The Pulse: SATs don't always mark a successful path

I just experienced the thrill of being invited back to the campus of my alma mater to speak to undergraduate students. The invitation came a few months ago from Jack Lule, the chair of journalism and communication at Lehigh University, from which I graduated in 1984. That someone in Lule's position would think students could benefit from listening to me for an hour gave me a measure of achievement and acceptance.

And I get why I was invited: The combination of my professional activities since graduation, including writing for The Inquirer, hosting a daily radio program nationwide on SiriusXM, writing five books with a novel on the way, and now hosting a Saturday morning program on CNN.

There's just one problem: According to my SATs, I was never Lehigh material.

Here are the bare facts. At Holicong Junior High School, and thereafter at Central Bucks West High School, I was a "sometimes" honor roll student. My grades were mostly B's with an infrequent A and an occasional C, frankly, more of the latter than the former. In a scrapbook somewhere I've got a few clippings from the Intelligencer listing the most recent honor roll with my name mentioned.

My public school record included some other attributes - sports participation, a few class presidencies, a stint as newspaper editor - and some liabilities - such as when I was disciplined for selling fake IDs to classmates. What can I say? I was always entrepreneurial, the kid who sold you Christmas cards and came to shovel your drive. Sometimes that ambition got me in trouble. Such as when Coach Carey demanded I stop an NFL betting pool out of homeroom, or when I got thrown in a police van at the Spectrum for selling Genesis bumper stickers in my senior year. (They cost me a nickel to print, and I sold them for a buck.)

My SATs were never commensurate with my respectable school grades. And it was no one-off. I took the test several times and never batted above the Mendoza line.

Nine-ninety. I still hate seeing it numerically represented: 990. I never even broke 1,000.

Lucky for me that my father received his master's from Lehigh and my brother was president of his Lehigh class the year I was applying. Otherwise, I'm sure my SATs would have sunk my application.

Driving back to Bethlehem Tuesday, I felt like George Bailey on the bridge toward the end of It's a Wonderful Life, when an angel shows the Jimmy Stewart character an alternative path. Bailey's angel was named Clarence. Mine was Samuel Missimer, then Lehigh's dean of admissions, who admitted me despite my mediocre SATs. What if my college acceptance had been determined by that test?

A rejection would have meant I'd have never met a faculty mentor named Dave Amidon, who sparked in me an academic fire I never knew existed. Missing from the Lehigh campus in the fall of 1980, I would not have met "Ambassador" George H.W. Bush when he toured Bethlehem Steel, an event that led to my working for Vice President Bush and a string of extraordinary political experiences, which in turn caused media outlets to solicit my commentary. No Lehigh? No Amidon. No Amidon? No double major and no Phi Beta Kappa. No Phi Beta Kappa, no admission to Penn Law.

The intervening years haven't softened my antipathy toward the SAT, not even the recent experience of a son who aced it. I'm encouraged that the College Board is attempting to change the nature of the exam in a way that will recognize evidence-based thinking that students should be gleaning in high school. Perhaps if I'd had an exam like the board now contemplates, I'd have scored more respectably. But maybe not. Better for students, parents, and colleges to scrap it altogether.

Today, out of roughly 2,800 four-year U.S. colleges and universities, about 850 make SAT or ACT submissions optional. A recent study by two former colleagues at Bates College, William Hiss, the former dean of admissions, and Valerie Wilson Franks, the study's lead investigator, found that there is a negligible difference between the performance of students who submit test results and those who do not.

The study, "Defining Promise: Optional Standardized Testing Policies in American College and University Admissions," looked at 123,000 student and alumni records. It found only a 0.05 differential between the GPAs of those applicants who submitted a standardized test score and those who did not - and graduation rates for submitters were only 0.6 percent higher than those of non-submitters. In other words, trivial differences.

When I shared my personal experience with Hiss, he told me by e-mail that the disconnect between my SAT scores and later academic and career success is "strikingly common."

"In our one study, there were tens of thousands of students whom any statistician would call 'false negatives.' That is, these students' SAT scores suggest they could not do strong work in college, when in fact they can. Simply put, our country cannot afford to throw away up to 30 percent of its talent."