Ditching the SAT

Every parent knows that many teenagers don’t test well. Some are slow readers. Others freeze when they are stuck in a room with a test booklet and well-sharpened No. 2 pencils. Some kids ace the reading section and stink on any math question that requires more than a working knowledge of Algebra 1. Still others are handicapped by their high schools, which don’t prepare them as well as schools with very high academic standards and a boatload of Advanced Placement class offerings.

In the face of growing criticism about the test’s relevance and fairness, a critical mass of schools now offer an escape route. Hundreds of colleges and universities—and the list seems to grow weekly—have made the SAT and ACT optional.

The SAT dropouts include some of the most highly regarded
schools in the country, including Bowdoin College, Mount Holyoke College, Pitzer College, Middlebury College, and the University of Texas at Austin. In fact, nearly a third of the schools that belong on the U.S. News & World Report’s list of the top 100 liberal arts schools have instituted an SAT or ACT-optional policy.

Before shouting for joy, you need to know what this means. Some
colleges aren’t as generous with the test-challenged as it might seem.
Schools, for example, may only waive the test for students who meet a
minimum grade point average or who have reached a certain class
rank, such as in the top 10% of the student’s graduating class. Certain
schools make teenagers without test scores submit samples of graded
work from their junior and senior year.

It used to be that choosing the SAT-optional route wouldn’t work
for many students because some colleges and universities wouldn’t
award merit money for students who skipped the Saturday morning
SAT ritual.

Members of the National Association for College Admissions
Counseling, however, overwhelmingly endorsed the position that
member schools can’t use minimum scores as the sole criterion for accepting
students or determining who gets scholarships and financial
aid. That new standard went into effect for the 2008–2009 school year.

While some schools, such as Bates College in Lewiston, Maine,
dropped the SAT requirement back in the 1980s, skeptics argue that
plenty of the latecomers have ditched the SAT for cynical reasons. If
a school, for instance, eliminates the SAT requirement, it could experience
a sizable bump in the number of applications it receives. When
word gets out about the change in policy, kids with lackluster (or even
very good but not phenomenal) test scores will conclude that they now
may qualify for a school that they once considered an impossibility.

Schools are delighted when they receive more applications because
it can help the institution claw its way up on U.S. News & World
Report’s college rankings list. How does that happen? When a school
is deluged with applications, it can reject far more kids. As perverse as
this may seem to many anxious families, the magazine gives brownie
points to schools that reject the greatest percentage of applicants. As
I said, this is the cynic’s take on the SAT-optional phenomenon.

Here’s another reason why industry insiders suggest that the motivation
of some schools is suspicious. If a school makes the SAT optional,
the institution’s average SAT score for its incoming freshmen
class should improve. After all, many of the kids with lackluster scores
won’t send them along. And guess what? U.S. News & World Report
and other college guide books reward schools that can brag about

higher SAT scores since they don’t care how these figures are generated.

In an op-ed piece in The New York Times, Colin S. Diver, the president
of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, provided this withering
take on the SAT-optional trend: “I sometimes think I should write a
handbook for college admission officials titled, ‘How to Play the U.S.
News & World Report Ranking Game, and Win!’ I would devote the
first chapter to a tactic called ‘SAT optional.’” Diver called the move
toward SAT optional admissions a “disheartening” trend. He said: “In
the rush to climb the pecking order, educational institutions are
adopting practices, and rationalization for those practices, unworthy
of the intellectual rigor they seek to instill in their students.”

Regardless of a school’s ulterior motives, supporters of dropping
the SAT requirement insist that it will make the college admission
process fairer. It would open up more schools to minority applicants,
as well as those from less affluent households. (Of course, a school
could be more inclusive simply by giving less weight to the tests for
certain applicants or for everybody who applies.) It would also help
level the playing field among those who can afford expensive SAT tutoring
and classes and those whose only preparation is a good night’s sleep.

One of the leading SAT critics is the National Center for Fair &
Open Testing (FairTest), which is a nonprofit dedicated to fighting
standardized testing. It argues that SAT scores are a lousy predictor of
how a student will fare at college and whether a student will graduate.
Despite significant differences in instructional quality at high schools,
FairTest maintains that better predictors of success are high school
grade point averages and class rank.

After living with the SAT optional policy for more than two
decades, Bates College in Maine has accumulated extensive data that
shows that its students’ performance remains strong. After gathering
five years of data on its experience, Hamilton College concluded that
the students who don’t submit their test scores do slightly better academically
than their peers.

