The lawsuit, filed in early April in a state court in Minnesota, was brought on behalf of an unidentified high-school senior in Dix Hills, N.Y. The lawyers who brought the case are seeking class-action status to allow any student who took the test in October, except those who received falsely high scores, to join the lawsuit.UVA was affected by the errors. A few of our applicants had scores that went up and the CB says they won't tell us if anyone had scores that went down after the error was found. The problem I have is that now, we can't give students our SAT stats without a big conversation about how they might be off a bit. It's bad enough that we have no history with this exam, now we're back at square one.
In a way, though, this problem is getting more people, both in admission and outside of it, to see things in a more realistic light. Application review as a holistic process, not one based on formulas and rubrics. If the SAT ceases to be reliable, maybe more educators will see it for what it is: a four hour, standardized test. Nothing more, nothing less.
3 comments:
I totally agree that the admission process is, and should be, holistic. However I don't understand why UVA puts A LOT MORE weight on GPA than on SATs. Afterall, SATs are standardized as you mentioned, and standardization makes it more comparable than high school GPAs, which can be arbitrary and inflated in one school vs. in another.
BTW, I'd like to know if a rumor I heard is true: UVA will deny/waitlist an applicant if s/he has an average GPA below 3.8 even if the applicant has high SATs (by high I mean 75 percentile or above)?
Thanks!
A VA Dad
The fact is that the SAT is not perfect. True, you can find stats that show those who score well on the SAT tend to do well in college, BUT you can't say that those who don't score well are destined to do poorly in college.
I have a fantastic story to illustrate this. Last fall, a 4th year at UVA (a senior) came by my office looking for advice about crafting a letter to law school admission officers. She was trying to draw a correlation between how she did on the SAT and her performance at UVA and her performance on the LSAT and her potential for performance in law school.
This young woman scored very poorly on the SAT. I won't post her score, but it was very bad. She is #20 in her class of over 3000 at UVA. Reread that. She's TWENTIETH in a class of THREE THOUSAND.
Thank goodness the admission officers who read her application didn't weigh that SAT score more heavily than her performance in high school! Thank goodness we look at how each school calculates GPA and how grading works at each school (an A starts at 90 in some schools, 93 in others) when we read an application.
If that didn't convince you, consider this: The SAT is four hours long. The high school transcript shows us four years of work. I'd rather see a great transcript with nice teacher recommendations, sincere essays and evidence of some involvement than perfect SAT scores.
As for that rumor, it's exactly that. UVA has no "cut off" when it comes to any component of the application.
Another quick story...
Back when I was in grad school, I "shadowed" an admission officer at a fairly competitive, large, private school. She showed me the ropes and then let me read a few folders while she looked over my shoulder (I wasn't going to make any decisions, it was more to show me how they went through applications). I paged through, noting good curriculum strength, nice teacher recs and an impressive resume. Before I even got to the essays, she told me to close the folder. I was bewildered, wondering if I had done something wrong. She told me that his 3.3 GPA didn't warrant a full review.
I was in shock. That's when I realized that on all my job interviews, I'd be asking for a run-through of the application reading process. I could never, ever work in a place like the one I saw on that shadowing day.
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