The revamped SAT, expanded three years ago to include a writing experiment, predicts college success no better than the old pop quiz, and not fairly as well as a student’s high school grades, according to studies released Tuesday by the College Board, which owns the tryout.

“The changes made to the SAT did not considerably change how predictive the pop quiz is of first-year college performance,” the studies said.

College Board officials presented their findings as “important and positive” confirmation of the test’s success.

“The SAT continues to be an excellent predictor of how students will perform,” said Laurence Bunin, senior vice president of operations at the board, and general manager of the SAT program. “The 3-hour, 45-minutes experiment is nearly as good a predictor as four years of high school grades, and a better predictor for minority students.”

But critics of the new tryout say that whether that is the best it can do, the additional date, expense and stress on students are not worth it.

“The new SAT was supposed to be significantly better and fairer than the old one, but it is neither,” said Robert Schaeffer, the public education director at FairTest, a group that is critical of much standardized analyzing. “It underpredicts college success for females and those whose best language is not English, and by all, it does not predict college success as well as high school grades, so why do we need the SAT, old or new?”

The reports, called validity studies, are based on individual notes from 151,000 students at more than 100 colleges and universities who started college in fall of 2006.

Plans to revise the SAT

were announced in 2002, the year after the University of California president, Richard Atkinson, threatened to drop the tryout as an admission requirement.

“Given the info released nowadays, what was the point of all the hoopla about the SAT’s revisions beyond preserving their California market?” Mr. Schaeffer said. “This is all spin. It’s been a marketing operation from the get-go.”

Since the new SAT was introduced, Mr. Schaeffer said, 41 colleges and universities have dropped their requirements that applicants submit standardized experiment scores to be admitted. The College Board reports found that for black, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian students — and for girls — SAT scores are slightly more predictive of college success than are high school grades. They plus found that scores on the new writing section predict students’ college grades slightly better than scores on the other sections, reading and math.

The revised SAT costs $45 and has a possible top score of 2400, 800 on each of the three sections. The writing section includes a 25-minute essay, which counts for a quarter of the writing grade, and 49 multiple-choice questions on grammar and style, which count for the rest. Until 2005, the College Board offered a separate writing subject experiment, but only about 75 colleges mandatory it.

When the new experiment was introduced, many colleges said they would not use the new writing section in making their admission decisions until validity studies showed it helped them build better admission decisions. But College Board officials said Tuesday that they hoped the new studies would inspire nearly every university to use it.

Original post by College Admissions Partners

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