The Case Against the Test

Why selective colleges should drop the SAT · Writing 150, Argumentative Essay

For nearly a century, the SAT has served as the closest thing American higher education has to a common yardstick. A single three-digit score promises admissions officers a way to compare a student from rural Mississippi with one from suburban Connecticut, and for decades that promise was treated as settled fact. Yet the yardstick measures less than it claims. Selective colleges should stop using the SAT as a primary factor in admissions, because the test tracks family income more faithfully than academic potential, narrows what high schools are willing to teach, and adds little predictive power once a student's high school record is known.

The most damning evidence against the SAT is how neatly its scores line up with wealth. On average, students from families earning more than $200,000 a year outscore those from families earning under $20,000 by roughly 250 points on the 1600-point scale — a gap that has held stubbornly steady for years. Wealth buys tutoring, practice tests, and second and third attempts, so a score often reflects how much preparation a family could afford rather than what a student can actually do. When colleges weight the SAT heavily, they are, in effect, rewarding applicants for being born into money.

The test also distorts the classrooms that feed into it. Because scores carry so much weight, schools that can afford to do so reallocate class time toward tested skills, drilling the narrow band of vocabulary and formulaic reasoning the exam rewards. Subjects that do not appear on the SAT — art, civics, laboratory science, sustained writing — compete for the hours that test preparation consumes. A tool meant to measure learning ends up quietly reshaping it, and rarely for the better.

Defenders of the SAT argue that it adds a layer of objectivity that grades cannot. Grade inflation is real, they note, and an A at one high school may not mean what it means at another; a standardized score lets admissions officers see every applicant on a single scale. There is something to this. But the objectivity is largely an illusion, because the scale itself is tilted by the income effects described above. A “common” measure that systematically favors wealthier students is not neutral — it simply hides its bias behind a number.

More decisive is what the research on prediction actually shows. When universities that have gone test-optional study their own data, they consistently find that high school grade point average predicts college performance as well as or better than SAT scores — and that adding the SAT on top of GPA improves those predictions only marginally. If four years of a student's work already tell admissions officers what they need to know, a single Saturday morning of test-taking is a costly and redundant addition.

None of this means colleges should judge applicants by grades alone. It means the SAT has been asked to carry far more weight than the evidence can bear. Dropping it as a primary factor would not lower standards; it would shift attention toward the fuller, fairer record students build over four years — and it would stop punishing talented students whose families could not buy them a better score. The yardstick was always shorter than it looked. It is time selective colleges measured with something truer.