Over at the New York Times, David Leonhardt does an excellent job distilling a slew of studies about the SAT exam for a layman’s audience. Contrary to the claims of the members of the activist class who are currently winning their war on the college admissions exam, the SAT, Leonhardt explains as he digs through the data that it does indeed accurately measure a student’s academic merit. Even when comparing students from lower-resourced backgrounds versus more privileged students, this latest study from John Friedman of Brown University and Bruce Sacerdote and Michele Tine of Dartmouth College shows the SAT was about as equally a predictive measure of how an applicant would perform in university and that the SAT alone has four times the predictive power of high school GPAs.

But Leonhardt makes one crucial error in his analysis. Progressives aren’t pushing standardized testing out of university admissions in spite of how accurately they predict an applicant’s future success. They’re doing it precisely because they know standardized testing is the ultimate, quantifiable piece of evidence that shows universities are prioritizing affirmative action hires, athletes, and legacies over the disproportionate number of Asian American students who deserve admission based on raw merit.