Reader says The old saw that the SAT is a test that you can’t study for is still that: an old, false saw

The old saw that the SAT is a test that you can’t study for is still that: an old, false saw. Perfect or near perfect scores were once a rarity, perhaps because students were (wrongly, as it turns out) warded away from preparing in a focused, methodical way. Now, however, admissions offices at the nation’s top-rated colleges are swimming in applications from students sporting such gaudy scores. Fully a quarter or more of freshmen matriculating at places like Yale or Princeton totally body-slammed the SAT. Hence, schools who informally market themselves the “Harvard of the South” or similar monikers that identify them as non-Ivy League, but striving for recognition and a healthy share of the rest of the best students, are competing heavily for students with those kinds of obscenely high scores by offering large merit-based scholarships. But, and this is a big but, those same schools are prone very quickly to lose interest in students who do not score perfectly or near-perfectly on the SAT. Respect for the SAT as a tool for admissions offices to make fine distinctions between and among good students has plummetted. Many detractors of the SAT see it merely as a narrowly-focused test of a certain raw academic-related skills, perhaps predictive of first year college performance, but of no real value beyond that. The ACT, by contrast, has a much different format. The ACT is broken down by subject matter and gives admissions offices a good idea how much of the pure substance of a given academic subject a student has ingested and comprehended. The ACT’s popularity among college-bound high school students is increasing as more and more people recognize the real weaknesses of the SAT.