Small college drops SAT requirement

Spending hours, days or even months studying, getting a good night's sleep and eating a healthy breakfast are all ways that most high school students prepare for the test designed to evaluate their future performance -- the SAT.

However, certain colleges and universities are deciding to drop this test from their application process -- and many wonder how far this will go.

Sarah Lawrence College in New York is among the most recent schools to drop the SAT requirement, joining the likes of Bowdoin, Bates and Mount Holyoke colleges.

"We have thought about getting rid of test scores for quite some time given the nature of the curriculum at Sarah Lawrence, which is very writing-based," the school's Dean of Admissions Thyra Briggs wrote in an e-mail statement, "but we decided to do it at this point after the announcement of the changes in the new SAT."

The College Board announced its decision just over a year ago to alter the SAT by adding a writing section which will be weighted the same as the math and verbal sections.

"We do not think that the SAT is helpful to us in evaluating applicants to Sarah Lawrence given the nature of our curriculum," Briggs added.

The question that higher education experts are facing is whether this is a trend or whether it will only occur at certain types of schools.

Alvin Sanoff, former managing editor of America's Best Colleges, said that he did not believe there was a trend emerging among colleges and universities to do away with the consideration of the SAT.

"This has been a slow and gradual decision by a variety of highly regarded liberal arts colleges to no longer require the SAT I," he said, "and... each has their own reasons for doing so."

Penn Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson affirmed Sanoff's remarks.

"There is no trend across the country to drop the SATs or any other standardized measures," he said.

Linda Sax, the director of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program Freshman Survey at the Higher Education Research Institute, said that regardless of whether or not schools stop considering the test, the SAT has still been the source of much flurry and debate.

"For the last decade, there's been increased concern that the SAT does not fairly evaluate students," she said, adding that "perhaps it's not the best test."

She mentioned that California state schools have been questioning the relevance of the SAT to their admissions process for years.

At Sarah Lawrence, the issue, however, was not whether the SAT was a good evaluation of a student, but whether it was a good tool for judging the student for that particular college.

"Smaller schools dealing with more manageable numbers of applicants feel more comfortable being able to assess applicants absent the SAT," Sanoff said.

"Every candidate at Penn gets a close reading, just as they do at all the Ivies, but I think it's a more personalized process at smaller liberal arts colleges," he added.

Briggs agreed that the application processes and curriculums of smaller liberal arts colleges might make the elimination of the SAT more feasible.

"I think colleges like Sarah Lawrence that are more writing-based than test-based and that have the luxury of spending a great deal of time on every application are more likely to stop using test scores," she said.

But Penn is not a small liberal arts college, so the University will likely choose an alternate path.

"Penn will continue to require standardized test results for all students," Sanoff said

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