SAT Valuation

The Penang international school community has gotten quite sizeable in recent years past, and with no sign of letting up anytime soon either. Increased expatriate (plus family) presence and a growing reputation as an international education hub have seen more students having attended multiple international schools by the time they graduate from high school, and through different systems of education. One blind spot that this may present regards those whose high school timelines include the US system (DALAT).

Folks tend to take for granted that SAT, or ACT (alternative standardized test) for that matter, is only required for applications to US colleges or universities. This is because it’s such a convenient myth, until they learn the hard way. The reality is that all tertiary institutions, US or otherwise will have their own admission policies. In the case of non-US colleges, the admission office may need to validate individual US high-school grades against a standardized test such as SAT because US high-school grading is by and large essentially individualized.

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The closest thing to a standardized test in the US education system is perhaps the SAT. The test was developed specifically for this very purpose and has served it well for a hundred years. It has also widely been applied for benchmarking as in the case in point: to get a valuation of an applicant’s grades with which the admission officer at the good university may not be familiar with, he needs only to juxtapose the grades and SAT corresponding scores of the applicant. Once the cross reference factor is determined, the rest becomes purely mechanical.

Thus, those who have attended a US high school, partly or wholly, would be well advised to equip themselves with SAT on their academic attainment portfolio even if the universities or colleges on their horizons may not be American. In particular, for students who plan to graduate from DALAT Penang SAT will likely be required no matter your onward next stop, tertiary-wise. To play safe, better get busy with SAT soon if you have no other supporting qualifications like IGCSE, O/A Levels or STM/STPM.