SATs are an inaccurate way to predict students’ future success and shouldn’t be so important to the college application process, some WHHS teachers and students feel.

We started investigating this issue because senior Liana Suarez has a strong school background, but average SAT scores.

So how important are SATs really?

Assistant Principal Patricia Robles, who runs the SATs at our school, expressed concern about the amount of pressure that students put on themselves about the SATs.

“You might have a bad day, or they might not be a good test taker,” Robles said. “I don’t think it’s fair to have a student’s future determined by one test.”

However, she noted, the SATs are considered by many as a good gauge of how a student will perform when they get to college.

Robles said she encourages poor test takers to take the test more than once because The College Board reports the highest “evidenced-based reading and writing” and math score a student gets, regardless if those scores occurred on the same test day.

Senior Tiana Rojas  said the SAT test has no value towards a student and their educational future.

“SATs are just a number, that’s all it represents,” Rojas said.

Rojas says that she tries to study the night before SATs, but if it means so much to people they should study at least two days out of the week for two months prior to the test date.

Rojas emphasized how SAT tests put a lot of pressure on students who aren’t good test takers.

School Counselor Holly Benedetti said student practice on Khan Academy’s free official SAT practice (www.khanacademy.org/sat) for 20 hours has been associated with an average 115 point gain on the SAT.

Ms. Benedetti said for those students who do not feel their scores on the SATs are a fair representation of their academic potential, many colleges are now offering a test blind-admission policy.  To see a list of colleges and universities now waiving the SAT requirement, visit www.fairtest.org.

“SAT allows colleges and universities to compare applicants from many different high schools, so there are some benefits,” Ms. Benedetti said. “But I don’t feel it is fair to to judge student’s candidacy for admission off a test score.”

After a lot of test taking, Liana Suarez recently got accepted to Quinnipiac University. She has been admitted into the Bachelor of Science in the School of Health Sciences as an Athletic Training major.

“I’ve stressed about these scores since junior year,” Suarez said. “But once I got my acceptance letter to my top school program, the stress of standardized testing seriously lifted off my shoulders.”