Is allowing college applicants to retake the SAT as many times as they like unfair to low-income students?

A report on a study published earlier this year by researchers at Duke University attempted to answer that question by examining the role that college admissions policies play in promoting the retaking of the SAT.

Because most selective colleges take into account only an applicant's highest verbal and mathematics SAT scores, many students take the $28.50 test more than once, the study found. Nationally, roughly half of college applicants repeat the test.

"We found that retaking the SAT is clearly associated with greater affluence and parental education, among other factors," said Jacob L. Vigdor, one of the authors of the report and an assistant professor of economics and public-policy studies at Duke.

For example, students whose parents made more than $80,000 per year were 2 percent more likely to retake the SAT than those whose family incomes were below $40,000.

Applicants whose fathers obtained a college degree were 6.6 times more likely to retake the test than otherwise identical applicants whose fathers obtained only a high-school degree.

Black students were less likely than white students to retake the SAT.

The researchers suggest that if colleges used an average of an applicant's SAT scores, or only the most recent score, the rate of retaking would decrease by as much as 75 percent.

The report, "Retaking the SAT," was published in the January issue of The Journal of Human Resources.