Impact of SAT changes on Rice admission standards unclear

By Andrew Ta     3/11/14 5:49pm

Although College Board recently announced plans to focus the SAT on skills practical in a university setting, Vice President for Enrollment Chris Munoz said he will defer judgement on how it will impact admissions until the exact changes are revealed on April 16.

Although College Board recently announced plans to focus the SAT on skills practical in a university setting, Vice President for Enrollment Chris Munoz said he will defer judgement on how it will impact admissions until the exact changes are revealed on April 16.

“Having experienced changes similar to this in the past, specifically with the College Board and the SAT making changes, I have come to the place of waiting to see exactly what materializes before I can really react at all,” Munoz said. “We really do not know what the changes are going to be until we actually see how it plays out.”

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Munoz said he has not received any direct contact from College Board about the changes.

“We hear and read that they are trying to be less esoteric and use vocabulary that measures what [students actually] learn while they’re in school, but what is that?” Munoz said. “What words? So I don’t know how anyone can really respond at this point with the work we do in enrollment and admissions until they actually see the [new] test itself.”

Applicants must submit the SAT Reasoning Test along with SAT IIs or the ACT. Munoz said the changes to the SAT may make it more similar to the ACT.

“We made the decision a few years ago to require [applicants] to take the SAT IIs, which measures content [mastered],” Munoz said. “Then we looked at the ACT [and it was] actually measuring the same thing as the SAT IIs. What the College Board is attempting to do, and I don’t know if they’d agree with what I’m about to say, is they’re trying to mirror more what the ACT measures.”

Munoz said standardized tests like the SAT and ACT are part of a holistic review process, but they offer an important, normative way of evaluating students from different schools.

“In grades, some schools can be more demanding than [others], but everyone has taken the same test,” Munoz said. “When you’re in highly-selective admissions, every piece of information that we can get helps us make the best possible decision. I think we would miss something valuable by not having that normative evaluation, if the SAT or ACT were not required.”

Munoz said if an applicant’s SAT or ACT score was extremely low, it raised additional questions.

“If a student has an exceptionally low test [score], but their grades seem to be better ... it doesn’t exclude us admitting that student, but it calls to question that maybe the coursework they took wasn’t as rigorous as it was purported to be,” Munoz said.

Munoz said test results and general academic performance are generally correlated.

“A student with a high test score tends to be admitted at a higher rate than students with a lower test score,” Munoz said. “Students who are successful in the classroom tend to have higher test scores.”

According to Munoz, many students submit both the SAT and ACT to Rice, but more students have submitted the ACT than the SAT in recent years.

“In the last three or four years, on a national scale, more students have been taking the ACT and not the SAT,” Munoz said.

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