Imperfect Test

Spreading steadily in the Ivy League is a resistance movement against overreliance on objective tests in deciding who gets in. Last week the movement got new support from Columbia's undergraduate admissions director, Henry S. Coleman, who voiced some doubts about the most sacrosanct test of all, the college board verbal aptitude exam.

Usually the gates slam on an Ivy applicant who scores below 550 in the test (scored from 200 to 800), but last year Columbia experimentally took a chance on 72 hopefuls who had done just that. Coleman happily reports that 69 of them passed Columbia's most highly verbal freshman courses, English A and Contemporary Civilization A, and that 16 of them ranked in the top half of the freshman class. Mediocre verbal scores, Coleman concludes, "do not accurately measure the well-motivated student's ability to survive, and in some cases to prosper, in a rigorous academic program."

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