When the SAT Feels Like a Lock, Not a Key

This episode is a collaboration with EdSurge and Open Campus.

The SAT test weighs heavily on our collective imagination — and most everyone can picture the stressful scene of students sitting in desks, bubbling in Scantron forms with a No. 2 pencil, while stern-faced proctors walk around looking for cheaters.

So it’s not surprising that the SAT shows up in lots of Hollywood blockbusters. And often, it’s the stuff of nightmares — as in the opening dream sequence of the 1983 film Risky Business, when Tom Cruise’s character shows up late for his SAT test and worries that his life has been “ruined.”

The SAT is super-high stakes, and often the test is depicted as a barrier, a cold impersonal gatekeeper, that in one three-hour sitting can shape the rest of a person’s life.

A more recent SAT film, 2004’s The Perfect Score, was one of the first to make clear that the test presents very different obstacles for different types of students — depending on your race or your class. One of the characters is a white, middle-class honor student who has a near-perfect GPA and is ranked second in her class, but she knows she might still need a high SAT score to get into her dream school. Another character is an African American athlete who needs just a high-enough score to qualify for scholarships. And he feels the SAT is rigged against students like him.

“The SAT is racist,” the character says. “Who created the test? Rich white guys.”

While the film is full of racial stereotypes and simplifications, it does raise questions that seem all the more pressing in this time of a re-examination of the role of race and privilege in college admissions and in the broader society.

Welcome to Bootstraps, a podcast series about merit, myth, and education. We’re unpacking popular narratives around who gets what opportunities in America and wondering how it could all be different.

Today we are talking about the SAT. Who is it for? Is it fair?

And will the recent rise in test-optional policies by colleges lead to changes that can improve equity on the nation’s campuses?

For a perspective that gets beyond the popular notions from Hollywood, we visited Thurgood Marshall Academy, a nonselective public charter school in Washington, D.C. It’s in a neighborhood that’s often overlooked by the rest of the city — in an old, beautifully restored building, with polished, creaky wooden floors.

Among college-admissions folks at many highly selective colleges, Thurgood Marshall Academy is known as an engine of transformation. It serves predominantly African American families in the city’s two poorest wards. In those wards about one in 10 residents has a bachelor’s degree, and about four-fifths or more of the academy’s students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Many ninth graders enter the school three or four grades behind. But there’s an intensive summer prep program that brings many of those students up to speed. And there is an intimate approach to learning and block-scheduling that really is meant to help students learn subjects in depth.

The school has a proven track record of helping underrepresented students get into college. Since 2005, 100 percent of its graduates have received an acceptance from at least one college, and about 85 percent of its students go on to attend a four-year college.

Now you might think that the guidance counselor who has presided over much of that success might have some special SAT-training program for his students. But in fact that official, Sanjay K. Mitchell, the school’s director of college and alumni programs, is a well-known, outspoken critic of standardized tests like the SAT and the ACT — so much so that he wrote the criticism into his Twitter handle: Sanjay the anti-tester, anti-racism, just Anti!

Why did he pick that identity on Twitter?

“I’m anti the messaging that standardized tests send to my students,” he said. “I have witnessed meltdowns in the hallways when students get their test scores. I have witnessed how bright, talented students have that light just snuffed out of them when that test score comes. I’ve seen the ways in which students cram, and they have the big SAT-prep book and they’re reading and they’re testing and they’re struggling and they’re striving, and so much of who they are as a college-bound student is so tied into that test. And when it doesn’t land into the score that they think it should, it actually deflates our students, and it prevents them from applying to some of these spaces.”

In other words, many of the students that Mitchell works with look at the median SAT score that a college accepts, and they don’t see that score as a goal or an aspiration. They see it as a likely obstacle.

And many students who don’t have high test scores decide that “I’m not even going to bother.”

Meanwhile, many of those same highly selective colleges are doing more outreach to attract underrepresented students like the ones at Thurgood Marshall Academy.

“That’s the ironic part of it,” said Mitchell. “There are colleges that are saying, ‘We want you. We want students like you. But in order for you to be here, you have to score within this range.’ And that really suggests that you really don’t want us there. And so then why would I apply?”

There’s an economic reality, too, because those selective colleges stand out in how much financial aid they’re able to give students who need it.

“A lot of these selective schools come with deep pockets,” Mitchell pointed out. “And so students are looking for money as well. So the ‘no’ is twofold. It’s ‘No, you can’t get in,’ and ‘No, you can’t afford school.’”

