On College Entrance Tests and Haddonfield Curricula

This is the time of year when high school seniors and their parents start to stress over college applications and all that goes with them. Early action and early decision deadlines loom; the struggle to write the perfect essay drags on, and those many extracurriculars, most frustratingly, won’t fit into the character limit on the Common Application form. Finishing applications while juggling senior-year coursework, along with everything else in high-school life, is a formula for sleeplessness.

My two HMHS grads went through all of this recently and intensively enough for me to have become a source of advice for other parents and their kids. Their biggest anxiety surrounds scores on college entrance exams. Few students relish taking these tests, but take them they must, as nearly all of the top 100 colleges require those scores.

Colleges want to see results on nationally standardized tests to level the playing field among applicants. For example, a straight-A valedictorian from one school might not outscore a middle-of-the-class student from another school, if the second school offers a more rigorous curriculum. Score results give colleges a context in which to compare students.

Many families in Haddonfield pay for tutoring to prepare their students for college admissions tests, because getting good-enough results is the first hurdle for admission to some colleges, NCAA eligibility, and eligibility for scholarships. The rewards can be considerable when test results place students among the top 25% of accepted applicants to any given college—and those rewards may include not only admission, but also merit scholarships, offers of honors programs and housing, stipends for study abroad or research, and college credit for high-enough scores on SAT subject tests and AP exams, to name some benefits.

Thus, good scores can be “money in the bank.” Given that most private colleges’ tuition, room and board top $250K for a 4-year degree, and a Rutgers 4-year degree tops $100K, that “money in the bank” is a very welcome offset—and example of what I call “keeping value in education.”

Should our schools’ curricula teach to these tests, or any standardized tests, for that matter? For AP courses, the curricula are set nationally and are designed to teach to the corresponding AP test. In other courses, many of our high school teachers incorporate a period in which they require students to review using subject-test-prep books before those students take the SAT subject tests. 

In my opinion, if our students have developed the vocabulary, reading comprehension, writing, and quantitative skills to perform well on these exams, then they have been at a minimum served by the district’s curricula. That being said, in any course, our school’s taught curricula can and often do go well beyond the skills and subject knowledge assessed by such tests. Those who fear that our teachers may only "teach to the test" should find this reassuring.