By Shireen Korkzan
<[email protected]>

On graduation day, my cousin Anthony will address the Senior Class of Hobart High School (Hobart, IN) because he is this year’s Senior Class President. When most students think of senior class presidents, they think of Ivy League-bound geniuses who will probably become the next President of the United States. Think along the lines of Dan Frascella when he was Student Body President here a year ago; now he’s attending Yale University.

But Anthony doesn’t even have a good chance of getting into a state school, let alone Yale. IU, my cousin’s top choice school, waitlisted him because of his below-average SAT and ACT scores. It’s not because he earned all his awards by becoming a teacher’s pet all four years of high school – he’s earned A’s in all his AP and honors courses, including AP Calculus AB and AP Chemistry, and he’s a very active student both in and out of school. He’s just not good with timed tests. Which is a shame, because most public schools – including IU – determine a student’s admission based mostly on grades, standardized tests such as the ISTEP and college entrance examinations.

How can my cousin, whose academic achievements can easily be on par with some of the top students here, be regarded as one of our below-average students simply because of his SAT and ACT scores? According to the College Board, the SAT is “one of the best predictors of how well students will do in college.” So is Anthony not as bright as his grades and the Hobart community claim he is, or is the College Board wrong about the SAT?

And maybe it is wrong, especially since more colleges – mainly liberal arts schools such as Knox College in Illinois and Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio – are dropping college entrance examinations each year. One of the most recent schools to fall into this category is Wake Forest University, which dropped the testing requirements because of students with cases similar to Anthony’s. And this doesn’t make undergraduate admission any easier; Wake Forest is still one of the most selective national universities in the country, focusing more on what students have done in their four years of high school (and the quality) rather than the score of a test taken on one specific date.

I concur with Wake Forest. In late August last year, Indianapolis Star reporter Andy Gammill quoted me in his story “Indiana’s SAT Scores Virtually Unchanged.” In his article, I said my scores don’t reflect all of my skills and “everyone is different. You could be the best math student in the school and you woke up (the morning of the test) with bronchitis and you can’t think straight.” Looking back at my quote, I’m not satisfied with what I said (I happened to have had bronchitis at the time of my interview). Instead I would have preferred saying something along the lines of not everyone is born with good test-taking skills and even the best students have bad days. Colleges shouldn’t make test scores their priorities when it comes to admissions, although this makes me feel like a hypocrite since my relatively high SAT score is what got me admitted to the University of Missouri. But even though I scored higher on both the SAT and ACT than my cousin, I know he’s still academically brighter than I am.

Ironically, Bellarmine University, a private university in Louisville that is, according to U.S. News and World Report, about 6 percent more selective than IU, admitted Anthony with an instant $14,000 academic scholarship. IU eventually accepted him as of Feb. 9, but this doesn’t negate the fact schools like IU are still heavily dependent in college entrance examinations for determining a student’s admission status. And it would have been a shame if IU rejected Anthony because of a silly test. Who knows? Maybe he’ll be a future President of the United States, and a test never helped along the way. Then again Lincoln and Truman never went to college to become president, let alone took the SAT. Shireen Korkzan is a writing coach for the HiLite. Contact her at [email protected].