Many high school students spend countless hours studying, thousands of dollars on tutoring and endless nights tossing and turning, all in anticipation of the SAT. But at some of the nation's leading colleges and universities, the SAT and the stress associated with it are now a thing of the past.

Robert Schaeffer, public education director for The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), said there are now more than 730 schools nationally that have made the SAT and ACT optional for college admission.

"More and more colleges are recognizing that the SAT and ACT test scores don't add anything useful to the admissions process," Schaeffer said, adding that more schools are using high school ranks, grade point averages, extracurricular activities and family backgrounds to make admissions decisions.

Randy Goldberg (sophomore-premedicine) said he thinks it's a bad idea to make the SAT optional. "A person who has a good GPA in a worse high school will be cheated out of a proper education by not being able to keep up with the rest of the kids," Goldberg said.

Randall C. Deike, associate vice president for enrollment management and executive director for undergraduate admission, said Penn State has never considered making the SAT optional, and he doesn't see it happening in the future. The university bases two-thirds of its admissions decisions on high school GPAs and the other third on SAT scores, extra curricular activities and a personal statement.

"The SAT and ACT are important to our admission process because not all high schools grade the same, but this test is the same everywhere," he said.

Among the growing number of schools making the SAT optional are some of the nation's top universities. Twelve liberal arts colleges ranked in the top 50 by U.S. News and World Report have made the SAT and ACT optional, including Bowdoin College at No. 6 and Middlebury College at No. 8.

However, Barry McCarty, the dean of enrollment services at Lafayette College, said the large number of schools now using SAT-optional admission is very misleading. "The important question to ask is how many of the 730 schools are highly selective colleges which have eliminated the SAT," McCarty said. "That number is probably about 10 percent of the total being reported, since most of the 730 schools are less competitive and never required SAT scores to begin with."

Lafayette College, which now requires SAT scores for admission, has not always operated that way. From 1994 to 1998, Lafayette conducted an experiment to see the effects of making admissions "SAT-optional."

"We were trying to emphasize the relative meaning of the SAT in decision making and trying to encourage high-performance students whose SATs were low to apply," McCarty said.

But Lafayette saw no increase in applications and heard from critics questioning whether it still was "an academically serious institution," McCarty said. After a lot of statistical analysis, Lafayette found the SAT did enhance its ability to predict student performance, and it now requires SAT scores.

FairTest reports that one of the positive effects of SAT-optional schools is they experience a large increase in applications once they go optional.

However, Bernard Phelan, a College Board SAT committee member, said universities are not interested only in getting students into the school, but having them stay there as well.

"The SAT predicts whether a student will do well freshman year, so while those SAT-optional schools may see an increase in applicants, in the long run, they will most likely see a decrease in retention rates," Phelan said.