The Importance of the SAT II Subject Tests
The official advice that admissions officers give when asked about the importance of testing is usually a variation on the following: “For admissions purposes, the most important academic component of your application is your four-year high school transcript, since that represents four years of effort. SAT Is and IIs are not as important because they represent only an afternoon's worth of work and don't tell us as much about how you think.”
I have heard this advice since 1985, when I applied to college, but after having worked in admissions for four years, I have come to doubt its veracity. I am not accusing admissions officers of outright lying. In fact, I think most (including myself) really believe deep down that your high school transcript should be more important than your testing record. However, there are several reasons why I believe test scores (particularly SAT Ills) take precedence over high school transcripts.
The first reason has to do with how high schools represent your place in the class. Since many high schools do not like to rank their students because they think it fosters too much unhealthy competition, the tendency is to try to provide colleges with less information rather than more. For example, if colleges know that you are ranked number three out of three hundred students in your high school and that rank represents some kind of weighting for advanced courses, they are positive that you are indeed at the very top of your class. But what if your high school reports only your GPA as 93, with no further information on where that GPA would put you, even approximately, in your class? (Luckily, some high schools, even though they do not officially rank, will at least provide some kind of grade-distribution information that allows officers to approximate fairly accurately how that student measures up to his classmates) I hate to say this, but when high schools try to withhold information in this way, colleges tend to assume that the high school is hiding something (perhaps at this high school, the grading is very inflated and that student would be only in the top 20 percent of the class, low by Ivy standards) and sometimes regard the applicant with a suspicious eye. After all, if that student's GPA truly put him close to the very top of his class, why didn't the counselor volunteer that information on the high school's part of the application?
What can highly selective colleges do if they have absolutely no way to judge whether this hypothetical 93 GPA is truly excellent or just average for this high school? As you might guess, they are almost forced to ignore the entire high school transcript and rely instead on test scores. Since the high school transcript in this example has no meaning (in that the student cannot be placed in the overall context of the class), it becomes almost a nonfactor in the admissions process—four years of work wiped out in a single blow. Test scores now take a primary role.
Lack of information provided by the high school is only one reason why testing is important. What about very small high schools that have only from ten to thirty members of the senior class? How can admissions officers give the same weight to a student who is number one out of a class of four hundred as they do to another student who is number one out of a class of fifteen? Although it is certainly in no way the student's fault for being in a small high school, clearly he has not had to face the same kind of intense competition as the student in a larger class. In this case, scores can be used to compare both of these students, even though they are in very different high school situations.
Finally, what about the consistency of teacher recommendations? Since officers cannot possibly know every teacher personally, they have no way of standardizing what teachers say. Obviously, not all teachers are equal in ability, nor are they comparable in their own ability to judge a student's intellectual strength. How can officers weigh one teacher's recommendation against another's? The obvious answer again is by using SAT II subject tests in conjunction with what teachers write about a student.
Admissions officers use the SAT II tests to sort out a standard that can be applied across the entire country. Let's say they are reading an application from Montana of a student who is ranked number one out of three hundred in the senior class. Let's also assume that the admissions officer is not at all familiar with this particular high school. Teachers all say positive things about how strong the student is. The Spanish teacher says that this is the most talented language student he has ever had, while the biology teacher says that science is this student's real strength. So far so good. Turning to the SAT II subject tests,* the student has scored the following: 570 biology, 490 Spanish, 600 writing. Suddenly, the admissions officers are forced to reevaluate the teachers’ comments: If Ricky is the strongest Spanish student the teacher has ever had and yet he scores only a 480, well below the national average, either the teacher has really never had a good student or the class itself is so weak that it could not possibly begin to cover the basic material on this test. The same applies to the biology score: Ricky just cannot be that good a science student if he scores only a 570. These tests cover finite amounts of material and are relatively straightforward to prepare for.
Now when admissions officers compare this student to another valedictorian at a different high school who gets all A's and scores three subject tests in the 700s, they are forced to draw different conclusions. If one of this student's teachers say she is the finest Spanish student and the student actually scores 750, the comments are taken a little more seriously. In fact, because this student has compared favorably to the top students in the country who took this test, more credence is given to the level of the high school and to the competence of the teachers.
A straight-A student with very weak subject tests in many cases represents an extremely diligent student or a very poor test taker. This type of student tends to have good study habits and has learned how to do the necessary work in order to obtain an A. However, I would go so far as to say that many of these students are working up to 100 percent of their capacity and just do not compare to the brightest students in the country, who are their competition for a place at an Ivy League school. Diligent and hardworking yes; brilliant and/or insightful, no. On the other side of the coin, a C student with very high testing usually represents a very smart but lazy student who obviously has the ability to do well but does not work up to capacity.
In short, it is fair to say that these subject tests are the true equalizers in the admissions process. The real function of these subject tests is either to back up all the evidence present in the file or to contradict this evidence. They are still examined relative to your socioeconomic background (more on that in subsequent chapters), but admissions officers can get a sense of how strong the high school is, how qualified the teachers are, and how well the student has covered the material. Doing very well on the SAT II subject tests will help show your academic strength when considered against the national pool of applicants. Doing poorly will show that you are not up to the competition of applicants from around the country who have higher scores.
