College Board Should Offer A Summer SAT For All Students, Not Just Rich Kids

Who wants to take the SAT this summer?

The junior year in high school has slowly become almost unimaginably stressful for students, who try to balance grades with AP classes, SATs or ACTs, sports, student government and other extracurriculars. A summer SAT would help, a lot.

Guest post by Dan Edmonds

The College Board, after receiving a spate of criticism for its decision to link an August SAT date to an exclusive $4,500 course at Amherst College, made the right call in cancelling the program. But the fact remains: the people at the College Board wrongly thought it was a good idea to roll out a long-desired summer test date only to a handful of affluent students.

And after years of denying that test preparation is effective, they did so in partnership with The Princeton Review, one of the companies they?ve been most critical of over the years. While it?s good they backed down, the fact that the decision ever got the green light shows serious myopia on the part of the College Board.

The right response, though, wasn?t to get rid of summer testing; it was to expand summer testing beyond the narrow, privileged confines of a single program at Amherst College. The criticism of the College Board was not for having a summer test date; it was for not offering that test date to a wide enough (or socio-economically broad enough) audience.

A summer test date would be a boon for countless students. It would offer another opportunity for rising seniors to retake the SAT before early decision deadlines (and at a time when they could prepare without the many distractions of school).

The junior year in high school has slowly become almost unimaginably stressful for high achieving students, who have to try to balance the most important year for grades with AP classes, SATs or ACTs, SAT subject test, sports, student government, and other extracurricular activities. It is the year that matters most to colleges, both in terms of grades and non-academic accomplishments. On top of all that, they?re expected to begin figuring out where they want to attend college.? And all this ignores the challenges and adjustments simply required by being an adolescent.

Summer test dates would add a great deal of flexibility to college preparation. While students would almost certainly want to take their first crack at the SAT or ACT during their junior year, having a back-up date the summer between the junior and senior year would take some of the pressure off those spring test date performances.

As it stands now, if you don?t do well in the spring, you have to take the test again in September (for the ACT) or October (for the SAT and ACT), once again in the midst of the school year. A July or August test date would allow the student to focus much more narrowly on test preparation.

Students could know their scores before they returned to school in the fall, which would have the benefit both of making the senior year less stressful, and of allowing them to make more intelligent and informed decisions about where to apply for college, especially any Early Admission and Early Action applications (which usually have October deadlines, generally before students would even receive scores from October test dates).

I could even imagine particularly motivated rising juniors taking advantage of summer test dates to try to get the SAT and ACT out of the way before the start of junior year.

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