by Jack Roviere

Created on: July 31, 2008

Crestmuth University is a school that prides itself for its early adoption of a policy that abandons the use of the SAT and ACT for college admissions decisions. The school claims that this policy, which has substituted a more holistic admissions process, has created a student body that is better equivalent to students' knowledge levels and achievements. Now, it selects students with the highest grade point averages from their respective schools, who represent a diversity of extracurricular involvement and social backgrounds, who are compassionate leaders (even in high school) who don't waste their times studying for tests and instead do things that help *people*, and who will certainly be the leaders of a future generation.

It sounds great, right? I know a lot of students, just from this description, will want to register and apply for Crestmuth immediately...and who can blame them? Their goal is noble and their immediate actions to dropping the SAT nobler.

Is this school only a dream? A quick google search will reveal that the school, indeed, is a dream...but what about their policies? Is this hypothetical situation something tenable for colleges today?

What is the purpose of the SAT and other admissions tests now? First, standardized tests...quite simply...standardize the playing field for students. They allow students to be met on a more equal footing despite their different high school experiences. Secondly, standardized tests (debatably) predict success in college. So, how well does Crestmuth's policy works on these accounts?

Ah, its GPA requirement - Crestmuth's policy of exchanging GPA for test scores has at least one big pitfall. Crestmuth's admissions counselors probably aren't naive enough to rate students based on the raw highness of a GPA. A student whose schools weight courses would have an ultimately unfair advantage over a student, so this would immediately be unfair to a broad level of students.

Fortunately, though, most schools *already* do not trust the weighted aspect of most high school grade point averages...so most schools, and probably Crestmuth as well, will reweight back down to a 4.0 scale or whatever's manageable. This gets out of one pitfall and into another, because Crestmuth has no way to identify the level of grade inflation that one school has over another...One school's 4.0 might be much more easily achieved than another's, so rating a 4.0 as greater than a 3.9 isn't necessarily a sure bet.

Most colleges, still, try to deflect even

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