On the morning of her third try at the SAT last month, Ali Derassouyan, 17, is eating her mother's good-luck pancakes at home in Langhorne.
In June, the second time she took the test, her mom had also made her pancakes and her math score had jumped 30 points.
But truth be told, Ali and her parents had done a lot more than make pancakes to try to ratchet up her scores: She'd also had 41 hours of prep courses and tutoring at a cost of $2,900.
Still, Ali felt that her June results, especially in reading, were not quite good enough if she wanted to get into her first choice, Cornell.
Her goal: Get over 1340 in math and reading. She'd heard on college tours that she'd need at least that.
"Good luck," her mom said, hugging her. "I love you."
The Scholastic Assessment Test, the holy grail of college aptitude, is one of higher education's most perplexing paradoxes.
Despite growing momentum over the last decade to deemphasize it, the SAT (and its counterpart, the ACT) have, in fact, become more important.
In 2006, 60 percent of colleges rated test scores as having "considerable importance" in admissions, up from 46 percent in 1993, says the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
Proponents say the SAT, a 33/4-hour exam in reading, math and writing, is especially useful for large schools with many thousands of applications to read. It also remains the only reliable standard of college aptitude at a time when grading and the rigor of curriculum vary widely across high schools.
"Grade inflation is a problem, and colleges know that," said Laurence Bunin, senior vice president of the SAT.
The College Board says 43 percent of SAT test takers reported having an A average in high school in 2007, up from 27 percent 20 years ago.
But critics for years have asserted that the exam is biased against girls, minorities, non-English speakers and students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
Last month, a commission led by Harvard University's dean of admission largely discounted the bias argument, but acknowledged that scores correlate closely with family income and race.
The commission, which investigated how colleges use standardized tests, suggested that other measures, including subject-specific exams such as Advanced Placement tests, may better assess achievement.
The criticism has done little to quell a test-prep industry that has mushroomed to $1 billion a year as students try to boost scores and get into better schools.
