SAT Testing Problems

Problems of SAT Test and Alternative Solution
In this era of innovation, it is apparently that knowledge is the key for success. And get accepted into universities are accredited as most important step to achieve the higher knowledge for a potential future. Since a major of people want to get into universities after graduated from high school, there must be a criteria to determined whether someone is good enough to enter universities. And the SAT test has been chosen by the U.S College Broad to be the qualification test for people who want a higher education. However, the SAT test is causing some problems for universities and students. Firstly, it restricts the effort of becoming diversity of some school. Secondly, it could be time-wasting
On the other hand, the reliability of the test has been questioned recently due to the College Board (a privately owned company that runs the SATs and the scoring) recently making a costly mistake on the scoring of the October tests in 2005. For being the sole company that controls the required test at most universities to make a mistake on the scoring for 5,000 tests, it shows the unreliability of the test. By the time they discovered there was a problem with the answer sheets, the scores were already mailed to colleges and decisions about admissions made. In an article by Eric Hoover he notes that “…in the instance of future scoring errors, the College Board should notify colleges about students who receive incorrectly high test scores, in addition to those who receive incorrectly low ones…admission deans criticized the College Board’s decision not to report the corrected scores of some 600 students who had received inflated scores as a result of the scoring problem” (Hoover 52.46).The College Board not reporting the higher scores is as bad as not reporting the lower scores. By not reporting the students who received higher scores they give the students competing with that student a disadvantage because colleges will see a falsely high score. This greatly compromises the validity of the test and when there are hundreds of thousands of students relying on the accuracy of a test that’s been proven to
“Within the relatively homogeneous group of students in our study, the SAT was a better within-group predictor of academic performance for women than for men, even though overall the women had higher GPAs and lower SAT scores. Perhaps, controversial though the practice may be, standardized examination scores should once again be normed and reported by sex” (Sheehan and Gray). The only reason that the SAT is still in use is because it is convenient and cost the college’s nothing. A big concern with critics of the test is the reliability of the new section and if it will be comparable to the old SAT scores. The College Board saw a “decline by 4 to 5 points as compared with the combined average score for the entire 2005 cohort” (Hoover 52.38). Some universities have seen as much as 10 to 15 point drop while others see no change. Some professionals believe that the reason for the change in scores is because they are finding fewer students retaking the test and students generally improve their scores on the retakes. Another reason could be that the 3 and a half hour long test would effect the concentration of test takers due to hunger or fatigue. Some are not concerned with the scores being lowered so long as the test is still able to predict how well a student will do at the university. However; SAT scores have been shown to be just as good as, if not worse, predictors of success at