Does the SAT show a direct correlation with a student's success rate during his first semester of college?
             Almost every person who is of the age of eighteen or older has encountered some sort of standardized test at some time in their lives. Whether or not they scored as they had hoped, is a different story. Some people have seen that the score that they had received on a test wasn't necessarily an accurate portrayal of the way that they were going to succeed at what they were testing for. Many colleges throughout the United States require a particular score from the SAT's for admittance to their institution. Does that particular test score reflect how the student is going to do in college? Of course it doesn't. The SAT is no longer an aptitude test. The SAT is also not a valid test. The SAT's also fail to show how hard a student works at something, and the potential that they may have.
             What is the SAT? According to Good (1957), the scholastic-aptitude test is "a test used to predict the facility with which the individual will progress in learning academic school subjects" (602). This tells us that the SAT is an aptitude test. An aptitude test is "a test for determining the probability of a person's success in some activity in which he is not yet trained" (Neufeldt 68; 1991). The definitions given above tell what the SAT is, and what it does. Not all people agree with this thought. Does the SAT necessarily tell a high school student what kind of grades they are going to receive their first semester of college? Does the SAT really test aptitude? According to some experts on the topic, even though the word aptitude appears in the acronym, the test itself has hardly anything to do with aptitude at all (Lemann #??; Dejnozka and Kapel; 456) The test is now more likely correlated with an intelligence test and an achievement test.
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