Make SAT optional for Texas colleges
We worked so hard the summer before their senior year of high school. With the support of a handful of fellow Teach for America teachers and community volunteers, I had recently launched EMERGE, a program that helps talented low-income students get to and succeed in the nation’s top colleges. This was our first cohort of students in the program, and despite facing challenges such as homelessness, violence and poverty, they had done extraordinarily well in school. Getting admitted to a top college would almost guarantee them a full scholarship and provide them with one of the surest ways to climb out of poverty.
And yet, I was nervous. Not because I doubted their talent or ability, but because in just a few months, they would have to somehow prove it on the SAT. None of the students had PSAT scores that indicated they would score within the typical range necessary for admission to a highly selective college. And so, we purchased SAT prep materials, rolled up our sleeves and got to work that summer.
Defenestration, puckish, irascible — these were among the hundreds of words that we reviewed with the students, along with an array of concepts that usually are not part of a school’s core curriculum. By the end of the summer, the students’ scores had increased by an average of more than 200 points. This experience underscored two main things: first, that there is not a strong correlation between a students’ innate ability or academic performance and their SAT scores, and second, that students with the means to participate in test preparation could, to a large extent, raise their scores.
This wasn’t the case for everyone, however. Even with all the intensive preparation, some students’ scores didn’t improve much. These were the students I worried about the most. They had already proven their ability to thrive academically, scoring perfect grades in all their advanced classes, even while juggling extra demands such as having to work or living in a shelter. It upset me deeply to think that despite this, their dreams and everything for which they and their families had worked so hard could be deterred by this one assessment.
We learned that there was a small number of selective top colleges — among them Smith, Tufts and Amherst — with progressive policies that made the SAT optional. Elated with this news, we helped our students apply to these institutions. We cried tears of happiness when the acceptances started rolling in. And last week, I was encouraged to see that University of California System took the bold move of making the SAT optional and am hopeful that these policies will expand throughout Texas and other states.
Proponents of the SAT allege that it allows colleges to gauge how ready students are for college. The problem is that the test isn’t particularly good at that. Despite their less-than-stellar SAT scores, all the original EMERGE students who enrolled in top colleges with SAT-optional policies successfully graduated, as have an overwhelming majority of the hundreds of EMERGE students who have followed in their footsteps. Indeed, research shows that the SAT does a much better job of predicting a student’s wealth than of predicting their likelihood of graduating from college. High school grades, it turns out, are a much stronger indicator of college readiness.
And I say all this as someone who has benefited from the current system. As someone who was lucky enough to be born into a college-educated household, who attended a private college preparatory high school, who did well on the SAT, I was able to attend Yale University, no doubt in part because of it. I’m not implying that I or other students with similar backgrounds don’t deserve such opportunities. Instead, what I’m arguing is that there are too many students — particularly from underserved backgrounds — who get overlooked and dismissed due to this one heavily weighted element of imperfect value.
Nor am I proposing that the SAT be abolished altogether. There are certainly low- and moderate-income students who do exceedingly well on the SAT, and as a result catch colleges’ attention in ways that they may not otherwise. But a heavy reliance on the SAT leaves far more deserving and talented students outside the gate than it lets in.
Instead, more colleges should recognize that talent and ability, can and should be measured in multiple ways and should follow the example of more than 1,200 colleges who have adopted SAT-optional policies. Many of these colleges have become more socioeconomically inclusive and continue to have the same, if not better, graduation rates than they had prior to becoming SAT-optional.
Until then, we’ll continue to teach delphic (obscure) SAT vocabulary words and run our SAT camps to provide our students with the best opportunities we can.