Waco, Texas (BP)—Baylor University’s vice president for marketing and communications said Oct. 16 that the school regrets offering students cash incentives for retaking the SAT, a program he acknowledged was motivated by a desire to permit students access to additional financial aid.

“In retrospect, we regret now the cash incentive,” John Barry told Baptist Press. “We’ve heard the criticism; we understand the criticism. It at least has the appearance of impropriety. I would tell you that was never our intent. Our intent was to try to be creative and to encourage students to take a test that would then allow them access to financial aid money that we thought they were entitled to.”

In response to inquiries from students and parents, Barry said Baylor decided to move up the admissions process last year so they could notify students of award packages earlier, presumably to help students decide which college to attend.

In May, Baylor administrators noticed that the school had committed less financial aid than they had expected to award by that time, Barry noted.

“The other thing was that our SAT scores were down,” he pointed out. “Our conclusion was that in pushing our processes so far forward, what we might have done is prohibit smart students—capable students—from retaking the SAT … and doing better on their scores and therefore qualifying for higher levels of merit aid.

“We were trying to help them by moving the deadlines up, but our conclusion was that we might be penalizing them by our processes,” Barry added.

Baylor, a 14,000-student Baptist university in Waco, Texas, opted to give each incoming freshman a $300 book scholarship redeemable at the campus bookstore for retaking the exam last June.

Since the school’s newspaper ran the story of the incentive program Oct. 9, controversy has ensued. Several academic experts have said Baylor misused the SAT in order to boost their status in the U.S. News and World Report ranking of colleges and universities. Baylor now stands at No. 76 and has expressed a desire to rank in the top tier of schools by 2012.

Baylor’s Faculty Senate passed a motion criticizing the incentives program Oct. 15, saying the practice is “academically dishonest and should be discontinued.”

“It’s an issue of academic honesty,” Georgia Green, chair of the senate, told the school paper. “We think it’s fine for students to retake the SAT to enter a higher scholarship bracket. What we disapprove of is giving a financial incentive to be able to say we have a higher average SAT score.”

Barry told BP it “was routine at Baylor until two weeks ago and it is routine at many universities around the nation” to permit students who already have been admitted to provide additional SAT scores if those scores would benefit their academic profile.

Asked why the admissions office did not notify the Faculty Senate about the incentive program, Barry said he did not think such admissions or financial aid programs generally were run by the representative body.

Barry did express an intention to alter the school’s practice in the future.

“The thing that we regret, and the mistake we made was to provide the cash incentives. It was motivated by a desire to recognize a mistake we had made in a process and to permit students access to additional financial aid. We probably shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “We should have just communicated it as strongly as we could and hoped that students would take advantage of the opportunity.”

About 28 percent of the newly admitted Baylor students accepted the incentives offer, and 151 of them earned the merit scholarships, collectively raising Baylor’s average SAT score for incoming freshmen from 1200 to 1210, still nine points below last year’s freshman class and three points below the 2006 class.