Although nearly a half-century has passed, Goucher College President Sanford J. Ungar has no trouble recalling the precise numbers that helped get him into Harvard University: 683 verbal and 749 math.
"I'm appalled that I remember my SAT scores," he says with a rueful laugh.
Despite the high-scoring president's happy history with the SAT, future Goucher applicants need no longer be burdened with standardized college entrance exams.
This week the 122-year-old Towson institution joined the growing ranks of U.S. colleges - about 740 of 2,400 schools, by one estimate - that no longer require standardized test scores from all students. Typically, students can still submit test results, and most do, educators say.
Meanwhile, officials at Salisbury University, the first public college in Maryland to make standardized tests optional for some students, said early results suggest that the policy is boosting interest in the school from qualified applicants.
Other state colleges, including the University of Baltimore, Bowie State University and Frostburg State University, have also said they're considering test-optional admissions.
The announcements reflect an increasing body of research indicating that the SAT and ACT exams - generic tests designed to predict college readiness - are no better at forecasting post-secondary performance than high school grades and achievement tests in specific subjects.
A study published in June examined the records of nearly 80,000 students admitted to the University of California system and found that SAT scores "add little if any" predictive information to high school grades, said co-author Saul Geiser.
The Goucher decision "continues an important trend in which - particularly - selective liberal arts colleges are recognizing that they don't need the SAT or ACT to do high-quality admissions work," said Robert Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, an advocacy group that tracks test-optional colleges and is critical of the way standardized tests are used.
More than a quarter of the schools in U.S. News and World Report's top 100 liberal arts college rankings now employ some variation of test-optional admissions, Schaeffer said.
The New York-based College Board, which administers the SAT, has played down the test-optional trend, pointing out that it is used mostly by less-selective colleges and that, even when given the option, most students still take standardized tests and submit their scores.
"It should also be noted that test-optional colleges are not dropping testing, they are making it optional," said spokeswoman Nancy Viggiano in an e-mail. "The most selective colleges, including all Ivy League schools, still require test scores. In addition, the nation's public flagship universities require test scores."
But even highly selective colleges that have no intention of making the SAT optional say that the influence of the test is waning. "We're not currently assessing a change in our policy," said Johns Hopkins University enrollment dean William Conley, "but if you look at our class profiles over the last four or five years, our SAT average has actually dropped off a bit. And it's dropped off because we don't hold onto it as a single measure of quality of our students."
In part because admissions officers are emphasizing more subjective candidate information - such as the rigor of the high school curriculum, personal essays, extracurricular activities and counselors' evaluations - Conley said Hopkins still values the SAT as an element of objectivity.
The College Board argues that the SAT also functions as an important bulwark against creeping grade inflation in American high schools.
"In 2007, 43 percent of SAT test-takers reported having a high school grade point average of A or better," Viggiano said, compared with 27 percent of self-identified "A" students in 1987. "Over this same time, SAT scores have remained relatively stable."
Under Goucher's new policy, applicants can decide whether to have their standardized test scores count in the admissions process. All students who take the SAT or ACT will still have to report scores to the school before they enter for academic counseling and research purposes, officials said.
The current average verbal and math SAT scores for Goucher's entering freshmen total about 1,200. The national average in 2006 was about 1,020.
Ungar said Goucher's decision to experiment with optional SAT scores was influenced by positive experiences of other colleges. "The schools that have already done this have found that their applicant pool tends to grow larger, be more diverse and to give them at least as good a class as they've had before," he said.
Critics of the test say it puts at a disadvantage low-income and minority students, who tend to receive lower scores.
So far, officials at Salisbury University say their first test-optional admissions cycle is promising. In December, the state university system's Board of Regents allowed the Eastern Shore campus to waive SAT requirements for applicants with high school grade averages of 3.5 and above.
Only 10 percent of prospective freshmen submitted applications without standardized tests, but they were admitted at twice the rate of other students - in part because of their better high school grades, officials said.
Students who applied to Salisbury without submitting test scores had an average 3.69 high school GPA, compared with 3.4 among test-submitting students, officials said.
In general, the university has had an 11 percent jump in applications since it made some tests optional. Test-optional students were also substantially more likely to accept offers of admission from Salisbury than were other students.
The real test for Salisbury will come when the university compares grades and retention rates of students admitted with and without SAT scores, said Ellen Neufeldt, vice president of student affairs.
"We're waiting to see how they're doing at the end of the first semester," she said. "It's too early for us to have any understanding of what all this will mean until then."
gadi.dechter@baltsun.com