So not getting into a dream school can feel like the end of a bigger dream. And some college-admissions folks may not realize what impact a rejection can have.

For instance, schools like Thurgood Marshall are relatively small and close-knit. Students tend to have a keen sense of what their classmates are doing, what their aspirations are, and what their admissions fortunes end up being.

“Students hear where seniors are getting admitted. And they might say, ‘Well, this student was one of our top seniors and did not get into X place, so why would I apply there? I definitely won’t get in,’” said Mitchell.

While college officials may think to themselves that there are thousands of colleges and students will get in somewhere, that is not necessarily the case, according to Mitchell.

Even when a student at Thurgood Marshall scores high on the SAT, the reaction is not always one of celebration.

“When I really think about my students with high test scores, they’re not pumped or excited about applying to super-selective schools, because I think deep down, somewhere inside, they just know that it’s still not a space that wants them, even with their scores,” said Mitchell. “And it takes a lot of coaching, a lot of coaxing, a lot of conversation, to get them to consider [applying to] a highly selective college.”

“The test score isn’t the thing,” Mitchell pointed out. “Sure, they’re happy [when they say,] ‘I got a 1250. Is that a good score?’ That’s always the question. ‘Is that a good score?’ … Yeah, that’s a pretty solid score. But then there’s still disbelief. They don’t believe me when I say it’s a good score.”

The students Mitchell works with certainly don’t feel as if they are the colleges’ target audience.

“If you have 300 African American students who take the SAT and 15 score above whatever you consider to be your great averages, that means that there’s about 285 of them that did not. So what is the rule there? Is the rule that this is a test that gives an opportunity to African American students, or is it a rule that it doesn’t give a space for them to grow, and then there are these 15 who just so happened to beat it?” said Mitchell.

“And what does that mean?” he continued. “What are you saying about the 15 who beat it? Did they beat it legitimately? Because there’ve been questions around that, particularly around African American students who score well on the test.”

He cited a case in Florida in 2019 in which Kamilah Campbell, an African American student, improved her score of 900 to 1230 when she took the test again. She said she had done it by using the free practice materials for the SAT provided by the nonprofit Khan Academy, which is an official partner of the College Board, maker of the SAT. But she got a letter from the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, that raised doubts about her higher score.

“I did not cheat,” she said in a news conference at the time. “I studied and I focused to achieve my dream. And I know that to achieve them I had to be focused and dedicated, and I won’t let ETS or anybody else take my dreams away from me.”

We reached out to the head of Khan Academy, Sal Khan, about the incident, and whether it undermined the promise of the Khan Academy materials. He said he didn’t remember the specifics of the case, but from what he knew, from working with the College Board, it doesn’t usually challenge someone just because a score improves.

“The flags around cheating are usually, to my understanding, only if there’s an unusual correlation between one person’s answers and someone else in the room, or something like that — that’s the type of thing that might get flagged in their systems.” He said that scores that increase after studying should be celebrated, “and my sense of the College Board is that they wouldn’t disagree with what I just said.”

The situation brought to mind another Hollywood blockbuster, the 1988 film Stand and Deliver. In it a teacher inspires a group of working-class Latino students in East Los Angeles to intensively prepare for the AP calculus test. But when all the students do well, their scores are questioned by ETS, saying they must have cheated. The students take the test again to prove themselves, and they all maintain high scores.

The Florida student who improved her SAT score and then was questioned by ETS ended up withdrawing her challenge, and decided to take the test again.

Sal Khan pointed out that, for all its flaws, the SAT and the ACT were actually designed to improve equity in the nation’s colleges.

“Because a hundred years ago, if you wanted to go to Harvard, you had a much better chance when Harvard knew your guidance counselor at Phillips Exeter or Phillips Andover than if you were a kid in a random public high school someplace in the country who had no connection,” Khan said. “And so the SAT tried to introduce this notion of ‘Hey, at least if there’s a standardized assessment, it can provide a signal.’”

The important thing, he argued, is not to put too much emphasis on the one score. “I think what most people are saying is, we shouldn’t overly index on it,” Khan added. “We should know what it’s measuring and what it’s not measuring, and use it in a broader context.”

Many defenders of the SAT say that it helps colleges spot unidentified talent around the country, and may help them find “diamonds in the rough.” But Mitchell said that thinking is backward.

