As the parent of a high school senior, I’ve been amazed at the angst and agony that students and parents experience over SAT scores. As a student, my own preparation for the SAT consisted of sharpening a No. 2 pencil.

These days, students enroll in eight-week prep classes. They buy phone-book-size study guides. They write and rewrite practice essays. Even teens with dazzling scores endure second and even third rounds of testing in hopes of edging closer to the perfect 800 in math.

The state itself invests the SAT with tremendous importance. Gov. Sonny Perdue and state schools Superintendent Kathy Cox both issued statements last week responding to news that Georgia’s average score fell to 1466 from last year’s 1472. The national average on the college admission test —- in which a perfect score is now 2400 —- was 1511.

Yet while taking the SAT has become more nerve-wracking for seniors than finding a prom date, colleges are beginning to question the value of the high-stakes exam.

This year Wake Forest University in North Carolina and Smith College in Massachusetts announced that they’ll no longer require prospective students to submit SAT or ACT scores as part of their applications.

An estimated 750 four-year colleges and universities have adopted some sort of optional approach to the SAT, including Bowdoin, Mount Holyoke, Middlebury, Hamilton, Union, Wheaton, Drew, Bard and Dickinson.

Bates College in Maine was a pioneer in the movement, making the submission of SAT/ACT scores optional in 1984. Today, about one-third of Bates students gain admission without test scores. The policy helped Bates attract more applications from women, blue-collar and rural kids, international students and low-income students.

In its own analysis, Bates found that students who didn’t submit SAT scores fared the same academically as those who did. The average grade point average of students without SATs was 3.06, while those admitted with SATs had an average of 3.11. Graduation rates for the two groups were also similar.

Minor differences between the career paths of nonsubmitters and submitters surfaced in the study; the nonsubmitters were a bit more likely to end up in creative or service fields such as the arts, broadcasting or education, while submitters were more apt to land in scientific or technical fields.

In her May announcement to faculty about Wake Forest’s decision, admissions director Martha Allman said that the university’s own research suggested that the SAT was a less accurate indicator of a student’s potential than high school GPA and the rigor of their high school curriculum.

“Across universities and colleges in the U.S., there is more and more evidence that the SAT is less sound as an indicator of college success than we once thought,” she said. “This is the evidence that led us to ask a serious question: Does reliance on standardized testing limit access to our university by discouraging applications from students who would succeed, and even thrive, if they got in?”

However, we still can’t tell high school seniors to relax about the SAT. The most selective campuses still freight the test with great significance, maintaining that an objective academic yardstick like the SAT is necessary to counter grade inflation and hyped high school transcripts.

But here’s another fact that we ought to tell seniors: Where they go to college doesn’t matter that much in the long run. At virtually every campus, there are smart professors, engaging courses and countless opportunities to stretch and learn. Success is not a product of where you go to college, but what you do once you get there.

Learning Curve is a new weekly column on education. Please send suggestions for topics or feedback to mdowney@ajc.com.