Benjamin College Consulting

I am not a fan of standardized testing or even grades for that matter, but neither are likely to disappear en masse anytime soon.  To be fair however, standardized tests like the SAT and ACT do seem to have a correlation with student success in the their first year of college and therefore colleges’ retention and ultimately graduation rate.  These are of course educationally sound goals, if more than a little self interested.  The only thing worse for a colleges’ “ranking” by U.S News than their students not graduating, is accepting a student who chooses not to matriculate.  While the uses and abuses of college rankings will be addressed in a forthcoming the post, it is the tests that I want to consider here.

As I mentioned, for college admission in the United States, the SAT and ACT are the most important standardized tests.  Traditionally the SAT was taken by students on the coasts, since that is what colleges there required, while the ACT was taken by most students in the middle of the country for the same reason.  Today, however, since almost all colleges except either test, many students elect to take both and use conversion charts to see which “looks better.” There are differences in the tests and therefore different strategies for success, but in my experience most students score very comparably.  The key is not which test one takes, but how he or she prepares that matters most.

Let me say it again, these are not diagnostic tests, students are expected to prepare for them, and how they prepare will go a long way toward determining the college they attend and how much they (you) pay in tuition.  In addition to earning admission, there is so much merit-based financial aid available to students who score high on these exams that not performing up to a student’s absolute best, can be equated to throwing away money.  Now I know many rich people, and while most of them are quite generous, they did not get rich by throwing away good money.  So for the rich, and the rest of us, it only makes sense to give our students the best chance to maximize their potential on these tests.

Look forward to part 2 of this post to learn the best way to prepare for these tests.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 10th, 2011 at 3:26 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.