Just saw this on Yahoo news: http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20060405/ts_usatoday/moreuniversitiesaregoingsatoptional
More universities are making the SAT optional. I understand the reasoning that some students have trouble taking standardized tests, even when they excel in school.
The new article says: "The tests have taken on too much significance. It's gotten out of control," says Steven Syverson, Lawrence's dean of admissions. "The amount of time, energy and money spent on tests distorts how students spend their time. We want them to be high school students."
You know, four weeks before I took the ACT (I know I switched tests here in this post, but both tests should be similar, and one's experiences with one should pretty much transfer to the other) I picked up two test prep books from a bookstore, and spent and hour or two a day working through them. I scored a composite score of 30 on the ACT, which put me in the 97th percentile of high school students taking the test. Now, I believe that if students aren't scoring well on standardized tests just by doing their high school course work, (and are spending too much time and hard work preparing for the test instead of just doing a little review like I did before the test), than either there is too much asked for on the test or (in my opinion) students aren't learning their course subject work well enough.
The high school grade-point average is the best predictor of how a student will do in college, and the SAT adds little, say admissions officials at the schools that dropped the test this year.
Probably true. Many colleges want these tests, but then when you talk to them they're more interested in one's GPA then the score on the test. My 3.845 GPA interested the colleges I talked with more than my ACT score of 30.
Okay, disjointed rant over.
The one thing that I noticed that the ACT could test someone on that the GPA couldn't really, is on the spot thinking. The science and math parts of the test, I had never studied parts of what was asked. However, the necessary information was there, and you could logically put it together to come up with an answer. This was especially true for the science portion.
Bingo. In case you're wondering, I had the same experience. As long as one can read a graph and extrapolate the data they provided to answer the question they asked, one should be able to ace the science section of the ACT. The math section was a little more involved, but it didn't require knowing or figuring out any extraodinary hard questions.