The SAT: Predicting college success, or just another aptitude test?
It seems to be widely accepted that the SAT has some magical ability to predict students’ success in college, and as such is used across the United States as one of the main factors deciding students’ college acceptance. However, while the test certainly measures some kind of aptitude or intelligence, and therefore your intellectual capacity to succeed in college, it certainly does not fully measure the likelihood that you will succeed in college. Certainly more important to college success than intellectual aptitude are drive, dedication, and work ethic. As such, the SAT may overestimate the success students will have in college. I provide an excellent example of this: I aced my SATs, but did not proceed to ace my first year of college, due to a general lack of motivation.
On the other hand, the SAT may also underestimate a student’s ability to succeed in college, especially due to the fact that it is a speed test. This means that brilliant students, if they are slow test takers, may get average scores on the SAT. This is also not a good predictor of college success, because rarely are college tests as time-limited as the SAT is.
In support of these concerns, studies have been performed testing the validity of the SAT in predicting college success. One such study, performed independently at the University of California, found that the SAT 1 explained only 13.3% of variance in college GPA (Geiser & Studley, 2001). 13.3% is not a lot of variance to be explained by a test that is so heavily relied on in deciding which students will succeed in college.
This leads me to wonder: are there other tests out there that could predict a student’s success just as well as the SAT, if not better? For example, I wonder if a simple IQ test may be able to explain just as much variance in college GPA as SAT scores do. If this is the case, why are we still requiring every American student to write the SAT, and why are colleges so reliant on this score in making admissions decisions? Perhaps out of habit, or perhaps because of political reasons involving the company that creates and administers the SAT, or perhaps simply because change is hard to instigate when so many people are involved.
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Geiser, Saul; Studley, Roger (October 29, 2001), UC and the SAT: Predictive Validity and Differential Impact of the SAT I ad SAT II at the University of California, University of California, Office of the President.