The Ivies will look at your three top tests, although some might require one specific test, such as the writing or the math level 1, so do not limit yourself just to math and science. Follow your natural strengths. Since math is not always required, don't suffer through math level 1 and 2 if you hate math and are not very adept at it. I say this because part of these subject tests is being able to do a good amount of work in a short time frame. Call the College Board in Princeton, New Jersey, and get the full list of available tests—all this is public information published in various College Board brochures. The earlier you know what is offered, the better off you will be selecting appropriate tests.
SOME IMPORTANT OBSERVATIONS
1. I have mentioned the case of the poor tester, that student it who is extremely bright but falls apart under strict time constraints. (I am not including learning-disabled students in this category because they can request untianed SAT testing so that time does not affect their scores.) What can you do if you are a poor test taker? The best advice I can give you is to study the material so well that you can work faster than your normal speed. The “poor tester” excuse is sadly one that is not looked upon very sympathetically by Ivy League admissions officers. After all, they reason, if a student does not work well under pressure and tight time constraints, how will they handle the rigors of Ivy League classes? The majority of classes at the Ivies have exams, many of which are timed, and final exams tend to be two- to three-hour tests, much like the SATs.
Poor testers should keep in mind that the main difference between SAT Is and IIs is that the latter are much easier to prepare for, not to mention that there is a direct correlation between level of preparation and score. As you will discover, it is much harder to prepare for the SAT I, since it is designed to test aptitude. For example, the verbal part of the SAT I—no matter how many Stanley Kaplan tricks you learn—will still be difficult if you have never really been a reader. Remember, the SAT I is still fundamentally meant to test aptitude, while the subject tests are meant to test knowledge of a specific subject. Therefore, you must go out of your way to prepare for the SAT II subject tests.
2. Another surprising observation, especially for teachers, is that test scores tend to get more weight than do recommendations, even though officers would seldom admit that this is, in fact, the case. As in the examples I cited previously, if a teacher recommendation seems to be out of sync with a subject test, usually the subject test is taken as gospel. My personal opinion is that in some cases, the subject tests are good indicators. For example, in biology, a 450 score really does indicate that the student did not learn the biology curriculum very well. Of course, it could also mean the student had the flu the night before he took the test, or that while he learned a tremendous amount of biology, he didn't learn the exact material required for the College Board's test. It could simply mean that the student was a deep thinker and spent too much time puzzling over the implications of the questions, rather than just tearing through the exam without giving it much thought.
The most striking example of a test that has little bearing on a student's true talent is the writing test. Although admissions officers will value your score of 750 on the writing test, I maintain that the test has little to do with a student's real writing ability. Even the essay part of the test is so formulaic that it encourages very linear, structured writing, not the kind of creative writing that could distinguish a brilliant writer from a standard one. To look at it another way, Ernest Hemingway probably would have scored an 800 on the writing test because of his organized, spare, and direct prose. On the other hand, one of the greatest English-language writers of all time, James Joyce, probably would have scored only a 500 at best because of his unorthodox style and unconventional use of vocabulary. I doubt that William Faulkner, with his complex sentence structure, would have done well, either.
3. The last important observation is that despite what Ivy League admissions officers will admit if you ask them, most value high scores and decent grades much more than decent scores and high grades. There is something undeniably impressive about a student who scores over 750 on the verbal and math portion of the SAT I and who scores in the high 700s on three SAT II subject tests. Perhaps part of the reason is because very few people working in Ivy League admissions offices scored this well on these tests, so they unconsciously rank the student above their own intellectual level and therefore consider him very smart.
It used to surprise me that even the director of admissions at Dartmouth would make excuses for students with extremely high scores. I am not talking here about C students, but about students who did modestly well in high school (top 15 percent rank or B-category grades) and had astoundingly high test scores. Often during committee deliberations, I would hear the director say, “With those scores, I bet Caroline was just bored with her classes and her teachers, since she is obviously smarter than some of them. I bet she would take off if challenged by other brilliant people in an Ivy League classroom.” You would never hear the same argument for someone with a number-one rank and all low 500 scores. The comments would run more like this: “Despite the impressive rank, we can only assume that this high school is very weak or that Tom is a real grind, who would continue to do here what he did in high school—plug away at his work and get good grades without adding any intellectual insights to the classroom.”
As harsh as it sounds, most Ivy League admissions officers equate high scores with brilliance and would rather take a chance that an underachieving but brilliant student will blossom in college, rather than take a chance that a very diligent student would add significantly to the classroom.
The truth is that the Ivies admit very few students with even high-500 test scores, perfectly respectable as those might be. The highly selective colleges compete with one another for high test averages, which are reported each year in numerous college guides. No admissions director wants the testing average to go down, since, superficially, the conclusion is that the students at that particular school are getting weaker. All admissions directors know that students compare the different colleges by looking at testing averages. To attract the best students, it helps tremendously to have impressive standardized-testing averages.
In short, for all the reasons I have set forth in the last two chapters, I cannot overstate the importance of standardized testing, despite what admission officers might tell you. In the following chapters, you will see even more graphic evidence of why scores are so important in the admissions process at Ivy League schools.