Educational experts and college admissions officers are sharply criticizing an experimental project that the Educational Testing Service, the group that administers the SATs, is conducting to label test-takers as "strivers" or "underachievers" based on their score and socioeconomic background.
The project uses 14 different criteria, including socioeconomic background, race, ethnicity and the parent's employment status, to identify students who have overcome difficulties to score exceptionally well on the test. Students who score 200 points above an expected range as "strivers."
According to Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Karl Furstenberg, the College and other Ivy League universities have responded negatively to the new program.
"[Admissions officers] are already looking for kids who have beaten the odds," Furstenberg said, arguing that a program such as Strivers adds little to the application process.
Furstenberg said that Dartmouth, like most other top universities, already looks at a variety of factors in determining the admissions status of a student.
Furstenberg also said he thinks the Strivers program is stigmatizing to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, as it assumes they will not do well on the SATs.
The Strivers program was also severely criticized by a New York Times article in September that claimed the ETS was indirectly acknowledging flaws in its own test by instituting the Strivers program.
Another complaint about the project was that it was giving an advantage to certain students, because while their score would not change, they would receive additional recognition for a high score.
Other criteria considered also included the quality of the school, the student's high school GPA and the academic rigor of the student's core curriculum.
Colleges often have their own methods for identifying different kinds of students and for understanding SAT scores within a larger context, including interviews and essays, according to Furstenberg.
"Basically the idea is pretty much dead. The president of ETS has come out to say that it's a bad idea. The whole concept is really flawed," Furstenberg said.
The research focused on students who scored between 1000 and 1190 on the SATs. Those with a score greater than 1200 are presumed to do well in college.
Acknowledging that many colleges already have a set of criteria that they use for their admissions processes, Ed Tate of the College Board said the motivation behind this research project was "an attempt to broaden in a systematic way the criteria that might be used in admissions."
"This is a more rigorous analysis on very carefully selected set of data," Tate said. "They will use this information in different fashions. It is a new attempt at a different system."
Tate does not think that it will profoundly affect college admissions, at least not immediately. "We will distribute this widely to colleges and universities" said Tate.
The project has been going on for just over two years, and is considered to be a one time research project. Currently under peer review, the project is nearing completion, and is expected to be finished in the next two months.
