More and more are making these tests optional. The claim is that they are (unintentionally) culturally biased. My view is, if they think the SAT is culturally biased, they haven't looked very closely at the universities themselves.
Anyway, if applicants opt out of the SAT/ACT they have to submit other evidence of their qualifications.
They don't really prove anything though. For engineering degrees the math section is too easy; for arts degrees it's irrelevant. The English section is all about memorizing a bunch of words you'll never use.
Whether it is a good test depends on what you're trying to measure and what you want a college degree to convey. If a college degree in photography should state _only_ that a person has some knowledge and competence in photography, then I agree.
I think the conferral of a degree is supposed to symbolize more than that, though. An institution's degree asserts some minimum level of education broadly, with an emphasis in the field of study you chose.
There's no reason a standardized test's worth should hinge on what a student might focus on in college. There's no reason any college student shouldn't arrive without a basic grasp of English or math.
You may have received some incorrect information - US universities will require an SAT or ACT exam score and some programs will even require subject based exams (ex an SAT Math or Chemistry exam)
However at the differences at the top 5 or even 10% are marginal at best, and even the top 5% represent a more than magnitude of students than have slots at elite schools.
I would be cautious about schools that do this. Unless its published that SAT score presence didn't affect chances to get in, I would assume its largely a play to get more applicants to reduce acceptance rate, with no scores counting against you heavily.
Anecdata of 1, but in my grad program, standardized test scores were used to sort students best to worst, and then they were evaluated one by one, given an accept/reject rating until all slots were filled. The score didn't affect your chance of being accepted given you were considered at all, but it did determine the chance of being considered.
Huh? In general they do — either the SAT or the ACT. Only a few big universities don't require them (though COVID has led many/most to change their policies at least temporarily).
In other countries, though, the admissions exams are much more heavily weighted. Here they play a minor role. No one is getting into Harvard on the basis of a perfect SAT score, and plenty of people get in on more than a standard deviation below a perfect score.
Minor role is unfair. It's more like a good score is necessary but not sufficient. Basically, you can have a perfect SAT score and GPA from high school but you have no hobbies or other interests than studying and your essays are unimaginative, you're probably not getting admitted.
But you do need to demonstrate some base level of academic ability.
Well, you can also have a perfect SAT and GPA and lots of interesting hobbies and extracurricular successes, but then get rejected in favor of other applicants with significantly weaker applications simply because subjective evaluations, under the direction of admissions offices, tend to claim that people of your racial background are all unimaginative drones...
You're right that a perfect SAT isn't a guarantee of success, although anyone who nails the SAT will be admitted to a pretty good school (assuming their GPA is commensurate).
Part of the issue is that the SAT is not difficult enough to stratify the applicant population, which means that it's not a super useful tool for schools at the very top. The elite liberal arts college I attended liked to brag that they turned away half of the 1600s that applied — and their overall acceptance rate is much higher than H/Y/S.
It would be interesting to think about what would happen if the SAT were more rigorous (or if there were another test that students could take that offered this stratification). Some schools (think Caltech) would probably put a decent amount of weight on such a test. Other schools, who currently optimize for more variables, would presumably not pay much attention.
They do. Well, most do. Well, some do. With the modern day race quotas (harsh phase, but that's the reality) in place it turns out that suddenly admissions exams are racist. It's wrong think to believe that you have to pass an exam to be accepted to the highest of higher level learning.