SAT scores no longer considered in VCU acceptance
A press release sent out on Tuesday following President Rao’s State of the University Address revealed that, beginning in the Fall 2015 semester, students seeking admission to the University with a GPA above 3.3 will not be required to submit SAT scores.
Austin Walker
Staff Writer
A press release sent out on Tuesday following President Rao’s State of the University Address revealed that, beginning in the Fall 2015 semester, students seeking admission to the University with a GPA above 3.3 will not be required to submit SAT scores.
As a part of Virginia Commonwealth University’s “Quest for Distinction,” the school is going to be allowing students to bypass the standardized test that many high-school students prepare for for years.
In his speech, Rao said, “beginning this fall, your ability to succeed at VCU will no longer depend on your ability to pass a test that’s fundamentally flawed.”
The SAT, the acronym which the College Board assigns no meaning, is an aptitude test designed for colleges to compare intellectual capacity of applicants. Statistics support that the test is an accurate measurement of intelligence or career success, and that the expensive test preparation courses don’t improve a student’s chance at excelling.
Gail Hackett, the provost who will be coming to the university in March, said earlier this year that “rather than having a standard where you are judging your students by who you exclude – that is, raising the bar and looking at test scores only – and that you are elite because of all of the students you turn down, you judge the excellence of your student body by who you include and how well they do at the institution and how well they do when they graduate.”
VCU is the only research institution in Virginia thus far to drop the requirement of the SAT, but there are already 800 universities in the United States that have done this already.
