Quiz: What Do You Know About the SAT?
Colleges have turned away from standardized testing in admissions. Are the tests really that bad?
In recent years, the tide turned against standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT. Once a nonnegotiable metric for determining college admission, many universities have cast off such tests, declaring them unnecessary—or even racist. While many schools went test-optional during the pandemic, that trend seems to have continued even on the other side of COVID-19 panic. According to FairTest, an anti–standardized testing group, most colleges in America are now test-optional, and over 80 refuse to look at scores entirely.
But the trend against testing may be reversing. New data show that standardized tests predict student achievement better than high school GPA alone. Some schools have even reinstated their testing requirement—including Dartmouth College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), whose dean of admissions told The New York Times, "Just getting straight A's is not enough information for us to know whether the students are going to succeed or not."
SATAT: SAT Aptitude Test
To test your knowledge on college entrance exams, here's a standardized test of our own:
This article originally appeared in print under the headline "Quiz: The SAT, Reexamined."
