From the issue dated October 26, 2001
Lafayette's Comfort Level Is Higher With SAT's
By BARRY W. McCARTY
We undertook an experiment at Lafayette College in 1994,
making it optional for students to submit SAT scores in their
applications for admission.Our faculty admissions committee
was interested in attracting more high-achieving students,
including those with less impressive SAT's. The committee
members felt that those students might have been intimidated
out of applying because of their perception that SAT scores
would have a heavy influence in our selective admission
decisions.
We experimented for five years by making submission of the
scores optional, and then we returned to requiring SAT scores
from all applicants. We believe that we are the only college
in the nation to have gone from requiring SAT scores to making
them optional and to requiring them once more.
A funny thing happened during that experiment. At the outset,
we anticipated a great influx of high-achieving applicants
with modest SAT scores -- highly motivated students who may
not have scored well because they did not have the opportunity
to prepare for the tests, or who attended high schools where
fewer students went on to college, or who were minority or
female students who thought the SAT was biased against them.
Instead, we ended up with more applicants, but without a
significant increase in the academic achievers we were
seeking. And, unwittingly, we created confusion in the
marketplace.
When we first considered making SAT's optional, there was much
discussion among faculty members and administrators about
whether that change would achieve our fundamental aim: an
improvement in the intellectual climate on the campus. We
agreed to experiment for five years and then review the data
to determine whether to continue. We were unsure that our
assumptions about the impact would be realized.
When we decided to abandon the optional-SAT experiment at the
beginning of the fifth year, in 1998, we did so because our
assumptions did prove false. We did not see a surge of
applicants who were highly motivated but had lower SAT scores.
And the data showed that our ability to predict student
performance during the first and second years at Lafayette was
enhanced by a full slate of academic-performance measures,
supplemented with the SAT.
What has happened since we returned to requiring SAT-score
submissions? Our "very competitive" admissions profile,
according to Barron's Profiles of American Colleges, has risen
to "most competitive." Our applicant pool is the strongest in
our history. Our diversity profile has improved as well,
although it did not change significantly in either scenario.
And while we have seen a substantial rise in applications, we
also have experienced a major increase in the number of high
academic achievers in our applicant pool. We are unsure
whether there is any correlation between those trends and the
return to required SAT's, but we think there probably is.
For the just-matriculated class of 2005, we had the largest
number of applications in our history, 5,195. We accepted 39
percent of them. Just seven years ago, our acceptance rate was
59 percent. Our yield on acceptances rose to 29 percent, a
significant improvement from the 23-percent rate of seven
years ago. Matriculating students in the top 10 percent of
their high-school classes rose to 57 percent, compared with
39
percent for the Class of 1998. Average SAT scores rose to 1246
from 1190 seven years ago.
Requiring SAT's is certainly no magic bullet. There are many
reasons that Lafayette's admissions and academic profiles have
changed so much. We have engaged in more-aggressive outreach
and marketing, and have invested more than $200-million in
improving our programs and our campus. But both quantitative
and qualitative data strongly suggest that requiring SAT
submission as part of our application process, to complement
the more-reliable measures of academic performance and
strength of high-school curriculum, enhances our prediction
of
how well a student will do in the first two years of college.
Nationally, there are those who are critical of the SAT
because they say it penalizes minority and other disadvantaged
students, and therefore discourages them from applying. We are
very sensitive to that issue at Lafayette. We emphasize
throughout the admissions process that the SAT is never
considered as an isolated factor in the decision process, and
that a low score will not undermine outstanding achievement.
A quantitative review of three years of data reflecting the
academic performance of Lafayette students who hadn't
submitted SAT scores showed that they went on to perform at
a
slightly lower level, as measured by grade-point average, than
did their classmates. We are not using, and have never used,
SAT scores as the most important or an isolated criterion in
our assessment process. We continue to give them less weight
than we do other indicators of scholastic achievement and
motivation, like class rankings, GPA's, extracurricular
activities, and community service.
But the SAT's are a helpful national standard to have,
particularly in an environment of grade inflation. If there
were no SAT, no national standard, it would be especially
difficult to compare students from different high schools,
unless the schools provided grade distributions for individual
courses or the class as a whole. There is great variability
nationally among high schools offering courses with similar
titles. If we were to abandon the SAT, a similar test would
eventually be created to take its place.
We had hoped that parents and counselors would see the
optional policy as emphasizing that the SAT is only
complementary to other, more-important academic criteria. But
instead, it left some people confused about our selectivity.
Perhaps most damaging was the interpretation of some people
that Lafayette might not be an academically serious
institution if SAT's were optional. The SAT has become such
a
widely recognized standard that they felt we might have
compromised our selectivity. More than a few families of
high-ability students told us of their assumption that the
absence of an SAT requirement implied limited selectivity.
Our required-SAT policy, as reinstated, ensures the
availability of an additional reliable tool for admissions
decision-making, and has clarified for students and parents
how selective we actually are. Moreover, with our emphasis on
performance in secondary school, it has enabled highly
motivated, high-achieving students with more-modest SAT
performance to still be admitted to Lafayette, and to prosper
here. Simply put, it has helped us make better admissions
decisions.
At the same time, we strive to communicate the influence of
the SAT to prospective students and their parents, especially
how it is used in concert with other measures of performance,
such as GPA, class rank, and rigor of the academic load.
Our journey has taken us to where we wanted to be all along
--
significantly improved selectivity and a campus population
with a much higher percentage of high academic achievers.
Along with other factors, the SAT has helped us achieve that
success.
Barry W. McCarty is dean of enrollment services at Lafayette
College.
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Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education