Myths and Tradeoffs: The Role of Tests in Undergraduate Admissions

In 1996, more than 8 million students went through the complicated, stressful, and sometimes bewildering process of applying to colleges and universities in the United States. Much of the nail-biting centered around the standardized tests that those students took to gain entrance. The National Academies recently looked at some of the persistent myths about admission testing and examined the specific tradeoffs entailed in the use of these tests.