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Baylor Rewards Freshmen Who Retake SAT

By Sara Rimer

Baylor University in Waco, Tex., which has a
goal of rising to the first tier of national
college rankings, last June offered its
admitted freshmen a $300 campus bookstore
credit to retake the SAT, and $1,000 a year in
merit scholarship aid for those who raised
their scores by at least 50 points.

Of this year’s freshman class of more than
3,000, 861 students received the bookstore
credit and 150 students qualified for the
$1,000-a-year merit aid, said John Barry, the
university’s vice president for communications
and marketing.

“We’re very happy with the way it worked out,”
Mr. Barry said in a telephone interview. “The
lion’s share of students ended up with the $300
credit they could use in our bookstore. That’s
not going to make or break the bank for
anybody. But it’s sure been appreciated by our
students and parents.”

The offer, which was reported last week by the
university’s student newspaper, The Lariat,
raised Baylor’s average SAT score for incoming
freshmen to 1210, from about 1200, Mr. Barry
said. That score is one of the factors in the
rankings compiled by U.S. News & World
Report.

News of the action by Baylor, a 14,000-student,
private Baptist university, came just weeks
after the National Association for College
Admission Counseling (Nacac) issued a report
calling for a re-examination of the use of SAT
and ACT scores in both college admissions and
the awarding of merit aid.

Critics of standardized testing said they were
troubled by Baylor’s action, pointing out that
the SAT was a college admission test and that
these students had already been admitted.

“This appears to be the type of misuse of
undergraduate admission tests that the Nacac
Testing Commission sought to identify and
correct,” said David A. Hawkins, the author of
the new SAT study and the director of public
policy and research for Nacac.

Mr. Barry said Baylor’s decision to offer
freshmen incentives for retaking the test was
driven primarily by the university’s desire to
award additional merit aid. He said the new
students had not had enough chances to qualify
for the aid.

Asked whether the decision was motivated at all
by the college rankings, Mr. Barry responded:
“Every university wants to have great SAT
scores. Every university wants to be perceived
as having a high-quality class. We all wanted
that. Were we happy our SAT scores went up?
Yes. Did our students earn their scores? Yes
they did.”

Robert Schaeffer, the public education director
for FairTest, a nonprofit group that has been
critical of the use of standardized tests in
college admissions, said Baylor’s move “fans
the fire of SAT paranoia.”

Whatever university officials might say, Mr.
Schaeffer said he found it hard to believe that
encouraging students to retake the SAT was not
connected to the university’s widely publicized
10-year strategic plan — called Baylor 2012 —
which says that one of its major goals is
bolstering its ranking in U.S. News & World
Report. It was ranked 76th in 2009.

“This is a straightforward, cynical attempt to
manipulate test score averages to boost
Baylor’s rankings,” Mr. Schaeffer said. “This
is a perfect example of what Nacac warned about
in their report.”

Liz Foreman, the assistant city editor of The
Lariat, and Ashley Corinne Killough, a staff
writer, broke the story about the SAT retake on
Oct. 9. In Tuesday’s Lariat, an editorial
accused Baylor officials of “using some cheap
ploys to try to better its ranking.”

“The deal is unfair to the upperclassmen at
Baylor,” the editorial continued. “Every
college student could use an extra $300 to pay
for books or the chance to knock $1,000 off
each year’s tuition, but only this year’s
freshmen received that opportunity.”

One of those quoted in The Lariat’s initial
article was Emanuel Gawrieh, a sophomore.

“I think the people who put forth this decision
completely compromised what they say Baylor is
about: its Christian values, the integrity of
Baylor, the integrity of Baylor 2012,” Mr.
Gawrieh said in a telephone interview.

A number of freshmen in Mr. Gawrieh’s residence
hall took Baylor up on its offer to retake the
SAT. “It was because of the incentive,” said
one of those freshmen, Max Herrera, 18, a
chemistry major from Houston. “It helped with
the books. My books cost over $800.”

— Sara Rimer
New York Times
2008-10-14


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