c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Dale Hanson Bourke is the publisher of RNS and gets hives when she gets within 100 miles of Princeton, N.J.)

UNDATED _ If someone had just asked me, I could have settled the whole thing years ago.

But it finally took the U.S. Department of Education to explain what has been apparent to me for decades: The SATs are a crummy way to determine who gets accepted into the best colleges.

After all, the test seems to reward people who have the patience to color in little circles with number two pencils for hours on end. These are the same kids who made you crazy in kindergarten by hogging crayons so they could carefully outline the picture and color every inch of it. Is that a good measure of intelligence? And would you really want to go to college with a bunch of people like that?

Actually, the U.S. Department of Education didn’t exactly cite that as the main problem and they didn’t even use the word”crummy.”That was pure editorializing on my part, which demonstrates one of the reasons my own SAT scores were not an accurate reflection of my intelligence. Creative writing and marginal smiley faces did not seem to impress the humorless folks at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., who graded my exam.

In any case, last week was a pretty upsetting one for college presidents, especially those who really like the clarity a simple score can bring. The draft of a little booklet,”Nondiscrimination in High-Stakes Testing: A Resource Guide,”turned out to be a resource guide mostly for ticked-off parents who can hire a high-priced lawyer to show a college just how high the stakes are for not accepting their brilliant child.

The Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education, which is responsible for the little booklet, was taken aback by the response from colleges since all they had done was condense civil rights laws on the books for more than 30 years. Apparently those laws had not made it to the required reading lists.

And those folks in Princeton, who recently re-calibrated the tests to make the younger generation sound like geniuses compared to their parents, feigned shock over the fact that women and minority students consistently score lower than white students and men. (Actually, they knew it all along but were hoping everyone with low scores would be too embarrassed to talk about them in public, thus preserving the fragile egos of white males for another generation or two.)

Anyway, those guys at the Department of Education are still looking up the names the Educational Testing Service folks called them and may soon conclude another fact I suspected years ago: Some of those words are just made up.

But even if they did make up some of the words and even if the test is biased against certain groups and even if they don’t like smiley faces, that isn’t what might sink the ship _ make that yacht _ of the folks in Princeton. What will really take them down is that college presidents, like all Americans, fear nothing more than having their pants sued off.

So colleges may be stuck with the overwhelming task of looking at every kid as an individual, not a dot on the bell curve. And this will be harder than you think since high schools, not wanting to be sued themselves, have taken to giving just about everyone who shows up for class an A.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, many schools are even handing out grade point averages above a theoretically perfect 4.0 and have now created a boom market for valedictorians. One school had 18 last year.

So pity the poor college admissions counselor who gets applications from hundreds of better than perfect valedictorians. At least an SAT score used to cut through some of the spin. That is, of course, before rich parents started hiring thousand-dollar coaches to raise their kids’ scores by as much as 100 points a crack. And before some savvy folks learned to claim their kids had certain conditions so they could take the SAT test untimed, offering another advantage to a supposedly disadvantaged group.

Once you start looking into this subject it becomes pretty clear that hardly anything about college admissions isn’t rigged in one way or another. And once you really start to think about the whole mess you see it as a pretty sad commentary on how parents view parenting.

Being a good parent, it seems, has come to mean suing someone for doing something to your child that can be construed by someone to be unfair. Now that is really scary.

My own parents, noting that my SAT scores vastly underrated my intelligence, listened to me whine for a few minutes, then offered one of their well practiced,”Life isn’t fair. Get used to it.”Never once did they offer to sue on my behalf.

I considered checking in to the statute of limitations on child abuse, but then decided against it. I may harbor some negative thoughts against those guys at the E.T.S. (all white males, no doubt), but all in all, my parents had it right. A person might as well learn one of the main lessons of life from an SAT score. Life isn’t fair and you can’t work the angles on everything.

Or maybe we should all realize that standardized tests cannot hope to accurately access those of us who are remarkably creative, witty and extra special.

DEA END BOURKE