Tone: ?
Audience: High school and college age students, college admissions
“Designed to ferret out hidden talent, the tests have become, for some students at least, barriers to higher education. Scores are highly correlated with family income; Harvard law professor Lani Guinier calls the SAT a "wealth test." Type "SAT" into Amazon.com, and you'll have to scroll past more than 200 test-prep volumes before you get to one book that's a history or critique of the test. Because the SAT and ACT are now thought of as yardsticks of ability, students who do poorly on them are marked — or mark themselves — as failures. Overreliance on the SAT and ACT threatens to make America's institutions of higher education even more elitist, adding to income inequality and harming U.S. competitiveness.” -http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2013/10/22/daily-circuit-sat-college-admission

“Because the SAT was devised as a tool to identify talented students from underprivileged backgrounds, it was thought of as a test that would measure an innate ability referred to as "aptitude," rather than abilities that these students might have developed through school.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/test/what.html * “According to the College Board, the SAT now does not measure any innate ability. Wayne Camara, Director of the Office of research at the College Board told FRONTLINE that the SAT measures "developed reasoning," which he described as the skills that students develop not only in school but also outside of school. He pointed out, for example, that students who read a lot, both in and out of school, are more likely to do well on the SAT and in college. The College Board says that the best way to prepare for the SAT is to read a lot and to take rigorous academic courses.”-http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/test/what.html * The SAT has been found to correlate with first-year college grades. But psychologist Claude Steele pointed out that the test has been found to measure only about 18 percent of the things that it takes to do well in school, and thus is not a very good predictor of how a student will do in college. "The SAT is not going to get you very far with predicting who's going to do well in college," he told FRONTLINE.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/test/what.html * * 11 colleges that don’t require SAT scores: Smith college, NYU, Wake Forest University, American University, Middleburg College, Bowdoin College, Bryn Mawr College, Bates College, Bard College, Franklin and Marshall College, Hamilton College http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/11/11-colleges-that-do-not-r_n_782187.html#s179417title=Smith_College