SHOCK: New York Times Discovers SAT Is Useful After All

In a front-page story in the New York Times this month titled “The Misguided War on the SAT,” journalist David Leonhardt describes the disastrous effects of colleges and universities abandoning the requirement that prospective students submit standardized test scores as part of their application. Leonhardt’s observation reflects recent research findings that confirm what mainstream analysts of higher education had long understood.

As Leonhardt, who “has been reporting on opportunity in higher education for more than two decades,” reports, the COVID-19 pandemic made it more difficult for high school students to take the Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) and its rival, the American College Test (ACT). As a result, “dozens of selective colleges” stopped requiring test scores at all. While the move was sometimes described as temporary, almost none of the schools restored the requirement.

In reality, as Leonhardt acknowledges, the elimination of testing requirements reflected “a backlash against standardized tests that began long before the pandemic” (in fact, in the mid-1960s) largely grounded in claims of “equity.” More specifically, since average black and Latino scores were lower than those of white and Asian-American students, it was claimed that the tests embodied often subtle racial bias (for instance, by using vocabulary words like “regatta” that students from less privileged backgrounds were less likely to be familiar with).

In response to such charges, the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, began scrutinizing questions on the verbal part of the test in order to eliminate any sort of seeming racial or ethnic bias.

But it was more difficult for the biased excuse to explain differences in the quantitative or mathematical part of the test, in which the scores of African-American and Latino students fell well below those of their white and (even more) Asian-American counterparts.

In fact, as a literature review cited by leading scholars Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in their book No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, “[i]f there is a ‘racial bias’ in the SATs” as predictors of college success demonstrated, “it is a bias in favor of blacks” (their emphasis). 

Nonetheless, in 2019 the Educational Testing Service added an “adversity score” to the test, designed to reflect particular disadvantages students had faced. This was soon replaced by a new program called “Landscape,” which was supposed to put SAT scores in a broader context by assessing the quality of the school a student had attended (this time, unlike in the past, with a view to favoring applicants from lower quality schools), class sizes, and neighborhoods, all of which would supposedly provide a fuller picture of a student’s capacity for learning in college.

When colleges eliminate the SAT-ACT requirement, they are forced to rely chiefly on their admissions decisions on applicants’ high school grade averages, along with personal essays, teacher recommendations, and personal interviews (with extracurricular activities a secondary factor). But as Leonhardt reports, recent research “has increasingly shown that standardized test scores contain real information, helping to predict college grades, chances of graduation and post-college success.”

Widespread, nationwide grade inflation has made high school grades an even less reliable predictor of college success than they were in the past. (Nor, I add, do they reflect differences in the competitiveness of the schools that applicants attended.)

“Without test scores,” Leonhardt reports, “admissions officers sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between applicants who are likely to do well at elite colleges and those who are likely to struggle.” Moreover, SAT/ ACT scores “can be particularly helpful in identifying lower-income students and underrepresented minorities who will thrive” in college, since even when their scores are lower than those from students in wealthier communities, or those of white and Asian-American students, “a solid score for a student from a less privileged background is often a sign of enormous potential.”

By way of background, the SAT was invented in the late 1940s at a time when American colleges were faced with an influx of millions of new applicants thanks to the G.I. Bill. But by the 1950s, it also helped bring about more fairness and equality in the admissions process for most prestigious colleges, many of which (such as Ivy League schools) had previously relied heavily on admittees from socially elite (and expensive) prep schools, and which also widely employed quotas to limit the number of high-achieving, but rarely wealthy, Jewish students. As the offspring of Jewish immigrant parents of modest means, who were able to win admission (with financial aid) to Cornell in 1960, I myself, and many of my friends, had our lives transformed thanks to the SAT.

Nowadays, attacks on the SAT aimed at increasing the number of black and Hispanic students admitted to competitive colleges threaten to restore an environment more like the one that existed before the invention of the SAT – just with different groups being favored as the “in groups” at the expense of other “out-groups” (namely, white people, and especially straight, white males, and Asian Americans). Despite the Supreme Court’s invalidation of racial favoritism in college admissions in the Fair Admissions case, officials at numerous competitive schools have indicated that they will find ways to evade the ruling.

But as Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor observe in their 2012 book Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It, admitting minority or economically disadvantaged students to colleges where they are not well-prepared for the work isn’t likely to do them any favors in the long run. Often, encountering a difficult curriculum for which their previous education did not prepare them may lead them to drop out when they might have done well at less prestigious, but perfectly respectable, colleges.

