Over at the New York Times, David Leonhardt does an excellent job distilling a slew of studies about the SAT exam for a layman’s audience. Contrary to the claims of the members of the activist class who are currently winning their war on the college admissions exam, the SAT, Leonhardt explains as he digs through the data that it does indeed accurately measure a student’s academic merit. Even when comparing students from lower-resourced backgrounds versus more privileged students, this latest study from John Friedman of Brown University and Bruce Sacerdote and Michele Tine of Dartmouth College shows the SAT was about as equally a predictive measure of how an applicant would perform in university and that the SAT alone has four times the predictive power of high school GPAs.
But Leonhardt makes one crucial error in his analysis. Progressives aren’t pushing standardized testing out of university admissions in spite of how accurately they predict an applicant’s future success. They’re doing it precisely because they know standardized testing is the ultimate, quantifiable piece of evidence that shows universities are prioritizing affirmative action hires, athletes, and legacies over the disproportionate number of Asian American students who deserve admission based on raw merit.
“Some people have worried that SAT scores are merely a proxy for income or race, Sacerdote noted, but the data should alleviate this concern. Within every racial group, students with higher scores do better in college. The same is true among poor students and among richer students,” Leonhardt writes. “When I have asked university administrators whether they were aware of the research showing the value of test scores, they have generally said they were. But several told me, not for quotation, that they feared the political reaction on their campuses and in the media if they reinstated tests.”
The argument that the SAT would be skewed more by privilege than any other factor on a college application never made sense. As the lesser predictive power of high school GPAs indicates, grade inflation has run rampant across secondary schools, and thanks to a lucrative industry of college admissions counselors, essay editors, and unpaid internships to litter the resumes of upper-middle-class adolescents, all the subjective aspects of college applications are the easiest for the rich to game.
But that’s not what really concerns progressives. Rather, now that the Supreme Court has overturned the systemic racism of affirmative action, elite universities fear that keeping the objective statistics of standardized testing will prove they continue to run afoul of federal law as they discriminate against high-performing Asian Americans and middle-class whites.
The SAT is not a perfect exam, but if anything, the College Board ought to enhance its difficulty and specialization. The math section of the SAT does not even test elementary calculus, which would be fine for a pre-law applicant but less so for an aspiring engineer. Rather than throw out the SAT entirely, universities should require it along with specialized tests pertinent to an applicant’s intended major. Alas, the College Board decided to nuke its subject tests in 2021 in the name of “equity.”
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As Leonhardt explains, the biggest losers of the Marxist war on meritocracy are those least-privileged geniuses who are able to get 1600 on an SAT but not boast of a summer interning for free at the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Intuitively, the progressive position sounds as if it should reduce inequities,” Leonhardt writes. “But data has suggested that some of these policies may do the opposite, harming vulnerable people. In the case of standardized tests, those people are the lower-income, Black and Hispanic students who would have done well on the ACT or SAT but who never took the test because they didn’t have to. Many colleges have effectively tried to protect these students from standardized tests. In the process, the colleges denied some of them an opportunity to change their lives — and change society — for the better.”