“It’s very lazy to me, in my opinion. It’s a very lazy notion of expecting brilliance to happen in an exam on a Saturday morning where students have lived experiences that may interrupt the way they perform,” he said. “And it’s a very borderline elitist, as we all know, expectation that preparation for a test determines your level of intelligence, whereas not necessarily working with the students to refine and define their intelligence, and having this idea that intelligence manifests itself in one space, in one place. And of course proponents of the test will say that’s not what it is saying, right? But the languaging of it says that. The languaging suggests that these tests are important because they’re the ones that can identify that student who may be the diamond in the rough, or the rose in the concrete, or whatever kind of analogies we want to use.”

“It’s a very shortsighted and very unintelligent way of identifying and defining these ‘diamonds in the rough,’” he continued. “They’re everywhere. … Intelligence is not a fixed thing. There’s different points in time where your intelligence can grow and your ability to adapt can expand. And what I would hope that colleges are thinking about and looking for when they’re identifying students [is] asking, ‘Is the seed there enough to grow, nurture, and plant into something beautiful?’ Or are you looking for a static, ready-made product that you don’t have to do anything with, therefore don’t have to put in much work in the higher-ed space? I would like to believe that that is not the tenet of our higher-education system within this country. I would like to believe that that’s not what the ideology or the axiom of it is.”

For decades and for generations ACT and SAT scores have mattered. They have mattered to people who work at colleges and universities. They certainly have mattered to people who work in admissions offices.

Many admissions officials who have no great love for standardized tests, and even dislike them, will often say, “Nonetheless, the test score gives us important information about a student. It is one measure of their potential.”

But Mitchell said colleges have long overrelied on that particular measure.

These days something big is happening with college admissions. Since the pandemic, hundreds of colleges have gone test-optional, meaning they’re not requiring applicants to submit an SAT or ACT score. Some of those institutions may go back to requiring the tests once Covid-19 fades, but many others say they’ve made the change for good.

And the students at Thurgood Marshall have noticed.

“When we told students that their favorite schools are now test-optional and that’s off the table,” said Mitchell, “we saw the earnest ways in which they’ve approached the process after that — the excited ways they approached the process, and the ways in which they found language to articulate about themselves in the process that make them stand out, outside of the test … If we had always had this as an option, I wonder how many students would have just said …, ‘Let me apply and let me apply earnestly’ versus ‘I’m not going to apply because this score tells me that I’m not college-ready.’”

Does Mitchell think such a new era will make highly selective colleges more welcoming to more types of students?

“I think I’ve moved from a pessimist to a cautious optimist,” he said. “What I am worried about, though, is what other obstacles are going to be put in place to replace the obstacle that the SAT was. And that’s the thing that keeps me up.”

“Because if we argue that the SAT, and standardized testing, was a means to standardize a review process for every applicant, now there needs to be a new thing — right? — that standardizes everything,” he added. “What will this new thing be? And how will it affect students from marginalized backgrounds?”

One thing he’s heard may gain prominence is demonstrated interest — the term in admissions for when colleges try to judge how interested applicants are, looking for signs like whether they visited campus or contacted the college for more information.

But Mitchell said that would raise new questions: “How does one demonstrate an interest when you don’t have internet at home and you’re in school all day? How does one demonstrate an interest when you can’t fly to visit a school or can’t meet with a counselor?”

“Are we going to create a new wave of things that will intimidate students from applying to any campus,” he said, “now that we are moving to a space where the No. 1 exclusionary thing is no longer the No. 1 exclusionary thing?”

It turns out that the SAT is just one piece of a puzzle, and there are many other ways of making the education system more fair and equitable.

“How should we pick students for Berkeley or for whatever?” said Nicholas Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia University professor who wrote a book about the history of the SAT called The Big Test. “And there you get into these huge disagreements. It’s not obvious. Should there be legacy preferences? Should there be donor preferences? Should there be athlete preferences? Should there be minority preferences? Should there be geographic? Should there be diversity of talent?”

Maybe that’s the thing about the SAT that’s so problematic to Mitchell and other critics — that it seems to deny the diversity of talent and suggests that the only talent that really matters is the talent that’s revealed on the test.

In that 2004 movie, The Perfect Score, the students manage to steal the answers to the test, but the main characters decide not to use them and just to present themselves to colleges as they are, in all their diversity. And that’s actually the message Mitchell seems to be telling his students.

The question now is, Will this moment of turmoil create a space to talk about these questions more openly? Can the broader higher-ed system do better at seeing all these students for whom they are, not to look for diamonds in the rough, but to see potential in all students and help them craft that potential into something more fully formed?