Today’s post is brought to you by guest blogger Mary!

High schoolers and others hoping to attend two of the nation’s most prestigious liberal arts colleges — Smith College in Massachusetts and Wake Forest University in North Carolina — won’t have to sweat taking the ACT or SAT to be considered for fall 2009 admission. The reason? Both schools want their student bodies to be more socioeconomically, racially, and ethnically diverse.

Today, about 760 of the nation’s 2,500 accredited institutions of higher learning have loosened or eliminated admissions exam requirements, although many applicants submit their scores anyway. The addition of such selective schools (Wake Forest admitted just 38 percent of 9,000 applicants for fall 2008) to the list has sparked new debate on an old topic: are standardized tests elitist or essential?

Colleges and universities weigh several factors to determine admission including personal essays, interviews, involvement in extracurricular activities, academic performance, and ACT and SAT scores. Larger institutions, however, tend to rely more heavily on test scores as an indicator of college readiness. The reason is simple: They have fewer resources to vet tens of thousands of applications.

“It serves as a national, fair, standardized metric in a time when grade inflation is an increasing problem,” Anna Klein, a spokeswoman for College Board, which oversees the SAT, told the Boulder, CO Daily Camera newspaper. Twenty years ago, 28 percent of SAT takers had an overall high-school grade-point average of A-minus or above; that compares to 43 percent in 2007, she said.

Still, many educators say admissions exams serve simply as a barrier to less advantaged students and favor the wealthy, who are more likely be tutored and take SAT and ACT preparatory courses. Richard Atkinson, University of California system president from 1995 to 2003, unsuccessfully advocated eliminating UC’s admissions test requirements. He said the SAT was an unconscionable requirement given statistics that show African-American and Hispanic students fair worse on the test than students of other ethnicities.

UC still requires the exam, which raises the question: will fairness to all ever outweigh practicality at selective large universities? Perhaps the University of Texas will serve as a model. It largely avoids the standardized test issue by guaranteeing admission to students who rank in the top 10 percent of their high school class.