Score Choice: How Important is the SAT?

The history of the SAT is an interesting story involving the Ivy Leagues and Army recruits. More than 80 years later, it still determines the fate of many high school graduates. Score Choice is the newest SAT policy that lets students report only what scores they want to colleges. Some believe that Score Choice benefits only affluent students who can afford to take the test many times. However, as Laurence Bunin of USA Today argues, repeating the test does not guarantee score gains, and score improvements from taking the test more than twice are very small, if any. He argues the SAT is challenging enough, and Score Choice remedies the issue by not penalizing students if they didn't put their best foot forward on test day.

To read a different view of the importance of SATs, check out FairTest's report Test Scores Do Not Equal Merit. Over 815 four-year colleges and universities across the U.S., acting on the belief that "test scores do not equal merit," do not use the SAT or ACT to make admissions decisions about a substantial number of their incoming freshmen classes.