<p>The SAT is arguably the best impartial measure of a prospective student’s academic ability. Of course it is not a guarantee of future success nor does it paint anything close to a complete picture of a student, but it is, nonetheless, a good indicator of academic strength. But what would happen if it were eliminated? One have to ask oneself why? Why would you want to eliminate it. The best answer I can come up with is that it is purely for political reasons. </p>
<p>To get an idea of the potential consequences for lowering the standard for a key acceptance criterion, consider the financial crisis currently at hand. Would the economy be in the dire straights it’s in had Fannie Mae not lowered the bar strictly to provide more mortgages to those who otherwise were not credit-worthy enough to safely be granted them?</p>
<p>I hope UF does de-prioritize the SAT. It’s so easy for rich kids to game the system and get Kaplan to raise their score a couple hundred points, but it’s much harder to do that with AP tests or subject tests because there is just too much to game.</p>
<p>Can you get a degree with a high SAT score? Hell no! You ultimately have to take 40 or so courses and get good marks in them to get that piece of paper. I can’t tell you how many people I personally know that scored 1400+ on the SAT and absolutely bombed their AP tests. I’m talking people with 1500+ SAT’s with 1’s in multiple broad subjects like calculus and physics.</p>
<p>I don’t necessarily agree with you, FLBoy. I bombed out on my SATs (this was before they changed it to the new format but still, I did bad), rocked my ACTs, and have a 4.0 right now at UF.</p>
<p>I don’t think the SAT is THAT accurate on a student’s academic strength. There’s a lot of other factors to consider. But that’s just my opinion :)</p>
<p>I guess I should respond to your points directly.</p>
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<p>It’s not lowering the standards, it’s re-weighting them. There’s no reason at all to attempt to homogenize the applicant pool; deciding what is important is what they’re debating.</p>
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<p>Holy moly the two situations aren’t even comparable, either in importance or scope, especially after what I just said.</p>
<p>The University of California System is going to reduce the importance of the SAT and ACT. Watch how fast their reputation falls down the tubes in the years to come! Until Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the rest of the Big Boys stops using test scores then the best public universities would be wise to use this standard. </p>
<p>If the state of Florida tries to even think about changing the standard then I say someone needs to sue them in court. Over the long run if we flinch first and the Big Boys don’t follow suit then our reputation will be flushed down the toilet. Mark it down…</p>