LAST week, the College Board announced that it was revising the SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test) in an effort to make it more acceptable to test-takers, teachers, college admission officers and the public more generally. Test-takers who receive lower scores than they have hoped for are likely to be concerned about their academic future. It's no wonder that it's hard to discuss the test without negative feelings. The SAT isn't perfect. Like any test, it can be misused, and may reflect unequal educational opportunities. Even before the announcement of the SAT's redesign, experts were discussing the test's limitations. Writing in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert described its questions as limited: "Critical thinking was never called for, let alone curiosity or imagination." But the SAT provides an effective measure of a person's ability to reason through verbal  and mathematical materials, a skill required in college. Although there are conflicting reports on the issue, a study published in the journal Educational and Psychological Measurement in 2011 found that the SAT can meaningfully add to the prediction of a student's first-year college academic performance, above his grades in high school alone. The fact that the SAT can help predict this is, to me, an astonishing achievement that cannot be ignored. We cannot afford to ignore tests because they fall short of perfection or make us uncomfortable. But there's a better way to make the SAT more acceptable in the long run: We should expand the types of tests we use so as to more fully reflect what students can do. What if, in addition to the SAT, students were offered new tests that measured more diverse abilities? For future artists or musicians, there are tests that measure creative thinking --a largely ignored ability by the SAT. For future engineers, there are tests that measure their sense of space. And new measures of "personal intelligence" -- the ability to reason about a person's motives, emotions and patterns of activities -- may also tell us something important about students' self-knowledge and understanding of others. According to the text, the author may disagree with the idea that   _  .
the SAT can at some point predict how a student will do in the freshman year of college academically the SAT helps measure students' ability of reasoning through their creativity and imagination the SAT will be more acceptable if creative thinking, sense of space and personal intelligence are tested as well the SAT has many limitations and it may make a difference to students' educational opportunities