After the SAT

As the University of California considers dropping the test, admissions directors of two colleges talk about what happened after they made it optional.

By Amy Benfer

Feb 22, 2001 | Throughout its history, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) has collected more nasty names than a schoolyard bully: It's been called classist, racist and sexist. The mother of all standardized tests, it has been derided for class-based analogies that require students to know what a yacht is in relation to a regatta, and it's been accused of preferential treatment of the rich and white at the expense of everyone else.

Despite its critics, the SAT has maintained its status as the college entrance deal-breaker. In this role, it has spawned an entire industry of expensive tutors and a generation of stressed-out students, parents and teachers.

The makers of the SAT have subjected it to numerous tinkerings and reparations; it has been revised and rehabilitated.

But a few presidents and admissions directors of certain colleges and universities have decided to make their admissions policy SAT-optional.

On Sunday, University of California president Richard C. Atkinson announced that he will move to eliminate the SAT as a requirement of admission to the eight U.C. campuses that take undergraduate students. (This year, 91,904 high school seniors applied for admission to U.C.)

This is big news. The prestigious U.C. system is one of the largest state university systems in the country. Several of its campuses -- Berkeley and UCLA among them -- are considered to be on par with the top Ivy League universities in the country, with Nobel Prize-winning faculty members and high-achieving students.

In part, Atkinson's decision may have much to do with California's recent decision to ban affirmative action in the college admission process. Several years ago, a faculty committee recommended an SAT-optional policy to increase enrollment of black and Hispanic students in the system.

Although nearly 90 percent of colleges and universities require the SAT for admission, several other highly selective colleges -- Bates, Bowdoin, Mount Holyoke -- have already made the SAT optional in their application processes.

In small, selective colleges such as these, the admissions officers have the time and the manpower to carefully evaluate each applicant on an individual basis. They rely on close scrutiny of each student's transcripts, essays, recommendations and personal qualities.

But it remains to be seen whether dropping the SAT as an entrance requirement, which works so well for some small colleges, can translate into a successful policy for a behemoth like the U.C. system, which already uses a complex numerical system (i.e. weighted GPA, plus SAT scores) to rate each candidate. It's hard to imagine that admissions officers will suddenly have the time for close scrutiny of student essays and personal statements.

Atkinson has not yet said how the system will manage without SAT scores as a necessary variable in admissions. The system will not drop the requirement, which is subject to faculty approval, right away.

Admissions officers from two SAT-optional colleges -- Richard Steele of Bowdoin, a small liberal arts college in Maine, and Diane Anci of Mount Holyoke, a small liberal arts women's college in Holyoke, Mass. -- have differing views of the admissions process without SAT scores. Bowdoin was one of the first colleges to abandon the SAT requirement in 1969; Mount Holyoke just changed their SAT policy last year.

Both Steele and Anci talk about the philosophical underpinnings of their schools' decisions to make the SAT optional, and discuss the criteria that they use to judge applicants in the absence of standardized test scores.

Richard Steele, dean of admissions and financial aid, Bowdoin College

Bowdoin first eliminated the SAT as a requirement for admission in 1969. What has been the effect of the decision?

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