Many high school juniors are gearing up for spring testing season, when weeks and months of prep and practice culminate in an hours-long exam that will shape their academic futures.
The Scholastic Aptitude Test was first administered in 1926, adapted from the Army’s officer candidate assessments to help identify the best potential students among millions of applicants. Education was becoming a path to social and economic advancement, and universities across the country were booming.
That largely holds true a century later, but many now question whether standardized exams should determine who gets into the best schools.
Are they an objective tool to measure merit and academic potential? Or do they simply bolster an unfair status quo?
These tests aren’t fair
Students deserve an honest assessment of their qualifications, but exams like the SAT and ACT are not truly objective measures. Many believe they should cut through social strata to find the best prospective students, even the proverbial diamond-in-the-rough. But in practice, they tend to reinforce the privileges and disadvantages that exist in society. “The SAT correlates not only very high with freshman grades,” says Nicholas Lemann, author of “Higher Admissions: The Rise, Decline, and Return of Standardized Testing,” “but even higher with things like race, parental income and parental education.”
Wealth is the single largest predictor of high scores. In 2023, Opportunity Insights, a Harvard-based research team, found that students from the top 1 percent of income brackets were 13 times more likely to get a top score than those from the poorest. Some 40 percent of students from families making $11 million a year scored above the admissions threshold for Ivy League schools, as opposed to just 5 percent of middle-class students. Only a fifth of the poorest students even took the tests; a meager 0.5 percent of them scored 1,300 or better on the SAT. Merit is less a factor than a student’s ZIP code.
The odds are especially stacked against Black and Hispanic students, who each score significantly lower on the math section than their white and Asian counterparts, according to the Brookings Institute. No wonder, perhaps, given the SAT’s history with race. Its creator, Princeton psychology professor Carl Brigham, was a noted eugenicist who advocated for white superiority. More recently, Jay Rosner, an executive director of The Princeton Review Foundation, discovered evidence that the SAT’s process for developing new questions statistically benefits white students. To be fair, no such exam can account for the quality of education in Hispanic and Black neighborhoods.
The idealistic notion that standardized tests level the playing field of academic opportunity is misguided. Some exceptional students will rise up and outperform their circumstances, but of the 3.3 million who take these tests each year, Lemann says no more than about a thousand will fit that “Cinderella scenario” — or about .0003 percent. As Opportunity Insights director Raj Chetty told The New York Times, “we don’t need to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the poor. We just need to take off the thumb that we — perhaps inadvertently — have on the scale in favor of the rich.”
Life’s not fair
These exams play a key role in a college admissions process that should be based on merit and aptitude. “Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades,” wrote Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, which recently reinstated the school’s SAT/ACT requirement. Even the University of California system, which does not consider standardized test scores in admissions decisions, reached the same conclusion after an internal review of its statewide practices.
That’s even more true today, when other substantial metrics have become devalued to the point that they aren’t clarifying at all. High school transcripts are no longer reliable because of grade inflation. According to a 2016 College Board study, 47 percent of high school students graduated with A’s. Over the previous 18 years, GPAs went up while SAT scores went down, suggesting that grading was inconsistent with less subjective metrics. When every applicant came to Brown with exceptional grades, Paxson wrote, the tests helped to reveal which students would struggle once admitted.
Standardized tests may be imperfect, but there’s no reason to suppress information that can help admissions professionals to identify the best prospects. Besides, Americans don’t want race or gender to be a factor. A 2022 Pew Research poll found that nearly three-quarters of respondents across the spectrum didn’t think race or gender should factor into admissions decisions at all. This doesn’t have to be a catastrophe for racial equity. “If selective colleges made admissions decisions based solely on test scores, racial and economic diversity would indeed plummet,” writes David Leonhardt in The New York Times. But even intense STEM programs like Caltech rely on a variety of factors.
Besides, it’s not the job of standardized tests to make up for longstanding social inequity, even if they could. Removing these exams can’t fix the disadvantages that students face due to race or financial resources. “Educational inequality impacts all aspects of a prospective student’s preparation and application, not just test-taking,” MIT dean of admissions Stuart Schmill told MIT News. All schools can do is use what information they have to admit the students best prepared to succeed. “There’s just this dream that people have that there’s a completely fair way to do the admissions to these very oversubscribed schools,” Lemann says. “I don’t think there is.”
This story appears in the January/February 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.