Put yourself in the position of an honest college admissions adviser. How do you choose between applicants in a way that is genuinely fair?
Rich students can always rig the game with highly paid advisers who ghostwrite their personal essays. High schools often manipulate the college admissions process through grade inflation. But the SAT, the SAT subject tests, and the Advanced Placement courses were, by definition, standardized. Whatever their faults, they provided a metric that measured all test takers fairly.
Having attended a high school and college where educators and administrators were implicated in Operation Varsity Blues, I can verify that the most privileged, contemptible trust-fund babies are terrified of standardized tests. These tests allow self-made students to prove their worth.
And unfortunately, that is all about to change.
To avoid legal challenges for their sotto voce racial discrimination against high-performing Asian American students, the University of California system and some other schools have ceased to require SAT scores at all. The response by the College Board, which administers the SAT, has been to hasten their brand’s suicide and render its own existence irrelevant.
First, the College Board made the reprehensible decision to abolish its SAT subject tests. Although AP exams are much more rigorous and better at proving merit, schools in disproportionately low-income and rural areas lack the funding to provide AP coursework and exams. Thus, SAT subject tests offered the next-best objective demonstration of expertise, as the math portion of the standard SAT is pathetic — it only tests basic algebra and geometry.
Now the College Board has proven its death wish is not just pandemic-era hysteria. Not only will the general SAT exam go digital, allowing highly paid tutors to rig the test for the rich kids, but they will also amend the entire value of the test.
Students will have access to a calculator for math, an obvious enough concession for some trigonometric functions or algorithms for physics but utterly unjustified for math courses taught to prepubescent students abroad. The reading comprehension sections will be truncated. This will only put more weight on the subjective personal statement, which many high-income students hire other people to write for them anyway.
Most egregious is the College Board’s decision to no longer render the SAT a standardized test. The test issued to students simultaneously will not be standard anymore. The new test, now shortened from three hours to two hours, will be “unique” to each student, in the nonprofit organization’s own words. The College Board claims it will eliminate cheating, even though it can be taken on both personal and public school computers. This ignores the reality that the elite admissions advisers are known to facilitate cheating.
Nothing about the original SAT exam or the College Board’s oligopoly was perfect. The SAT failed to test engineering majors in calculus, yet it also unnecessarily tested political science geniuses aiming for pre-law in algebra. But the College Board, intimidated by woke ideology and its wholesale rejection of objective merit, has cowered under an artificially constructed collapse in demand. The SAT’s suicide is a sight to see.
