The Stopwatch for   
College Admissions
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          I never took that five hundred-dollar SAT class nor I did go to that high school where the SAT was a number one priority.  Not one single student went to an Ivy League school from my school. Not to say that they weren’t capable, but they just didn’t have the ambition. Maybe it would be a little easier if you understood the background of my school. I graduated from a high school in Manila, Philippines called Faith Academy. It has about 300 high school students and has a racial mix of roughly 80% white, 15% Asian and 5% Other. The school is a strict conservative Christian school. The kids there are mostly missionary children whose parents are serving somewhere in South East Asia. 
         With this background, most of the students opt to go to Christian colleges throughout the US. Some examples are Wheaten College, Biola University, Calvin College, Geneva University, Messiah College and Taylor University. There are some exceptions who went to public schools such as Georgia Tech, Texas A&M and Indiana. But most of my classmates are somewhere on the East Coast attending Christian colleges not bigger than the size of UCLA’s freshman class. 
         Many of these students were very bright. I remember my AP English class. Out of the fifteen of us, I was probably in the bottom third of that class academically. In my AP Calculus class, there were two guys who were just plain out geniuses. They would not only do their work faster than me but would think of new, shorter and brilliant ways of doing a problem. However, none of these students really had much ambition in terms of going to a first tier school or anything like that. Their parents wanted them to go to a Christian college where their spiritual lives would be nurtured and Faith Academy also encouraged this. 
         As for me, I had always wanted to go Caltech when I was in Junior High. And then in high school I realized that I may not be the Asian science whiz kid after all and decided I wanted to go to Stanford. During the summer between my junior and senior year I came to California for a month to visit friends. I picked up a stack of SAT books then and took them back to Asia. School in the Philippines started at the end of July, so during the weekends I would devote three to five hours of time to study for SAT’s and during the weekdays I would do all my necessary homework for school. I had taken the SAT’s without studying during my junior year and I didn’t exactly do well… at least not good enough for Stanford. A few months later I took the SAT again and scored 70 points better. Not really a marked improvement and not good enough for Stanford because they rejected me, but enough to get into all the UC schools. 
         The idea that the SATs may not be such an efficient way of gauging merit has been expressed in this class. Many students have suggested eliminating SATs all together. This argument rings quite empty to me because it’s a very diagnostic proposal with no prescriptive side. Or in other words, this idea points out that the SAT is not competent and disadvantages some groups of people, but it doesn’t present a solution to the problem. To think that the system will be more fair without SAT’s is as foolish as trying to compare a two different srpinters’ times in the 50-meter dash without using a stopwatch. SATs are a universal standard in which students from all different parts of the US and the world can be compared and contrasted objectively. Just like time in seconds measured by a stopwatch is the standard for comparison in a 50-meter dash. If SATs were eliminated, the only criterion remaining is grades and extracurricular activities. Grades aren’t a very good comparison because each school has different levels of difficulty and some states such as California have inflated grades on a 5.0 system. Extra-curricular activities fair worse because the opportunities for involvement differ from one school to another drastically even within the same school districts. 
         I have to admit that the SAT isn’t a perfect test. It’s a man-made test that contains human error and bias. Thus, some people will have a slight advantage and some people will be slightly disadvantaged. However, there’s plenty of opportunity to succeed in the American system. Although, this class has so severely critiqued the concept of “The American Dream,” I have much more faith in America and it’s idealism. When I compare America to the other countries I have been to, I can say with confidence that America is a land of opportunity and a sincere chance for a successful life. In Korea, since there is a limited number of colleges, the competition for higher education is so vigorous that a large percentage of high school students will not be able to partake in higher education. In third world countries like Indonesia, the possibilities are so limited that it’s virtually impossible to get an education if you are from a certain socio-economic background. Americans often don’t know how lucky they are to live in US and take the opportunities for granted.  
          If a student in America really wanted to attend a distinguished university and had the ambition to do so, it would be possible, no matter what kind of racial or economic background he or she comes from. In terms of the SATs, even if a student didn’t have the money to take SAT tutoring classes or didn’t even have the money to buy books, he or she find a way if their ambitious. Students in the American system are provided with abundant resources that are accessible to all students. Maybe the student will go the library and borrow the books. Maybe the student will photocopy pages from some books from their friends. Maybe the student will go on the web and find some study guides. America is not a country where kids don’t have any opportunities, like natives living in the hills of Iriyan Jaya. It really comes down to one’s aspiration and how hard one will work for his or her goals. 
         Recall the situation at my school in the Philippines. Many of my peers were intelligent and quite capable students. However, they didn’t have the ambition or the will to push themselves to their full potential. SATs in part measure that ambition and discipline. I’m not saying that good SAT scores are entirely something that can be acquired through studying but that studying can help raise a student’s score fifty to one hundred and fifty points to give that student a competitive edge for being admitted into a certain school. The SATs measure a student’s general reasoning and intelligence level but this score can be improved at most a couple hundred points by studying. 
         I think that the SAT shouldn’t be looked at a barrier to success but an opportunity. I moved schools during the summer after my sophomore year. My first semester of my junior year, I did poor in school. I had to adjust to another system of learning, a new grading basis and a new environment. I was worried that colleges would look negatively at my grades during my junior year. My hope was that my SAT score would negate this. For me, I saw the SATs as chance to prove myself. I chance in which my merit would be compared using a standardized criterion against other students who never endured the ordeals of moving schools from one country to another as I had. 
          It seems that I have led a rally in absolute support of the SAT. However, I do see and understand the problems with the SATs. It does privilege some groups of people over others. Yet, I can’t think of a more logical and plausible way to measure merit. By plausible, I mean that it is physically and economically feasible. Also I thought I’d mention that SAT’s aren’t the only thing that are taken in consideration in college admission. Grades, extracurricular activities, essays and SAT II’s which let a student pick a topic of his or her choice are all considered also. Let me emphasize one last thing before I finish. I really do believe that in this country, today, people do have a chance to realistically achieve their goal no matter what it is. People who really believe in their dreams and work to fulfill that dream are the future of this country. As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” 

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