In all likelihood, the SAT/ACT debate will never end. And in some
respect the arguments—pro and con—aren’t relevant to an individual
student, who is trying to figure out where to apply. But what is worth

thinking about is whether a high schooler should walk through the
SAT-optional door. Based strictly on your grades, you may be able to
win a fat admittance package from a school like Sarah Lawrence
College or Bates College, but you need to think about whether an
academically elite school is the right fit. If you got a 510 on the English
portion of the SAT—that was recently the national average
score—can you write cogent papers at an elite school?

You can obtain a comprehensive list of SAT and ACT-optional
schools by visiting the Web site of FairTest, (www.fairtest.org). The
schools on the list, according to the organization, “de-emphasize” the
use of standardized testing. To survive the cut, schools must make admission
decisions about a substantial number of applicants without relying
on the ACT or SAT. Recently, more than 750 schools were on the
growing list.

Here is a small sampling of the wide variety of schools that made
the list:

• Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona
• Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, Tennessee
• Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
• Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont
• Bluefield State College, Bluefield, West Virginia
• Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
• Cazenovia College, Cazenovia, New York
• Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut
• Denison University, Granville, Ohio
• Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania
• Drew University, Madison, New Jersey
• Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida
• Emporia State University, Emporia, Kansas
• George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
• Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
• Grambling State University, Grambling, Louisiana
• Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland
• Green Mountain College, Poultney, Vermont
• Hamilton College, Clinton, New York
• Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana
• Julliard School, New York, New York
• Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois
• Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois
• Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon
• McDaniel College, Westminster, Maryland
• Pitzer College, Claremont, California
• Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
• Prescott College, Prescott, Arizona
• Providence College, Providence, Rhode Island
• Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida
• St. John’s College Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland
• Texas A&M University, several campuses
• University of Arkansas, several campuses
• University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho
• University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa
• University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas
• University of Maine, several campuses
• University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee
• University of Montana, Missoula, Montana
• University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma
• University of Wisconsin, several campuses
• Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts
• Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts
• York College, York, Nebraska

While many schools still require SAT scores, some have reduced
the value of these scores. To get an idea of how crucial the SAT or ACT
score is, ask an admissions officer whether the standardized scores are
less important than in the past. Contact individual schools to learn
what their specific standardized test policies are.


Obviously, it’s better if a student has high standardized test scores
and excellent grades in high school. But for kids who can’t pull off that
feat, schools typically put more stock on grades than standardized test numbers.


Action Plan
If you perform poorly on the SAT, consider applying to schools
where the test isn’t required.
Source: The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price

SAT Guide : VOCABULARY - DOES IT MATTER?

IN A WORD: YES.

Vocabulary as such is not tested on the SAT. Until a few years ago, the exam included antonym questions, which required you to pick a word whose meaning was the opposite of some other word. Those questions have been eliminated. So the most direct and obvious form of a vocabulary question on the SAT is no more.
That leaves indirect and hidden vocabulary questions—of which there are plenty ;

1. Reading comprehension passages now include vocabulary-in-context questions. These focus on particular words in the passage and ask you to determine their meaning in the passage. Sometimes the words chosen are obviously “hard” words (latent, replete, and eminent, to name three real examples). More often, they are seemingly “easy” words that are tricky because they have so many possible meanings (camp, idea, and hard, for example). In both cases, the broader, more varied, and more accurate your vocabulary knowledge, the better your chances are of answering these questions quickly and correctly.
2. The better your vocabulary knowledge, the easier you’ll find it to understand both the critical reading passages and the sentence completion items (which are, in effect, mini-passages, each one sentence long). Even an occasional math item is made a little more complicated by the use of a challenging vocabulary word.

Therefore, vocabulary knowledge makes a clear and significant difference in your performance on the SAT. Fortunately, the kinds of words that regularly appear on the SAT, as with so much else on the exam, fall into definite patterns.

The SAT is basically a test of “book learning.” It’s written and edited by bookish people for the benefit of the other bookish people who run colleges and universities. It’s designed to test your ability to handle the kinds of academic tasks college students usually have to master: reading textbooks, finding information in reference books, deciphering scholarly journals, studying research abstracts, writing impressive sounding term papers, and so forth.

The hard words on the SAT are hard words of a particular sort: scholastic words that deal, broadly speaking, with the manipulation and communication of ideas—words like ambiguous, amplify, arbitrary, and arcane. The better you master this sort of vocabulary, the better you’ll do on the exam.

Fortunately, you don’t need to find these words on your own. We’ve done the spadework for you. By examining actual SAT exams from the last several years, we’ve been able to list the words most commonly used in reading passages and sentence completions, including both the question stems and the answer choices.

