College Entrance Exams - Do They Predict Undergraduate Success - Essay Example

Tyler Van Acker Mr. Jones English III 24 October, College Entrance Exams: Do They Predict Undergraduate Success? All the eminent educationists around the globe propose myriad pedagogical strategies concerning the entrance exams. While many people believe that some college admittance exams like standardized tests very subtly translate the real skills of an individual, others hold the view that such academic tests are potently capable of reflecting one’s intellectual and academic skills. Various colleges have given many reasons for their admissions criteria over the years. The constant standard for admission has been the college entrance exam and the nature of such exams has constantly been changing over the years. History claims that the concept of college entrance exams originated in ancient China. Imperial schools tested musical skills, archery, horsemanship, arithmetic, writing composition, and information regarding various ceremonies. (Hopkins 36-47). In America, the system of college entrance exams initiated in 1901. Later on, the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT came into the limelight owing to the convenient testing method it offered. Most of the test takers are middle to upper class, Caucasian, native English speaking males. The ideological foundations of SAT are deeply connected to the Army intelligence assessment criteria of Alpha and Beta tests (Hoffman and Katie 455-474). As mentioned before, different college admittance exams have been introduced one after the other and so, American College Testing or ACT entered the market following the popularity of SAT. This much becomes clear from the history that the standardized tests have come a long way since the imperial times. There are different methods adopted by a range of colleges for weighing standardized test scores. Despite the fact that such admittance tests are considered a source for assessing the students’ respective skills, many colleges still do not require submission of ACT and SAT tests scores for admission. Today, these tests constitute a hot topic among the educationists in America. Many researchers argue that both SAT and ACT are redundant, and unfair means of assessing the individual skills of minorities, women, and secondary English speakers. Even when college entrance exams are meant to predict an individual’s success by combining them with GPA and class rank, they are still judged to be problematic according to some research reports. That is the reason the educators are proposing subject matter testing to completely replace the reasoning tests, thus returning full circle to the college entrance exams that were originally introduced in ancient China and the U.S., as mentioned before. Admission committees usually use one “super-size” recipe to prepare their admissions rosters for the incoming freshman class. The officers place two large ingredients in the pot. The ingredients are GPA and SAT/SATII/ACT scores. The most commonly used spices to make the dish more palatable are clubs, varsity sports, community involvement, work experience, connection to the university or college, geographic location, race, gender, nationality, and age. Of course, every admission office has its own spices that make the dish unique. The modern trend is that 90% of the schools in the country lean towards the ingredients mentioned before. This leads towards the question that do the other 10% schools or colleges adopt an opposing trend? Research indicates that a host of popular schools do not favour either SAT or ACT. This may be because of the criticism and some of the latest research reports which claim that the intellect of a student may be attacked by various social factors like racism and fierce diversity, once that student goes to a college. There are many other factors that collectively may pressurize a student in such a way that he may not be able to perform well in the standardized tests, despite good academic skills. “The case against the SAT” by Crouse and Dale (45-57) showed that the SAT is deficient in terms of predicting long term success in college. It is argued that utilizing GPA alone results in correct admissions decisions 73.4% of the time, while SAT and GPA together predict correct admission decisions 72.2% of the time. While college entrance exams have been used for centuries to test whether a student can succeed at the next level of education, it is argued that high school GPA and standardized tests taken together are no better a predictor of college success than when high school GPA is used by itself. Additionally, it is pointed out that comparing the predictions from high school rank alone with high school rank and SAT identical admissions decisions would be made for a total of 90.8% of applicants (Crouse and Dale 51). Thus, Crouse points out that the SAT is redundant in correctly making admissions decisions. According to Rooney (1998), a Bates University study compared data of five years of enrolees of students who submitted SAT scores and those who didn’t. Bates found that the people who didn’t submit scores averaged 160 points lower on the SAT I, however their freshman GPA was only five one hundredths of a point lower than those that submitted SAT scores. This indicates that a higher SAT score does not necessarily correlate with a higher freshman GPA. A correlation coefficient is generally used to examine the relationship between test scores and first-year college grades. Furthermore, the research reports by Ransdell (357-364) and Hopkins (36-47) indicate that the predictive ability of the SAT on freshman’s college grades is just 0.22, which explains only 22% of the variation in freshman college grades. That leaves 78% of freshman grades unaccounted for by the SAT. The results of these research reports identify another indication regarding the credibility of the SAT that it cannot account for a significant portion of freshman grades. Predictive ability is the degree that higher test scores require for assessing higher performance in college. Baron and Norman (37-69) looked at the relationship between student’s performance on SAT and cumulative college grades as compared to the relation between class rank and cumulative college grades. It was found that SAT I was the weakest predictor with only 4% of the variation in college grades while SAT II followed with 6.8% of differences in academic performance. Class rank is identified to be the most useful tool in the research report that predicted 9.3% of the changes in cumulative college grades. As a matter of fact, combining class rank and SAT I summed up to 11.3% which leaves an unexplained 90% of the variation in college grades (Baron and Norman 37- 69). Hence, while studies show that the SAT does not predict freshman grades, it also does not predict cumulative GPA successfully. Another important finding of the study is that a correlation of high school grades against freshman college grades stands at 0.54 which translates to 54% and a variance of 32% in the performance of first year in college. This shows that high school grades are best used to predict college success, rather than the regular test scores. President Richard Atkinson of the University of California conducted a three year validity study to analyze the power of SAT I, SAT II, and high school grades as predictors of good performance at California’s eight public universities (Ransdell 357-364). The validity study by the University