Duke Study: College Admissions Practices Encourage Retaking SATs
Policy researchers say the admissions practices that encourage some students to retake the SATs may also inadvertently penalize students from less wealthy families
Tuesday, June 3, 2003
DURHAM, N.C. -- On Saturday, June 7, thousands of college-bound students will take the SAT I and II. For many of them, it won't be the only time they'll take the exam, due largely to the college admissions practice of taking into account only the highest verbal and math scores on the SATs.
The practice not only encourages students to take the test multiple times, but may inadvertently penalize those students who cannot afford to do so, says a study by Duke University researchers.
In 2002, 1.3 million college-bound seniors took the SAT, according to the College Board, which administers the exam. Nationwide, roughly half of college applicants take the SAT more than once. Among applicants to selective institutions, the frequency of retaking is significantly higher, the researchers at Duke's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy found.
Most selective undergraduate institutions, including Duke, allow applicants to submit multiple SAT scores, and consider only the highest math and verbal scores when ranking applicants. This creates a strong incentive to retake the test, because an applicant risks nothing by doing so: Higher scores improve the applicant's credentials, but lower scores are ignored.
"Retaking SATs is important to the extent that, in combination with admissions policies of considering only the highest verbal and math scores, it affects admissions outcomes," said Charles T. Clotfelter, Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of public policy studies and professor of economics and law at Duke. Clotfelter and co-author Jacob L. Vigdor, assistant professor of public policy studies and economics, reviewed admissions data from three selective institutions. (Note: Confidentiality restrictions prevent the researchers from revealing the identity of institutions included in the study.)
The study was published in the January issue of the "Journal of Human Resources."
"We found that retaking the SAT is clearly associated with greater affluence and parental education, among other factors," said Vigdor. For example, those whose parents made more than $80,000 per year had a 2 percentage-point higher probability of retaking the test than those whose family incomes were below $40,000, controlling for a number of student and family characteristics, including an applicant's first SAT score. Applicants whose fathers obtained a college degree were 6.6 percentage points more likely to retake the test than otherwise identical applicants with a high school-educated father.
By race, blacks were less likely than whites to take the test two or three times. Holding other factors constant, "the probability of a black student taking the test at least twice was 5.2 percentage points less than that of an identical white student," the study noted. Asian Americans were consistently more likely to retake the test.
The study uses numerical simulations to determine the role of college admissions policies in promoting SAT retaking. The results suggest that using an average of an applicant's SAT scores, or only the most recent score, would reduce the rate of retaking by up to 75 percent. Either of these reforms would reduce the incentive to retake the test, because applicants would face some risk of reducing their ranking if their scores went down.
The study also notes precedent for using a different policy: law schools typically use the average of an applicant's LSAT scores. Rates of LSAT retaking are correspondingly much lower than rates of SAT retaking.
Given the significant disparities under the current system, the researchers conclude that adopting a different policy would improve the college admissions process in two respects: promoting fairness and reducing social costs.