Two of the members of my private high school’s board of trustees spent time behind bars for their complicity in the Operation Varsity Blues Scandal. One received the longest prison sentence of any of the parents charged. Both conspired to buy their children’s way into my alma mater, the execrable University of Southern California.
I bring this up to highlight my own understanding of just how corrupt elite higher education has become. One might wonder why a Hot Pocket heiress and a hedge fund manager would risk hard time to get their kids into a B-list university with A-list celebrities, but that’s precisely the point: the modern university degree is valued not as proof of a certain, specialized skill set, but rather as a price signal to employers — evidence that you have the connections and chops to con your way through four years of recruitment seasons and happy hours.
Consequently, I am confident that the arms war between the College Board and our taxpayer-funded universities will only end with the least privileged and hardest working college applicants getting iced out from the elite university cartel. Why? Because SAT scores are a great equalizer on an otherwise very slanted admissions playing field.
Things are headed very much in the wrong direction in this regard. The College Board already nuked the most accessible and accurate set of tests in its repertoire — the SAT subject tests. “The expanded reach of AP and its widespread availability for low-income students and students of color means the Subject Tests are no longer necessary for students to show what they know,” the College Board announced in January, claiming that the pandemic “accelerated” pre-planned reforms. The only problem? This is a baldfaced lie.
As I wrote earlier this year, citing the federal Government Accountability Office:
<bsp-quote data-state="{"cms.site.owner":{"_ref":"00000161-3486-d333-a9e9-76c6fbf30000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b93390000"},"cms.content.publishDate":1621304039772,"cms.content.publishUser":{"_ref":"00000166-5490-d4a8-a166-f5bd84d20001","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"cms.content.updateDate":1621304039772,"cms.content.updateUser":{"_ref":"00000166-5490-d4a8-a166-f5bd84d20001","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"quote":"Schools in disproportionately high-poverty and rural areas cannot afford to offer AP courses and testing, putting poor students at the disadvantage not just of proving objective merit in a variety of subjects ranging from art history and U.S. government and politics to microeconomics and computer science, but also by not obtaining passing test scores that often count as college credits, rendering qualified students' degree programs less costly.
With the removal of the subject tests, underprivileged students in schools with no AP access now have zero mainstream tests to prove objective merit in a single subject.","_id":"00000179-7d40-d5d5-a3ff-7fcd163f0000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b92f10002"}”>Schools in disproportionately high-poverty and rural areas cannot afford to offer AP courses and testing, putting poor students at the disadvantage not just of proving objective merit in a variety of subjects ranging from art history and U.S. government and politics to microeconomics and computer science, but also by not obtaining passing test scores that often count as college credits, rendering qualified students’ degree programs less costly.
With the removal of the subject tests, underprivileged students in schools with no AP access now have zero mainstream tests to prove objective merit in a single subject.Universities are now compounding the problem by rejecting the general SAT entirely. The entire University of California system will now refuse even to consider SAT and ACT scores submitted, a dramatic escalation from other top colleges which had merely allowed applicants to opt-out of taking them. The system cited the supposed racism of these tests.
In practice, the departure from specialized tests on the part of the College Board and the entire abandonment of generically standardized tests by colleges will exacerbate the inequality of our college admissions processes. The most privileged students will always have parents ready to dress their resumes with plum internships and volunteering positions and schools keen on grade inflation. In contrast, the nation’s poorest students — especially those in schools with no funding for AP exams and with parents who rely on them for extra income — must rely on standardized testing as an objective measure of their merit to those wealthy charlatans who hide behind letters of recommendation and nonprofit gigs.
The SAT is not a good test. Even without the thankfully discarded essay section, its math section is embarrassingly easy for any student pursuing a STEM major and unnecessarily difficult for those applying to humanities programs. The reading section is really more of a logic game and likely more indicative of IQ over grit, which the SAT explicitly claims not to measure.
Still, an SAT score is far superior to a college application devoid of any objective measure of merit and even better were the SAT subject tests, which allowed aspiring doctors to prove their prowess with biology and physics exams and hopeful attorneys to demonstrate their chops in U.S. history and English.
Just imagine a post-standardized testing future. How many more parents of wannabe future trophy wives, such as the kids of the Operation Varsity Blues scandal, will steal the spots of rural and poor students who lack rich family friends to rig the game for them? What metric of merit would we retain to ensure that admissions were based on achievement?
Eliminating the SAT and its subject tests in the name of “equity” is tantamount to trashing your scale in the hopes it will reverse your weight gain. If the education system wanted to get real about its failures, it would gear up on fixing the abysmal K-12 public school systems that are leaving non-white students behind. Better yet, we would focus on telling the teachers unions to pound sand and just getting kids back into the damned classrooms.
Robbing students’ of their only way of competing with our nation’s most privileged is not a solution to any known problem.
