By BRENT STAPLES

Published: October 1, 2008

Imagine yourself an admissions director of a status-seeking college that wants desperately to move up in the rankings. With next year’s freshman class nearly filled, you are choosing between two applicants. The first has very high SAT scores, but little else to recommend him. The second is an aspiring doctor who tests poorly but graduated near the top of his high school class while volunteering as an emergency medical technician in his rural county.

This applicant has the kind of background that higher education has always claimed to covet. But the pressures that are driving colleges — and the country as a whole — to give college entry exams more weight than they were ever intended to have would clearly work against him. Those same pressures are distorting the admissions process, corrupting education generally and slanting the field toward students whose families can afford test preparation classes.

Consider the admissions director at our hypothetical college. He knows that college ranking systems take SAT’s and ACT’s into account. He knows that bond-rating companies look at the same scores when judging a college’s credit worthiness. And in lean times like these, he would be especially eager for a share of the so-called merit scholarship money that state legislators give students who test well.

These and related problems are the subject of an eye-opening report from a commission convened by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. The commission, led by William R. Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, offers a timely reminder that tests like the SAT and ACT were never meant to be viewed in isolation but considered as one in a range of factors that include grades, essays and so on.

But the report goes further, urging schools to move away from traditional admissions tests in favor of exams that would be more closely related to high school achievement and that are at least currently exempt from the hype and hysteria that surround the SAT. Mr. Fitzsimmons said that Harvard would always use tests. But he raised eyebrows when he said the school might one day join the growing number of colleges that have made the SAT and the ACT optional.

The commission deals bluntly with the parties it blamed for inflating the importance of college entry exam scores. It calls on college guides and bond-rating agencies to stop using test scores as proxies for academic quality or financial health. And it wants an end to the increasingly common practice of using minimum admissions test scores to determine eligibility for merit aid. The commission insists that the tests have not been validated for that purpose and often rule out applicants based on a single missed item.

The National Merit Scholarship Program, which uses a test to screen thousands of applicants every year, comes in for a drubbing. The commission believes that the program has played a destructive role by helping to narrow the public’s view of merit, giving it an exclusively test-related meaning. This commission draws on the work of Patrick Hayashi, a former associate president at The University of California, who has been fiercely critical of the National Merit program — and has even described it as “bogus.”

He first questioned the scholarship program during the 1990s out of disappointment with highly sought-after national merit scholarship students who had enrolled at Berkeley. He later wrote that those students had been outshone by students from the university’s more broadly defined merit program and had done “nothing to distinguish themselves academically or otherwise.”

The commission has also called on the states to stop the practice of using college entry exams in the public school accountability system. By inserting exams that weren’t designed for this purpose, the states have unintentionally encouraged students to believe that course work matters less than gaming the test that gets them into college.

Critics will inevitably view the report as an attempt to undermine objective admissions and awards systems. But the commission is arguing for a richer and more expansive view of merit that could include test scores but does not end with them. And the commission’s central contention — that the obsession with admissions tests is damaging education — is indisputably true.