College Admissions Help Blog

Boston City Council member Michael Flaherty is looking to pass new legislature which would provide Massachusetts students with free online access to preparatory programs. Students would be able to log into the Boston Public Library’s website to access the program if this new piece of legislature passes in December.

Online resources have been a growing national trend recently in trying to close the gap between students from affluent families and those families with fewer resources. These programs have been known to boost students SAT scores by as much as 300 points.

But many feel this is a “Johnny comes lately” piece of legislature. A growing number of colleges nationwide are dropping the test as an admissions requirement and making it optional. Grade point average and course rigor now hold more stock. Some also question how much impact this would really have when the reality is there’s only a handful of kids on the cusp of getting into a better college where the additional points could be beneficial.

Personally the more tools someone is willing to give me the happier I am. Instead of having just a hammer and nails to build a house with I’ll gladly take a buzz saw, a nail gun, and whatever other tools you want to give me to get the job done. Perhaps this piece of legislation will only help one Massachusetts student if it goes through, but that one student may be you.

Personally I bombed the SAT’s. I don’t do very well with standardized testing. I mean, whose standards are they anyway? Perhaps my son won’t have to too take them by the time he is ready for college.

Recent debate has been raised over whether the scholastic aptitude test (SAT) is really necessary.
William R. Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, conducted a year long study and found that standardized testing can not possibly measure someone’s true worth or ability. He cited backgrounds and the contrast in opportunities that some students are granted in upscale suburban high schools.

Furthermore, parents continue to pay a lot of money for students to take prep classes which are only preparing them for the test and not teaching them how to learn Fitzsimmons said.

A growing number of colleges, including Smith College in Massachusetts and Bates College in Maine, have made the SAT and ACT exams optional.

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

“The changes made to the SAT did not substantially change how predictive the test 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 test is almost as good a predictor as four years of high school grades, and a better predictor for minority students.”

But critics of the new test say that if that is the best it can do, the extra time, 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 testing. “It underpredicts college success for females and those whose best language is not English, and over 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 data 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 test as an admission requirement.

“Given the data released today, 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 test 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 also 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 test, but only about 75 colleges required it.

When the new test 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 make better admission decisions. But College Board officials said Tuesday that they hoped the new studies would encourage almost every university to use it.

By Kang Shin-who, Sa Eun-young, Staff Reporters

The first five minutes are the most critical for writing the SAT essay test for U.S. college admission, James Herron, 39, head lecturer in expository writing at Harvard University, said.

“Many students start to write immediately without planning because they have just 25 minutes for the essay test. It’s very important to take the first five minutes to think about the thesis because it is crucial,” Herron said in an interview with The Korea Times Friday.

Herron visited Seoul last week to take part in the U.S. college admission strategy seminar and workshop, “2007 AHEd Edu Summit” and gave lectures on how to write a good SAT essay to 90 hopefuls for top U.S. colleges.

In the workshop, he discussed samples of their writing efforts and said that many of the problems he encountered were identical to those of U.S. students. He explained as follows.

First, they present an unsupportable thesis that isn’t really a thesis at all. It’s not arguable and not actually taking a position, which is a common mistake among U.S. students.

Second, students present evidence that they don’t fully analyze; so they drop information into the essay but don’t show how the information supports their argument.

Third, for some students, English as a second language is an issue. But students worry about that more than they need. Many students who have very good English ability still worry about little problems in their English that aren’t important. Their writing is perfectly clear but they still worry _ it’s a kind of insecurity.

The writing professor also advised that according to his research a longer essay usually yields better results, although the college board says the length of essay is not important.
“Dr. Les Pearlman at Massachusetts Institute Technology analyzed SAT essay answers and scores and found that there was 90 percent correlation between length of essays and the scores,” he said.

In regard to essay evaluation, the professor said test graders are instructed to give scores only after reading entire essays rather like evaluating a painting. “The tests are graded holistically, meaning that the scores are not broken down for each section, but the test as a whole is given a score. When you see a painting, you like it a lot, or not like it. You don’t like some part of it, but it’s the whole thing that you like,” he said.

kswho@koreatimes.co.kr

Original post by College Admissions Partners