In the wake of last week’s affirmative action decision, most analysts expect the recent enthusiasm for test-optional admissions policies to continue—if for no other reason than to make schools’ racial gerrymandering less transparent. After all, a key issue in the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases was the evidence that Asian American students had to score at much higher levels on the SAT and ACT than their Black and Hispanic peers in order to gain admission. Stop requiring the tests, and that evidence goes away.
But that would be a big mistake. The students who will lose most in the process are the very students that these measures ostensibly seek to help: high performing, underprivileged students. In fact, early proponents of the SAT believed it would introduce meritocracy into college admissions. Prior to the SAT’s inception, America’s elite universities served the richest and most well-connected, not necessarily the best and the brightest. In 1933, James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard University, adopted the test in hopes that it could help identify a natural aristocracy, the truly best and brightest, regardless of their family or economic origin.
The SAT still facilitates this ideal, if imperfectly. Consider, for example, two valedictorians of schools where I’ve worked, one in an affluent neighborhood, the other in a poor one.
In the affluent school, this young woman had connections to local universities, access to prestigious internships, a two-parent household where mom and dad both had sufficient leisure time to help their daughter in whatever she needed, and sufficient wealth to pay for writing or application assistance.
In the poor school, this young man had none of that. He lacked the cultural capital to score a fancy internship or connections for letters of recommendation from influential figures. His mother was a nurse, and worked exceedingly hard to instill in him a passion for learning. But she worked second shift, so she rarely crossed paths with her son and couldn’t assist him with any applications or resumes. Nor could she reasonably afford to pay for any of that.
What did this kid who grew up in poverty have, though? He had a higher score than his affluent competitor. Any school that overlooks standardized test scores would miss that. Ironically, so would affirmative action policies. The majority of students who benefited from them are upwardly mobile, immigrant families, not the low-income students like him that they intended to help. His test score is the squeaky wheel that could grab an administration officer’s attention.
And there’s more than mere anecdotal evidence that bears out this reality. Though imperfect, standardized tests remain the fairest, most meritocratic measure of any student’s academic achievement.
My colleague Adam Tyner has cataloged the shortcomings and biases of other “holistic” approaches and the research to support the SAT’s use. One academic review that he references found that essay content and style had stronger correlations with household income than did SAT scores. Another found that kids with college-educated parents were far more likely to participate in extracurricular activities. As for grades, we know that GPAs are badly inflated of late, with those in many districts at all-time highs.
The use of standardized test scores harms no one. Only a fraction of students attend “highly selective” schools; the bulk of American students either two-year or inclusive four-year institutions where essentially everyone who applies gets in, unaffected by low or high exams scores. The SAT, ACT, and other such tests are merely a means to identify the most gifted.
Their benefits are akin to those of universal screening—a great, proven way to identify gifted students within underprivileged populations. One student might have attended Andover with the best tutors and college-application counselors that money can buy, then scored 1400 on the SAT. But another kid, who knows little about the process because he’d be the first in his family to attend college, and who studied for his tests in a rundown apartment and completed homework between shifts at the local grocery store—he took the same test and scored 1550.
The abolition of affirmative action forces a reconsideration of a simple albeit fundamental question: How do we most fairly determine who ought to attend which colleges?
The most meritocratic approach is best; the alternatives are subjectivity, caprice and favoritism, lotteries of chance, and quotas. Standardized tests may be imperfect, we may administer them too often, and family wealth may alter results—but they’re the best and fairest option we have. In the spirit of Winston Churchill, they’re the worst approach, except for all the others.
Editor’s note: Daniel Buck, who was previously a senior visiting fellow, has joined Fordham full-time as an editorial and policy associate.
