In 2005, the College Board added a required writing section to the SAT, and ACT added an optional writing test to the ACT. Before 2005, ACT and the College Board had periodically produced concordance tables to assist admission officers who wanted to understand how students of comparable ability would score on the two college entrance examinations.…

During the transition period between the use of exclusively old SAT® scores and the use of exclusively new SAT scores, college admission offices will be receiving both types of scores from students. Making an admission decision based on new SAT scores can be challenging at first because institutions have methods, procedures, and models based on…

College admission offices receive many different pieces of information on each applicant to their institution. The job of considering this information becomes further complicated when the information is not consistent across applicants. An example of one such complication is receiving SAT scores for some applicants and receiving ACT scores for…

The focus of this study is to explore college outcomes for students who come from traditionally lower-income backgrounds, reporting a household income of $30,000 or less, and who were awarded a fee reduction to take one or more Advanced Placement® (AP®) Exams, compared to students with a similar background and ability who did not participate in an…

Noncognitive attributes as the researchers have measured them do correlate with college GPA, but the incremental validity associated with these measures is relatively small. The noncognitive measures are correlated with other valued dimensions of student performance beyond the achievement reflected in college grades. There were much smaller…

Presented at the national conference for AERA (American Educational Research Association) in April 2009. The large variability of SAT taker population across states makes state-by-state comparisons of the SAT scores challenging. Using a mixture modeling approach, therefore, the current study presents a method of identifying subpopulations in terms…

Presented at the Summer Institute on College Admissions at Harvard in June 2008. The presentation explores whether the SAT validity has changed with the test changes and if those changes affect specific subgroups.

This paper presents and reviews gender, racial/ethnic, language, and socioeconomic subgroup performance differences on the SAT® over nearly the last two decades. Theories on the existence of subgroup differences are examined. Substantial revisions to the SAT were made in 1994, and again in 2005. The short-term and long-term impact of these…