Reactions to College Board's SAT Score Choice | Newsweek Education

Develop a Testing Strategy
8/12/2009 12:00:00 AM
Let's recap the good news—you now have more flexibility when it comes to your SAT scores and what colleges will actually use to evaluate your application. Ideally, this takes some of the anxiety out of the test-day experience and helps ensure you get a chance to showcase your best performance to the admissions committee.
Something Else to Worry About
Catharine Skipp 8/12/2009 12:00:00 AM
Oliver Beavers is planning to take the SATs again, and he's a little nervous. "Everyone has good test days and bad test days," he says. So it makes sense that he's a big fan of a new twist on the decades-old SAT, an innovation called Score Choice. Introduced by the College Board in late 2008, Score Choice allows test takers to send only their best SAT scores to the colleges to which they're applying. Under the prior system, colleges were given a warts-and-all look at the scores of every exam a student took. Beavers believes the old system hurt students whose performance varied on different test dates, and that the new scheme makes it easier for students to take the exam repeatedly to try to boost their score. "I think the best way to get better SATs is to just keep taking them and see where you go wrong," says the rising senior, who is hoping to attend his hometown University of Virginia to study economics. By utilizing Score Choice, he's less nervous about whiffing on the big test, and more relaxed knowing colleges won't know how many times he retests.
EDUCATION
Grading the Test
Pat Wingert 6/18/2008 12:00:00 AM
Ever since the new SAT writing test, featuring a proctored off-the-cuff writing sample, was launched in 2005, it has found few fans. Students weren't crazy about having to write a high-stakes essay under time pressure on a randomly assigned topic, or the fact that the new test extended a three-hour college-entrance exam by another 45 minutes. Meanwhile, college admission offices were reluctant to put much weight in a new test of unknown value that hadn't been formally validated.
EDUCATION
FAQ: Best High Schools
5/18/2008 12:00:00 AM
NEWSWEEK published national lists based on this formula in 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006 and 2007. In the Washington Post, I have reported the Challenge Index ratings for every public school in the Washington area every year since 1998. I think 1.000 is a modest standard. A school can reach that level if only half of its students take one AP, IB or Cambridge test in their junior year and one in their senior year. But this year only about five percent of the approximately 27,000 U.S. public high schools managed to reach that standard.
EDUCATION
Standardized Tests in College?
Peg Tyre 11/16/2007 12:00:00 AM
When U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings suggested a year ago that American colleges and universities consider using standardized tests to measure performance, the outrage in academia was loud and swift. Critics worry that No Child Left Behind type accountability measures are being unleashed on college campuses.
Test Wars
Jay Mathews