There is another important difficulty that Leonhardt overlooks. As colleges drop the SAT requirement for admissions, they have increasingly relied on the “personal essays” that applicants must submit. But while these essays are sometimes a surreptitious means of facilitating racial favoritism, a deeper problem is that they can be used to advantage students whose parents are sufficiently wealthy, and unscrupulous, to hire professionals to “assist” them in writing essays that will appeal to admissions officers.

When a journalist I know posed this problem to the admissions director at one of America’s leading academic institutions, he responded, “Oh, we can tell” whether an essay was written by a professional. But since professional essay “helpers,” such as one I spoke with, are highly skilled in the art of composing precisely the sort of essay that will make it seem like it came purely from the hand of an idealistic, highly motivated, and thoughtful but somewhat naïve young person, and those assistants are highly compensated to do just this one task, I wouldn’t bet on an admissions officer’s ability to outsmart them.

An impressive body of recent research cited by Leonhardt confirms earlier findings that test scores are a far better predictor of student success in college than high school grades. A study released last summer by the group Opportunity Insights, covering 12 leading universities (including the eight Ivy League schools) came to just this conclusion, as did a 2020 study by a faculty committee at the University of California.

“The relative advantage of test scores” over grades as a predictive measure, the committee found, “has grown over time” – doubtless largely thanks to grade inflation. M.I.T., which had suspended its standardized test requirement during COVID, reinstated it after reviewing 15 years of admissions records, which showed “that students who had been accepted despite lower test scores were more likely to struggle or drop out.” Thus, admitting such students out of some distorted sense of social conscience was setting them up for failure.

At the same time, without relying exclusively on test scores (a position that nobody advocates), M.I.T.’s admissions dean reported that the scores were “helpful in identifying promising applicants who come from less advantaged high schools” but had the potential to succeed. (For such students, as a Harvard economist who participated in the Opportunity Insights study put it, “the SAT is their lifeline.”) Yet after re-instituting a standardized testing requirement, M.I.T’s current freshman class includes higher percentages of black and Hispanic students than “at many other elite schools,” Leonhardt reports.

Despite these facts, administrators at many elite colleges persist in refusing to require applicants to submit test scores, justifying their decision by claiming that they don’t help to identify the most promising students, a claim that, as Leonhardt bluntly puts it, “is inconsistent with the evidence.” In fact, in 2020 the University of California announced that it would no longer accept SAT scores even from applicants who wanted to submit them – despite its own committee’s findings.

What Leonhardt calls “the strongest case against the tests” now comes not from those who deny their predictive value, but from “educational reformers who want to rethink elite higher education” so as to emphasize diversity and “social mobility” at the admitted expense of excellence.

One such reformer, an education professor at the University of California-Riverside, proposes “a stripped-down admissions system” in which applicants who meet minimum high-school grade requirements are admitted through a lottery. But as Leonhardt rightly asks, if the nation’s leading universities are compelled to admit large numbers of mediocre students instead of enabling top students to learn from the nation’s leading scholars, who in the next generation will “produce cutting-edge scientific research that will cure diseases” or be best equipped to run corporations and nonprofits “that benefit all of society”? (Of course, the curriculum at such universities would have to be watered down to prevent large numbers of enrollees from dropping out.)

In conclusion, let me add another reason why many more colleges outside of elite institutions like Harvard and M.I.T. may be abolishing standardized testing requirements.

Regrettably, far too many parents, in choosing a college for their son or daughter to attend, rely heavily on the rankings issued annually by U.S. News and World Report. Those ratings are highly arbitrary, relying as they do on such factors as a school’s “reputation” among administrators at other colleges. The rankings (including the mix of criteria used) need to be reconfigured each year (as if a school’s merit changed annually) just to sell a new issue. But one factor that enters into a school’s ranking is the degree of its competitiveness, in the sense of the ratio of applicants to those admitted: the lower the ratio, the higher the college’s apparent status.

As a result, as I learned years ago when some colleges eliminate the SAT/ACT requirement, they may be motivated by another factor than doubts about the tests’ reliability, or a desire to admit more minority members. Rather, by waiving the requirement, the schools encourage more high school students (of whatever economic or racial background) who didn’t score well on the test to apply. While few of those low-scoring applicants are going to be admitted, the more applicants the college rejects, the higher its “competitiveness” score.

Having devoted my life to academia and gloried in the opportunity to teach numerous bright, motivated students while associating with other faculty who shared my love of learning, I’m sorry to acknowledge one or two dark truths about life in the ivory tower. But as they say at Harvard (without always living up to the standard, as certain recent, headline-making events demonstrate), “Veritas.”

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor of Political Science, Emeritus at College of the Holy Cross.