(Education Week) By Catherine Gewertz —
As college application season ramps up once again, an annual survey of college admissions officers reiterates an important message for high school students who are worried sick about their SAT or ACT scores: The classes you take and the grades you earn are far more important to us than your test scores.
That’s a key finding of the 13th annual “State of College Admission” survey, released Thursday by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC. You’d never know it by the amount of cold sweat high school seniors generate nationally about admissions test scores, but that finding has stayed pretty consistent for 20 years, according to NACAC.
The survey found that in the fall 2014 admissions cycle, 79.2 percent of responding colleges and universities gave “considerable importance” to grades in students’ college-prep classes, while 55.7 percent assigned the same importance to admission test scores for entering freshmen.
