Those of us who help students and their families prepare college applications know how much more competitive the process has become in the last several years. Students are getting rejected from colleges that older and less accomplished siblings are now attending.

This is because the current crop of seniors is part of the “echo boom,” which is expected to peak with 3.3 million children of baby boomers graduating in 2009 and to remain near this level for another seven years. Many more students will be vying for spaces in college.

Teenagers are working harder than ever at challenging themselves with honors and AP courses and filling after-school hours with extracurricular activities, community service programs and SAT prep courses. But it seems like a cruel joke that coinciding with this increased competitiveness, they are required to take a longer and more rigorous Scholastic Aptitude Test.

In response to criticism that the test didn’t reflect enough classroom learning, the College Board re-vamped the SAT in 2005 by adding more difficult math questions, eliminating analogies, making the reading passages longer and requiring a writing sample. The test is now nearly four hours in length.

While the College Board says it added the 60-minute writing section in response to suggestions from the college admissions community, I have yet to hear one admissions representative articulate how this score is being used. Despite three full years of data, most say they are taking a wait-and-see approach. In the meantime thousands of students have suffered through this “new and improved” rite of passage.

The admission officers are usually careful to say that their most important criterion for admission is still the student’s academic record, both its strength and depth. But according to the National Association of College Admissions Counseling, admission test scores have been the third most important criterion for decades, after the academic record and rank in class, but ahead of counselor and teacher recommendations and extracurricular activities.

It is gut-wrenching to see the student who conscientiously embraces and succeeds in a college preparatory program but just can’t do well on the SAT. And to see the high correlation between SAT scores and family income. Too often the test seems to be one more place where the have-nots are at a disadvantage.

Wouldn’t it be great if colleges didn’t require these tests at all? When a college has confidence in the education being provided at the applicant’s high school, and there is a track record of past graduates succeeding at the college, there’s really no need to require the SAT. In other cases, which would be relatively few, where no students have gone to a particular college, it is understandable that the admission committee would need some “objective” evidence of a student’s capacity to do the work at the college.

The welcome news for students who happen not to be good Saturday morning test takers is that a growing number of colleges are becoming test-optional. The Web site fairtest.org has a list of these. But as long as the SAT is still around, the best attitude toward it was expressed by Charles A. Kiesler, a former professor and chancellor of the University of Missouri, Columbia: We shouldn’t either “deify or demonize the test,” he said, but rather view it as a tool “for enabling students to show their potential.”

It is heartening to one who has helped students cope with disappointing test results for decades that NACAC’s recently released “Study of the Use of Standardized Tests in College Admissions” is firmly recommending that colleges de-emphasize their importance and focus on tests more closely aligned with the high school curriculum. Even after the major revamping of the test, questions remain in both the college admissions and school counseling communities about how useful a measure it is.

Given all the time, energy, emotion and family resources that this test consumes, it’s important that we find a better method of judging students’ abilities. Until that happens at many more colleges, the SAT remains a necessary evil – even though the best predictor, far and away, of how a student will achieve in college is how well he or she achieved in high school.