and Sawtell (2003) for a review of high school grades and grade inflation.
COLLEGE ADMISSION TESTING 149Copyright American Psychological Association. Not for further distribution.scores, two thirds of public colleges have reported that they are of considerable or moderate importance compared with just 57% of private colleges. In addition, a significantly lower percentage of New England colleges indicated admission tests were of considerable importance when compared with the rest of the nation (Hawkins & Clindinst, 2006). Zwick (2007) noted that colleges have consistently atttibuted considerable importance to grades and course rigor, but the percentage of institutions reporting considerable importance to admissions tests has increased since the mid-1990s.Admission tests are used for college entrance throughout many of the developed nations, and specialized instruments have been developed for admission to graduate schools as well as programs in medicine, law, dentistry, and business. However, it is the use of admission tests for entrance into undergraduate college that has received the overwhelming amount of criticism and media scrutiny since the 1970s.The ACT and SAT are taken by well over 2 million college-bound seniors who comprise about two thirds of all graduating high school students. The SAT as well as the Subject Tests, which are produced by the College Board and Educational Testing Service (ETS), and the ACT, developed by ACT, are among the most highly researched large-scale tests produced in the world. Of freshmen in 2003, 64.0% submitted SAT scores to 4-year colleges compared with 50.5% of students who submitted ACT scores. Hawkins and Clindinst (2006) stated that "students who enroll in private, 4-year colleges with high selectivity and low yield were the most likely to submit their SAT scores" (p. 40). The SAT, which was established several decades before the ACT, continues to be subjected to more scrutiny, probably because it is more popular among students and colleges on the East and West Coasts of the United States, where national media are concentrated, and because it is more often associated with students seeking admission to more selective colleges.In 2005, the SAT added the Writing Test to the Critical Reading and Mathematics tests and made other changes in the format of questions and content of the test to better reflect the instructional practices in schools and skills required for success in college (Milewski, Johnsen, Glazer, & Kubota, 2005). Similarly, the ACT, which includes subtests in reading, English, science, and math, also introduced an optional essay in 2005 and conducts curriculum surveys to ensure that the test remains aligned to content in high schools. The correlation between total scores for students who take both the ACT and SAT has been .89 to .92 in three separate concordance studies, which is similar to the magnitude of test-retest reliabilities reported for both tests (Schneider & Dorans, 1999). Both testing organizations have published substantial amounts of research on t...