By Lindsay Tice,Staff Writer

Starting this spring, high school juniors will have to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test to prove they’ve learned everything they’re supposed to learn.

The college entrance exam will replace the 11th-grade Maine Educational Assessment, which has been used for years to gauge how well students meet state education standards. Officials say the SAT will do the same thing while getting more teenagers thinking about college.

But at least one group opposes the change, saying the national SAT was designed to predict how well students will do in college, not to show how well Maine students mastered their high school lessons.

The National Association for College Admission Counseling, which represents 9,000 high school counselors and college admission officers, wrote to the Maine Department of Education last week and asked Education Commissioner Susan Gendron not to replace the MEA with the SAT.

The Education Department has not yet formally responded to the letter, Deputy Education Commissioner Patrick Phillips said. But the department did officially tell superintendents this week that their 11th-graders will take the SAT instead of the MEA. The test is scheduled for Saturday, April 1.

“People have raised concerns. I think we can address those in the way we are using and developing this test,” Phillips said.

No one at the National Association for College Admission Counseling could be reached for comment Friday.

Gendron said in August that she was thinking about swapping the MEA with the SAT. State officials, an independent researcher and the College Board, the company that oversees and distributes the SAT, had spent months studying the issue. They believed the SAT matched Maine’s education standards and could replace the state’s own test, Gendron said.

Since then, a math specialist with the Maine Department of Education tried his own comparison, according to Phillips. The math specialist looked at SAT and MEA questions side by side to see whether they were comparable.

“He had a hard time telling the test items apart,” Phillips said.

Students will register through their schools in January and will take the test on paper at more than 55 high school testing sites in April. The state will pay to bus them to the sites and will pay the College Board directly for the $41 test, giving all juniors one free SAT for their college applications. It will cost the state about $700,000 to give the test to its 17,000 juniors, Phillips said. The state will save that in MEA costs.

Because the test will be held on a Saturday, some educators worried that students wouldn’t show up to take it. The state will offer one or two make-up exams on a weekday the following week.

Maine had to present the test on a Saturday because the College Board offers the SATs only on certain dates nationwide.

The College Board will provide college entrance scores. An independent group will score students on the state standards. Those scores will determine whether students know everything they should and whether their schools are failing or successful.

Swapping the MEA for the SAT means one less test for the 77 percent of students who already take the MEA and the SAT. Students will have to take a science exam starting in 2007, but the state is looking at ways to include that test in the SAT.

Maine is not alone. Phillips says he believes Colorado, Michigan and Illinois have already traded their standardized tests for the SAT. College Board officials say a few other states are also considering it.

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