For Elite Colleges, Standardized Tests Should Be More Important in Admissions Decisions Then GPA

Resolved: The SAT, ACT, and other standardized tests provided more insight into a high school student's preparedness for education at elite colleges and universities than high school GPA and therefore should play a greater role in admissions. For the sake of argument, any college or university that accepts less than 15% of applicants can be considered elite. That does not mean that there aren't elite colleges that accept higher percentages of applicants, but I do not want my opponent twisted the resolution by coming up with an example of a university with a very low acceptance rate that is not as academically rigorous. This applies only to US schools. For Oxford, Cambridge, and their lot this does not apply due to the very different educational systems of the US and the UK (or other countries). Contention 1: Applicants tend to have uniformly high GPA. Last year, Brown University had 2,199 applicants who were valedictorian or salutatorian of their high school class. It ended up enrolling 1,732 students. So, Brown received more applications with nearly flawless GPA then it could possibly enroll. This does not include the thousands of applicants that were third or fourth in their class or the extremely large number that came from schools that do not rank. Making GPA a major criteria is simply not possible because an overwhelming number of applicants have very high grades. The SAT, but contrast, is intentionally designed so that only a limited number of students will get the top scores. Out of the entire nation, less than 300 people receive a perfect score on the SAT per year and only about 10,000 score over 2300/2400. Thus, top scores on the SAT are less common and distinguish students better. To use the example of Brown, they received only 108 perfect ACT scores as compared to the 1,507 valedictorians. Contention 2: GPA is not consistent between different students. One student at the same school could get a higher GPA than another by taking an easier course load. This is even more of a problem across different schools. How difficult an AP Biology course is at school X might be very different then how difficult it is at school Y. Standardized tests are designed so that they produce consistent results across different places and different tests administrations. Contention 3: Most high school classes are not hard enough to show that a student is ready for an elite education. This is fairly simple if you think about it. Even a very selective private school cannot offer a math class taught up to the rigor of an MIT math class because no high school has enough students that would be able to handle it. In order to get this kind of student body, they would have to use the same admissions criteria as elite colleges do. Thus, students capable of doing the work at these colleges will always excel as compared to their peers in high school and will not be challenged to a level that would prove their ability. The SAT and ACT are challenging enough that a very small minority of students get very high scores, so a very high score proves a student's potential. Conclusion: It is of course true that many traits that cannot be measured on a test, such as work ethic and determination, are necessary for success at top colleges. These traits, however, are nearly universal for those who are serious about getting in. Only standardized tests can distinguish these students from one another and prove who has the ability. Consider a student with a 3.7 GPA and a 2370 SAT from school X and a student with a 4.0 GPA and 2020 SAT from school Y. Which of them would get in to Brown? The student with the 4.0 is one of thousands but the student with the 2370 is one of a few hundred. The student with the 2370, who is clearly more intelligent, should not be considered inferior because his classes may have been harder or he may have gotten few bad grades. Also remember that a .3 different is rather large in high school, which is graded much, much more generously then college. I will go into more arguments latter depending on what my opponent brings up. Sources: http://www.brown.edu... http://professionals.collegeboard.com...