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SAT and ACT Are Here to Stay

from Chatham Living Magazine, Chatham, New Jersey - January 2020 Issue

from Chatham Living Magazine, Chatham, New Jersey - January 2020 Issue, page 15

Do My Children Need to Wait Un...

Expert Contribution by Rich Michalak, owner of Breakaway Prep LLC

Last month, many Chatham High School juniors received their PSAT scores from College Board. The junior year PSAT is also the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (NMSQT). Best of luck to all of our Chatham students who took the test.

In light of this, I thought you all might want to know what the PSAT really is and what College Board is actually doing when your son or daughter sits for the test. Whether you are aware or not, your child filled out quite a bit of information about themselves before they took the test. College Board quietly takes all of that information and sells it to any college that comes calling for 47 cents a name.

If you have ever wondered why these tests (SAT and ACT) are still around even though we have been hearing about their demise for decades, it’s largely because the colleges need the information College Board and ACT provide.

There was a great article in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago that, for the first time I have seen, laid out how the colleges and College Board not only work together but ultimately need each other. If you run a college and want to make it more selective, buy a couple hundred thousand names from College Board and flood the country with your marketing materials. Drive your application numbers through the roof and then, in turn, reject students by the truckload when they apply so that you can position your school as more “selective”. It’s quite a game that College Board, ACT, and our higher educational system are playing and it’s why, unfortunately, the ACT and SAT are not going anywhere. Sure schools might do the cool thing and say, “we are now test optional”. Yay. Big deal. If you apply to a test optional school without scores, what do you suppose the college admissions officer thinks – maybe this applicant is hiding a 1600? Probably not. Test optional schools muddy the waters of the application process because then the question becomes…is my 1350 good enough for, say, Wake Forest? Test optional raises more questions than it answers. If schools really want to help kids out, simply STOP using the tests altogether. Don’t pretend that you are doing nice things for students when in fact you are only complicating the application process.

I don’t mean to sermonize here but the latest news is that the University of California system – from UCLA to UC Santa Cruz – may make the tests optional. They have a real chance to make a difference by simply eliminating the tests from the application process. But they won’t. With up to 60,000 applicants per school, there is simply not enough time in the day to do the work that’s needed to look at a student “holistically”. Until colleges and universities are ready to take that step, the SAT and ACT will continue to be a part of junior year in high school.