consternation over the misguided importance
this test has assumed. They want their students to focus on educationally
productive activities, not on test-prep skills, and so do we.
Casting a skeptical eye on the SAT and refusing to reduce a student
to a number is a step in the right direction. Now colleges and
universities must refuse to reduce ourselves to numbers as well.
The SAT has developed a strange relationship with another set
of numbers -- annual college rankings -- that are even more specious.
The average SAT score of an institution's incoming class influences
how that school does in college rankings, such as those manufactured
annually by U.S. News & World Report magazine. Admission
officers at many leading colleges and universities often reject
or discount students who may be well qualified but whose SAT scores
will "hurt" that institution's SAT average in the rankings. At
the same time, there is also a widely held belief among high school
guidance counselors that some selective schools are cagily using
early decision, early action and wait lists to manipulate their
acceptance rates and yields to improve their performance.
First students and then colleges themselves are caught in a perniciously
reductive numbers game, which is intensified to a fever pitch
as students compete to get into top schools and as top schools
compete for students and prestige. On the one hand, a thriving
and downright exploitative test-prep business has developed around
the frenzied preoccupation with testing among many high school
students -- if, that is, their parents have the money to invest
in these services.
On the other hand, college administrators are preoccupied with
ways to boost their own scores in U.S. News and other annual
rankings and guidebooks, many of which are modeled or based on
the approach taken by that magazine. The flawed methodology and
rationale, the commercial motivations and the widespread influence
of the U.S. News rankings have had a far more negative
effect on higher education than have standardized tests.
According to a recent Washington Monthly cover story, U.S.
News found its own methodology without "any defensible empirical
or theoretical basis" in an internal study in 1997. Gerhard Casper,
then president of Stanford, wrote to the editor of U.S. News
in 1996: "I am extremely skeptical that the quality of a university
-- any more than the quality of a magazine -- can be measured
statistically. However, even if it can, the producers of the U.S.
News rankings remain far from discovering the method."
Further, in its focus on input measures (SAT scores, rank in class,
acceptance rate, money spent per student) rather than on the educational
growth of students, U.S. News skirts the issue of how effective
colleges are in actually teaching students.
Not only is the U.S. News methodology highly questionable,
the magazine tinkers with aspects of its ranking formulas from
year to year with the result, if not the intent, that colleges
jump from place to place on an annual basis. It's absurd to think
that academic excellence could rise and fall precipitously year
to year and that you could rank-order institutions so precisely.
Even so, colleges and universities themselves often buy into this
race and give the rankings more lip service than they deserve.
It is time for leaders in higher education to speak out against
a ranking system that we know lacks credibility and validity.
Joanne V. Creighton is the president
of Mount Holyoke College.
|
|
|
