SAT Said To Be Reliable Predictor Of College Success

By John Gehring

The SAT not only is a solid measure of students' academic performance in their first year of college, it also can predict performance throughout a college career, according to an analysis that looks at more than 1,700 studies examining the test over the past 50 years.

Commissioned by the College Board, the New York City-based organization that owns the college-entrance test that some 1.3 million students took last year, the study uses a statistical method called meta-analysis to review the prior research on the SAT conducted by the College Board, university researchers, and others from the 1940s through the late 1990s.

"Overall, these results indicate the SAT predicts academic performance both early and late in college," the authors, who include six researchers at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and one researcher from the College Board,...