This list became the basis of the SAT Word List, which can be found in the appendix. It includes about 500 primary words that are most likely to appear in one form or another on your SAT exam. It also includes
hundreds of related words—words that are either variants of the primary words (ambiguity as a variant of ambiguous, for example) or that share a common word root (like ample, amplify, and amplitude).

If you make yourself acquainted with all the words in the SAT Word List, you will absolutely learn a number of new words that will appear on your SAT. You’ll earn extra points as a result.
Read More : SAT Guide : VOCABULARY - DOES IT MATTER?

The Best Vocabulary-Building Tips For The SAT

STUDY VOCABULARY DAILY
There are some topics you can easily cram. Vocabulary isn’t one of them. In general, words don’t stay in mind until the fourth or fifth time you learn them. Try to begin your vocabulary study several weeks before the exam. Take 15 or 20 minutes a day to learn new words. Periodically review all the words you’ve previously studied; quiz yourself, or have a friend quiz you. This simple regimen can enable you to learn several hundred new words before you take the SAT.

LEARN A FEW WORDS AT A TIME
Don’t try to gobble dozens of words in one sitting. They’re likely to blur into an indistinguishable mass. Instead, pick a reasonable quantity—say, ten to fifteen words—and study them in some depth. Learn the definition of each word; examine the sample sentence provided in the Word List; learn the related words; and try writing a couple of sentences of your own that include the word. Refer to your own dictionary for further information if you like.

LEARN WORDS IN FAMILIES
Language is a living thing. Words are used by humans, innately creative beings who constantly twist, reshape, invent, and recombine words. (Think of the jargon of your favorite sport or hobby, or the language that has blossomed in cyberspace in recent years.) As a result, most words belong to families, in which related ideas are expressed through related words. This makes it possible to learn several words each time you learn one.

In the SAT Word List, we’ve provided some of the family linkages to help you. For example, you’ll find the adjective anachronistic in the word list. It means “out of the proper time,” as illustrated by the sample sentence: The reference, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, to “the clock striking twelve” is anachronistic, since there were no striking timepieces in ancient Rome.

When you meet this word, you should also get to know its close kinfolk. The noun anachronism means something that is out of its proper time. The clock in Julius Caesar, for example, is an anachronism; in another way, so are the knickers worn by modern baseball players, which reflect a style in men’s fashions that went out of date generations ago. When you learn the adjective, learn the noun (and/or verb) that goes with it at the same time.

BECOME A WORD ROOT TRACER
The two words we just discussed anachronistic and anachronism are like brother and sister. Slightly more distant relatives can be located and learned through the “Word Origin” feature you’ll find near many of the words in the list. The origin for anachronistic connects this word to its source from another language: the Greek word chronos means time. Ultimately, this is the root from which the English word anachronistic grows.

As you explore the word origins, you’ll find that many words especially bookish SAT words—come from roots in Latin and Greek. There are complicated (and interesting) historical reasons for this, but the nub is that, for several centuries, learned people in England and America knew ancient Latin and Greek and deliberately imported words from those languages into English.

They rarely imported just one word from a given root. Thus, many word roots can enable you to learn several English words at once. The word origin for anachronistic tells you that chronos is also the source of the English words chronic, chronicle, chronograph, chronology, and synchronize. All of these have to do with the concept of time:

• Chronic means lasting a long time
• A chronicle is a record of events over a period of time
• A chronograph is a clock or watch
• Chronology is a timeline
• Synchronize means to make two things happen at the same time

Learning the word root chronos can help you in several ways. It will make it easier to learn all the words in the chronos family, as opposed to trying to learn them one at a time. It will help you to remember the meanings of chronos words if they turn up on the exam, and it may even help you to guess the meaning of an entirely new chronos word when you encounter it.

USE THE WORDS YOU LEARN
Make a deliberate effort to include the new words you’re learning in your daily speech and writing. It will help solidify your memory of the words and their meanings. Maybe you’ve heard this tip about meeting new people: If you use a new acquaintance’s name several times, you’re unlikely to forget it. The same is true with new words: Use them, and you won’t lose them.

CREATE YOUR OWN WORD LIST
Get into the habit of reading a little every day with your dictionary nearby. When you encounter a new word in a newspaper, magazine, or book, look it up. Then jot down the new word, its definition, and the sentence in which you encountered it in a notebook set aside for this purpose. Review your vocabulary notebook periodically—say, once a week. This is a great way to supplement our SAT Word List, because it’s personally tailored. Your notebook will reflect the kinds of things you read and the words you find most difficult. The fact that you’ve taken the time and made the effort to write down the words and their meanings will help to fix them in your memory. Chances are good that you’ll encounter a few words from your vocabulary notebook on the exam.
Read More : The Best Vocabulary-Building Tips For The SAT

What Is A Sentence Completion Question?

