As the Office of Undergraduate Admissions continues compiling enrollment decisions, SATs still play a factor in the admissions process despite changes by other universities.
Universities like Wake Forest will make the SAT and ACT optional for admission, but Director of Admissions at N.C. State Thomas Griffin said NCSU will continue to use standardized tests.
“High school performance is the number one factor in our admissions decisions,” Griffin said.
Wake’s release said SAT performance has been linked to “family income and education level” and it may be biased against certain students.
Robert Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, or FairTest, said he agreed.
Schaeffer, a public education director for FairTest, said the organization serves as “the nation’s testing watchdog.”
The SAT favors “children from well-to-do families,” he said, because some students can afford testing coaches that others cannot, which may improve scores for those with the extra preparation.
In the past three years, 41 colleges and universities have made the two tests optional for admission, Shaeffer said, which included some larger public universities like George Mason University in Virginia.
According to Griffin, he does not expect many state universities to follow Wake’s lead.
“The SAT is given as kind of an accountability measure,” he said. “I don’t see a lot of state schools talking about eliminating the SAT or ACT.”
Griffin also said the school’s size could affect its decision.
“They get many fewer applications than we do, so they’re going to have, perhaps, the ability to conduct more interviews or conduct portfolio reviews,” he said.
While the ACT does not penalize students for guessing in the same way the SAT does, Schaeffer said, it is not perfect either.
“The ACT is a different test, not necessarily a better test,” he said.
The writing test is optional on the ACT, Shaeffer said, and while Griffin said NCSU does not yet consider the writing portion of the SAT, it likely will in the future as more data is collected on it.
The average SAT score of the 4,764 incoming freshman that have committed to NCSU in the fall is 1179 out of 1600 – 7 points higher than last year, he said.
Compared with last year, eight percent more of this year’s incoming students are in the top 10 percent of their high school classes, Griffin said.
One large difference between this year’s incoming class and those in the past is its reliance on the waiting list, as Griffin said 150 have been admitted so far.
“In the past, we have never admitted more than about 50 from the waiting list,” he said. “This year has definitely been an unusual year in terms of the yield we’ve seen from ‘accepted’ to ‘intend to enroll’ for freshman.”
Griffin said fewer students have committed from the typical, non-waitlist pool, and it may be attributed to people applying to more schools than before.
Earlier in the admissions process, Griffin said Admissions placed about 1250 students on the waiting list, compared to the normal 500, to compensate for the new notification-date system as opposed to rolling admission.