of California tracked 80,000 students from the year 1996 to 1999 and it showed a poor weakness in terms of predictive power of SAT I which accounted for only 12.8% of the variation in GPA. SAT II accounted for 15.3% of the variation in GPA. Actually, the SATII is a product of the problems inherent in the SAT and ACT. The SAT II covers subject matter based tests is meant to give a fair shot to women, minorities, underprivileged, and non-English speakers. Further, it emphasizes skills that students need to know in college. Some critics even suggest that the SAT should be altogether dropped for ensuring long-term college success, rather high school coursework, grades, and other achievement tests should be considered since they satisfactorily measure an individual’s skills. Critics have also questioned the impact of the standardized tests on lower class students, minorities, women, and non-native English speakers. Various researchers have found that the rich students are frequently favored over the poor students (Hoffman and Katie 455-474, Bowen and Derek 46-59). Bowen and Derek found that the SAT and ACT do not effectively answer the economic question of education as they have highly questionable predictive power for facilitating the poor students. The ability of SAT and ACT to predict freshman grades, undergraduate class rank, college graduation rates, and attainment of a graduate degree is weaker for poor students than those with rich backgrounds. In this regard, the Volvo effect is one factor that is used to explain how strong a correlation there is between wealth and high standardized test scores. This theory says that the standardized tests correlate exceedingly well with income and education of one’s parents. “This correlation is so strong that one can easily make a good guess about a child’s test scores by looking at how many degrees his/her parents have and what kind of car they drive.” (fairtest.org 2007). It has been alleged frequently that the standardized tests are based on inequality due to which the outcomes are badly affected. Rich parents can afford to pay for the out-of-school coaching and buy sample test papers for their children. Poor students might perform poorly as compared to their rich counterparts on the SAT and ACT, yet they have the capacity that is not adequately tapped due to the lack of resources such as the financial problems. Another major weakness of the standardized tests is its tendency to favor white students over black and Latino students. Racial discrimination is considered to be an important element of this testing method by some critics. A study conducted by Vars and Bowen (57-75) set out to determine the test score gap between black and white students. Among other things, the study entailed validity research to examine the relationship between SAT scores and college grades. They conducted a study of 10,000 students at eleven selected public and private higher institutions of learning. Holding race, gender, and field of study constant, it was found that although the tests were predictive of college grades, still “whites had a GPA of 3.30, and blacks 2.80.” (Vars and Bowen, cited in Elizabeth Aries 212). This shows that there is a tenuous correlation between standardized test scores and college success. National SAT results for 2007 show that average scores for White students exceeds those of Black students by around 100 points on both math and critical reading sections (College Board 2007). When comparing the performance of males on standardized tests to that of females, it becomes clearer that how poor standardized tests are in predicting college success. There are long outstanding gaps between males and females, holding other factors constant, on the overall performance of SAT. On average, females score 35 to 45 points lower than males on SAT (Bowen and Derek, 46-59). A closer look at high school and college grades are indicative of a different picture. The reason for this is that females perform better when talking about the high school and college grades as compared to their male counterparts, and yet the latter are better performers on the SAT. This point is reflective of gender discrimination in that the test consistently over-predicts the performance of males and under-predicts that of females. Lately, this is the general consensus among the researchers that adding test scores to admissions equation results in fewer women and minorities being accepted than when academic records alone were used. This indicates that good performance on standardized tests such as SAT does not guarantee the success accurately. On the basis of language, standardized tests are fraught with prejudices for those students who do not have English as their first language. A study by the University of Miami made a comparison between Hispanic and non-Hispanic white students. (Bowen and Derek 46-59; Ransdell 357-364). The performance of the two groups was equivalent at the college level. However, the average combined SAT scores of the Hispanic students were 91 points lower than their non-Hispanic white counterparts. Due to the language difficulties among Hispanic students, their performance on the SAT was relatively lower than that of non-Hispanic white students. Between the two groups, there was a gap in the performance on the SAT but no such deficiency existed between the two groups regarding the performance in college, which supports the idea that standardized tests are yet again not a good indicator of college success. Summing up, this much becomes clear from the above discussion that most of the research highlights significant problems concerning SAT and ACT. The college entrance exams have little importance in the present times, since they were designed at a time when most of the test takers were native English speaking and white upper-middle class males. Patterns of society have drastically changed now. Things are definitely different and leaders like President Obama discuss words like parity and equality when they discuss education. The policy of “No Child Left Behind” has been a gigantic initiative with one goal to achieve higher test scores so that the children might one day get their high school degree and go to college. Works cited: Baron, Jonathan, and Norman, Frank M. Education and Psychology Measurement. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Print. Bowen, William G., and Derek, Bok. The Shape of the River. Princeton University Press, 2000. Print. Collegeboard.com. “Number and Diversity of SAT Takers at All-Time High.” 2007. Web. 20 Nov. 2010. < http://www.collegeboard.com/press/releases/185222.html> Crouse, James, and Dale, Trusheim. The Case Against The SAT. University of Chicago Press, 1988. Print. Elizabeth Aries. Race and Class Matters at an Elite College. Temple University Press, 2008. Print. Fairtest.org. “Meritocracys Crooked Yardstick.” 2007. Web. 20 Nov. 2010. < http://www.fairtest.org/k12/psacks.html> Hoffman, John L., and Katie, Lowitzki E. “Predicting College Success with High School Grades and Test Scores: Limitations for Minority Students.” The Review of Higher Education 28.4 (2005): 455-474. Print. Hopkins, Kathleen R. Teaching How to Learn in a What-to-Learn Culture. John Wiley and Sons, 2010. Print. Ransdell, Sarah. “Predicting College Success: The Importance of Ability and Non-Cognitive Variables.” International Journal of Educational Research 35.4 (2001): 357-364. Print. Rooney, Charles. “Test Scores Do Not Equal Merit.” 1998. Web. 20 Nov. 2010. Read More