AU has not changed its SAT submission requirement, even as a growing number of schools nationwide have decided to alter or drop their own testing requirements.
In May, Wake Forest University in North Carolina and Smith College in Massachusetts have joined the list of schools that no longer require a review of students' SAT scores.
The movement to lessen the importance of the scores has been underway since 1969, when Bowdoin College became one of the first to eliminate the requirement for their applicants, according to Linda Kreamer, Bowdoin's associate dean of admissions and the New York Times.
Today, 30 percent of U.S. universities have changed their SAT and ACT requirements; some schools made it optional, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing.
Wake Forest became the first top 30 nationally ranked university to adopt the new policy, according to the National Ranking Organization.
"By making the SAT and ACT optional, we hope to broaden the applicant pool and increase access at Wake Forest for groups of students who are currently under-represented at selective universities," Martha Allman, director of admissions at Wake Forest, said in a statement on the university's Web site.
Personnel at the school's admissions office directed The Eagle to the statement.
"Removing the test requirement will demonstrate emphatically that we value individual academic achievement and initiative as well as talent and character above standardized testing," Allman said in the statement.
AU does not require the applicants educated outside the United States to submit an SAT score, but does require applicants educated in the U.S. to submit either an SAT or ACT score.
Every year, the admissions office conducts a review to decide whether SAT scores should remain an important part of the admission process, according to Acting AU Media Relations Director Maralee Csellar.
However, she said they would continue to review SAT scores because she said they are a valuable indicator of a student's academic performance population.
The SAT score is just one piece of a larger review process, Csellar said.
"We have a very holistic review process," she said.
Smith College started to de-emphasize standardized testing in 1999, but the new rule became official in May, according to Karen Kristof, the school's senior associate admissions director.
"We adopted a philosophy to use a more holistic view of admission by not looking at one value only," she said.
A Smith College committee formed to study the effects of the SAT requirement found large disparities between race, income and parents, Kristof said.
"The test is racially and economically biased and it does not reflect how students did in high school or how they will do in the future," she said.
Wylie Mitchell, dean of admissions at Bates College, said he congratulates Wake Forest for their recent announcement to drop the requirement. Bates College changed their policy 20 years ago.
"It seems that they did their research and looked at it from an analytical point of view," he said. He said Bates' own studies found that "the achievement test truncates the potential pool of students who apply to college." He added that he doesn't recommend that all schools drop their SAT requirement but rather review the needs of their student population.
The National Ranking Organization recently reported that none of the schools' ratings have been hampered by dropping the requirement.
A complete list of schools that no longer use SAT or ACT scores for consideration, visit www.fairtest.org/university/optional. The list is compiled by the nonprofit advocacy group Fair Test.