In each SAT sentence completion question, you are given a sentence containing one or more blanks. A number of answers, or pairs of answers, are suggested to fill the blank space(s). You must select the word or pair of words that best completes the meaning of the sentence as a whole.
Examples:
Through his ---- he managed to cheat his partners out of their earnings.
(A) inefficiency
(B) ineptness
(C) machinations
(D) regime
(E) dealings

The correct answer is (C). Through what (noun) does one cheat? You should be able to answer, “Through unfair play, conspiracy, evil planning, or the like.” A look at the five possibilities reveals machinations as the only possible choice. Normally a(n) ---- of dependability, he had let his colleagues down;
now he could not face their ----.
(A) pillar .. smirks
(B) besmircher .. titillation
(C) paragon .. wrath
(D) bastion .. adulation
(E) anathema .. debts

The correct answer is (C). Despite being a what (noun) of dependability, did he let his colleagues down so badly that he couldn’t face them? Paragon, bastion, and pillar—all symbols of strength or virtue—would work; besmircher (one who dirties) and anathema (curse) would not. Using any of the three that work, focus now on the fact that he had “let them down.” What do people show when they are severely disappointed? Certainly not smirks (crooked smiles) or adulation (praise). Wrath, however, is a perfect fit.

HOW TO ANSWER SENTENCE COMPLETION QUESTIONS READ THE SENTENCE THROUGH FOR SENSE, AND TRY TO ANTICIPATE WHAT WORD WOULD BEST FILL THE BLANK. THEN LOOK FOR THAT WORD IN THE ANSWER CHOICES.
Example:
Alan waited ---- for his turn, relaxing in an easy chair with his eyes closed.
(A) impatiently
(B) eagerly
(C) warily
(D) calmly
(E) tensely

The correct answer is (D). When you read the sentence, you might have anticipated that a word like patiently could be used in the blank. Patiently does not appear as an answer choice, but there is one choice that is close to that meaning: calmly. None of the other choices is idiomatic; in other words, none has a meaning that is appropriate in the context of the sentence.

This sentence was a fairly easy one. And some of those you encounter on the SAT will be easy. Others, however, will be more difficult. Harder ones will require that you analyze the logical structure of the sentence to see what is required.
Read More : What Is A Sentence Completion Question?

Check In - Sample SAT questions test

Directions: Complete each sentence based on what is directly stated or suggested in each passage. Mark the letter that appears before your answer.
1. The film was completely devoid of plot or character development; it was merely a ---- of striking images.
(A) renouncement
(B) montage
(C) calumny
(D) carnage
(E) premonition

2. She delivered her speech with great ----, gesturing flamboyantly with her hands and smiling broadly from her opening remarks through her conclusion.
(A) candor
(B) consternation
(C) acerbity
(D) verve
(E) innuendo

3. As a result of a(n) ---- with her landlord, she was evicted.
(A) contusion
(B) alternative
(C) conflagration
(D) altercation
(E) aggression

4. It was not possible to set a monetary value on the legal services she provided, so the grateful town had a gold medal struck as a(n) ----.
(A) affirmation
(B) eulogy
(C) exultation
(D) elegy
(E) honorarium

5. No elected official who remains ---- can play a major role in public life; compromise is the life-blood of politics.
(A) obdurate
(B) dogmatic
(C) pragmatic
(D) irrefutable
(E) inflexible


6. Contrary to popular opinion, bats are not generally aggressive and rabid; most are shy and ----.
(A) turgid
(B) disfigured
(C) punctual
(D) innocuous
(E) depraved

7. The ballet company demonstrated its ---- by putting both classical and modern works in the repertoire.
(A) versatility
(B) mollification
(C) treachery
(D) dignity
(E) obtrusiveness

8. Though the concert had been enjoyable, it was overly ---- and the three encores seemed ----.
(A) extensive .. garrulous
(B) protracted .. gratuitous
(C) inaudible .. superfluous
(D) sublime .. fortuitous
(E) contracted .. lengthy

9. A good trial lawyer will argue only what is central to an issue, eliminating ---- information or anything else that might ---- the client.
(A) seminal .. amuse
(B) extraneous .. jeopardize
(C) erratic .. enhance
(D) prodigious .. extol
(E) reprehensible .. initiate

10. Peter, ---- by the repeated rejections of his novel, ---- to submit his manuscript to other publishers.
(A) encouraged .. declined
(B) elated .. planned
(C) undaunted .. continued
(D) inspired .. complied
(E) undeterred .. refused
Read More : Check In - Sample SAT questions test